aleks peterson | author

A few nights ago, I dreamt I was a trained Air Force pilot assigned to the new F15 Eagle II—a $110M fighter jet the size of a tennis court, with fly-by-wire controls and two massive GE turbofans capable of pushing 29,000 pounds of thrust. I was dressed in my flight suit and fire retardant boots and gloves, my helmet tucked beneath my arm, my flight bag on the tarmac at my feet, waiting on standby as others from my squadron dealt with a nearby air-to-air threat (I must have been channeling Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick, which I painfully watched in a theater two weeks prior). At some point the squadron commander approached and told me I was needed on the mission. Something about enemy aircraft. Something about our boys getting overwhelmed. As I climbed the ladder into the cockpit, my cockpit, as I caught the first glimpse of the switches and dials and displays in the box and heard the hiss of the jet fuel starter, my alarm buzzed on the nightstand, and I startled awake to the reality that I work in corporate marketing for a technology company. I fly a desk from my home office. I attend video conference calls. Send emails. Make PowerPoint slides.

I was off balance the rest of the week. Couldn’t focus at work. Couldn’t sleep at night. Not six months ago, I was exactly one eye exam away from making this aviation dream a reality, from having what I still believe is the most incredible, most exhilarating job on the planet.

We don’t always become the things we want to become. Life isn’t kind or fortunate, and the vast majority of us end up on a detour from what we thought was our destiny. We eventually settle into a less ideal, but profitable line of work because we have no choice. There are bills to pay (a lot of them) and mouths to feed (sometimes a lot of those, too). Time and resources are finite. We have everything we need and can’t afford to risk any of it in pursuit of an idealized vision of success. Or sometimes we simply can’t control our available options. Sometimes we are halted by true physical or mental limitations, or bad luck. In my case, it was a rare degenerative eye condition the Air Force considers too great a risk on which to gamble $1 million in training. So instead we pursue what is “realistic,” and remain haunted by visions and fantasies of what life could have been like, if only…

What makes this sense of disappointment and anti-climax worse is that we are conditioned from a young age to dream big, and to envision ourselves performing specific jobs in specific trades—many of which are highly exclusive to the degree of winning the lottery. Society asks its children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And children answer with the usual list: astronaut, ballerina, athlete, doctor, actor, musician, fighter pilot, Navy Seal. According to one study, only 4% of adults end up in the jobs they dreamt of as children, but a startling 64% of adults still wish they could. Those of us who never pursued our childhood career dreams are twice as likely to be unhappy in our current jobs. 

The question is problematic, or at least the way it is phrased: what do you want to be when you grow up? It implies that a child has not yet achieved the status of Being, and that they cannot achieve it unless they secure a career path that is predicted and planned for far in advance. It also associates be with the pronoun what, meaning that as an adult, a person’s Being is primarily associated with their occupation, with a thing they do to put food on the table. No wonder so many of us are secretly depressed about our work, and about not turning into astronauts. We’ve been conditioned our whole lives to think we are what we do. And if what I do is lame, then I guess I’m lame. If my boss tells me I’m not doing a good job, then maybe I’m not a good person. If what I do isn’t what I wanted to do, then maybe I’m not the Being I wanted to be. What if instead parents asked their children, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” Or, “What do you want to be like when you grow up?” Or, “What kind of person do you want to be today, even while you are still a child?” Maybe then we could see more adults who are functional and secure in their identities, regardless of the profession they choose. 

I asked my eight-year-old son this question recently, and he said that he wants to be “strong.” I asked him why, and he said so he can fight villains. I said that’s good. There are a lot of villains in the world. And there are a lot of villains inside of us, too, and we have to be strong on the outside and the inside so we can fight them. We agreed that strength on the outside comes from working out and eating vegetables, and that strength on the inside comes from knowing God. It comforts me knowing my son can fulfill his goal to become strong, whether he’s a special forces operative or a botanist.