If I could give someone younger than me one piece of advice, it would be this: Spend less time worrying and more time being, doing, and becoming.
The past is already gone, the present is fleeting, and the future will arrive whether you feel prepared or not.
In fact, the next minute is already the future, and by the time it arrives, it will have become the present. Spending too much time worrying about what is happening now or dwelling on what has already happened keeps us from fully living and doing what we can today.
As children, most of us were asked some version of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
In primary school, we dressed up as our chosen professionals for career day. I wanted to be a teacher, partly because I admired my teachers and partly because I recognized my natural ability to dissect concepts and impart knowledge.
I’m kidding, of course. I was six. A teacher asked me what I wanted to be, and it seemed rude not to say that I wanted to grow up to be like her.
By high school, we had career orientations that expected us to start turning those childhood answers into real plans.
At that point, I had little interest in participating in the real world. I was struggling both at home and at school, so I spent much of my time disappearing into short stories in which the main character rarely survived the day. I’m not kidding. That was the kind of writing I indulged in during lunch instead of, presumably, developing healthy coping mechanisms like eating proper meals.
If you had asked me what I wanted to become then, my honest answer would have been dead, which was less of a career ambition and more of a firm refusal to imagine myself reaching adulthood.
Anyway, before graduating high school, we were asked to choose a course, identify a career, and imagine the kind of adult we intended to become, often before we had enough experience to understand what those choices would actually involve.
Of course, dead wasn’t an actual career choice, so I said I wanted to become a writer. Since most writers are already dead inside.
Spoiler alert: I became a mother at twenty, so college graduation, writing and even dying, arguably my greatest ambition, had to wait.
Anyway, the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” made growing up sound like a destination like one day, we would arrive and finally become the teacher, doctor, artist, business owner, or whatever else we had written beneath our childhood drawings. As if our job was to prepare for that future by studying hard, making academically sensible choices, and avoiding mistakes that might send us off course.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that adulthood mostly consisted of trying to survive within ableist, racist, sexist, colonialist and capitalist systems while being told that circumstances shaped by public policy, systemic corruption and the decisions of a power-hungry few were simply the consequences of my own personal choices.
Eventually, I realized that growing up was less about becoming the person I wanted to be and more about joining an endless group project with unclear instructions, unequal workloads, and several people getting richer or taking credit for everyone else’s hard labor.
I had, in futility, spent far too much time taking responsibility for circumstances beyond my control and worrying about how other people’s insatiable greed and endless pursuit of power would eventually find another way to screw me over.
The future we had been told to prepare for was not waiting neatly at the end of a well-planned path. It was already happening around us, shaped by systems we did not create, responsibilities we had not anticipated, and decisions we were expected to make without ever having enough information.
Your generation, younger person, has it worse than mine.
We millennials grew up in a world where certain careers seemed ordinary and permanent. Video rental clerks, one-hour photo lab technicians, newspaper classified-ad salespeople, telephone operators, film projectionists, and travel booking agents were familiar jobs at the turn of the century. Some have since disappeared almost entirely, while others have survived only as niche or highly specialized roles.
At the same time, we entered a workforce filled with careers that barely existed when we were children: social media managers, app developers, content creators, podcast producers, drone operators and data scientists, among many others.
New careers now emerge so quickly that you may barely have time to learn they exist, much less prepare for them. Schools can spend years preparing students for established professions while technology creates entirely new fields between the beginning and end of their education.
By the time a course is developed, approved, and taught, the tools may have changed, the required skills may have shifted, and another profession may already be emerging. You may eventually pursue opportunities that your parents, teachers and career advisers could never have predicted.
You might not even wake up to the same possibilities from one year to the next. A career that appears secure today could be transformed, absorbed into another role, or automated before you have the chance to pursue it. Meanwhile, work that currently sounds too strange to be taken seriously could become commonplace almost overnight. Decades ago, carrying a powerful computer in the palm of your hand sounded like science fiction; today, almost everyone carries a smartphone.
So, younger person, you are not simply choosing what you want to become when you grow up. You are growing up in a world that keeps changing what it means to become anything at all, the same way we did, only so much faster.
So my best advice is just to be.
Be yourself. Be present. Be what you want to become.
One person can only do so much in a day, and worrying only cuts into that limited time. Do what you can, make the choices available to you, and deal with the consequences when they actually arrive.
The past is already gone, and the future does not wait for you to feel prepared. Within the next minute, you will already be living in it.
You might as well spend less of that time worrying about everything that could happen and more of it doing, being and becoming.
Good luck!
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