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What do you want to do or be when you grow up?

TheCatWoman

I've never had an ambition, or a goal/s in life, at 63 I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know if it's because I was never encouraged to do anything when I was a child, although I was often discouraged. If like most little girls I said I wantd to be a nurse, I was told that I wouldn't really want to that as it would involve carrying used bed pans around. A wish to be a hairdresser was met with disgust.

We had no careers advice at school, or at least not until we'd made our exam choices and it was to late to change anything. Some of the teachers said there was no point in educating us as we'd only go off and get married and have babies.

After leaving school, I was asked what I wanted to do and could never answer, I simply didn't know, I remember being told to search through a filing cabinet of folders about possible careers and found nothing, I was just overwhelmed. I think it also didn't help that a "career" was a fairly new thing, for people of my class, we's always had "jobs", which was a very different thing.

How did you find the thing you wanted to do, or do you still not know?

Do you do the job you trained for? 

  • I have no interest in a job for a jobs sake. I am self employed in a relatively low stress but uninteresting job that pays the bills. I don't see any virtue or value in working hard to build a business and "succeed" financially or to ascending some arbitrary career "ladder" that seems to make some people happy. Of course there are plenty of jobs that have a value outside of that - being a nurse, a carer, or being in the arts/entertainment, charities etc etc.

    I would be interested in working for a charity in a research capacity but I don't have the relevant experience or qualifications for that. I have a long held ambition to write fiction but have never had an idea for what that would be, that has been sufficiently motivating to start. I also doubt that I have the attention span (my therapist suggested there may be an ADHD element to my autism) to see something through to completion. Any little short story ideas I have and start, I almost immediately lose faith in and abandon. I did start a course in copy editing as I have a good attention to detail and regularly spot errors in all sorts of written material, with the thought of having a dual career, but my actual job got busy and I stopped doing it.

    My current job has some physical demands that are pretty low level at the moment but with retirement age getting later and later I think it would make sense to transition into something with fewer physical demands in the next 15-20 years. I really struggle with forward planning though and am an absolute top level procrastinator.

    All by way of saying that I have never known what I want to do and still don't, other than I would like to be retired and be able to do things without the purpose of earning money!

  • TheCatWoman said:
    How did you find the thing you wanted to do

    I was a bit of a propeller head at school and wanted to be a rocket scientist and got my degree in Applied Physics, worked on some cool research (including explosives) but eneded up bored as hell.

    I then dropped out and worked with computers (the first real office desktop computers - 286 processors being the hot thing. I found I enjoyed working in support and made a 32 year career out of it.

    Work has always really been about making enough money to have the life I want outside of it though. Luckily I've been able to do all the big things I wanted through the years so don't feel I have missed out but there has always been a high price to pay in terms of stress.

  • At 57 I still don't know. I feel like I am still waiting to start.

    I've done a series of jobs, some well paid, but I have been good at whatever I have done so there is no standout thing to pursue.

    I don't plan to retire unless something changes. So I have 20 years. That's long enough to create a career and earn some (more) money. I'm wondering whether to do a degree or master's or something. Or whether to find a way into something new.

    I'm bored and need an intellectual challenge. I am just nervous about my crappy sleep, although I'm a hungry sponge when I have something I'm interested in.

    At school I wanted drive trucks or join the Navy. I was told to go to uni as I could do better. I dropped out of mechanical engineering. I never wanted to work in an office, so I spent 35 years in an office.