“I Want To Be A Truck Driver/Teacher/Policeman Just Like Daddy…” — Or Maybe Not

Like many entries in the ‘Book Of Life’ (a web-based ‘live book’ with helpful thoughts and ideas for everyday life), this one makes you stop and think for a second. It’s about work, and ‘what we want to be when we grow up’. A choice, as the story points out, that we didn’t have for most of human history. What we did for a living was either exactly the same as our forefathers had done for generations, or something else that our parents deemed necessary to put food on the table.

We’ve only really been choosing our ‘own’ jobs for the past 200 years. And we really haven’t gotten to the bottom of what that choice really should mean. “At the most benign level, our family work scripts are the result of what our families understand of the working world”, writes popular philosopher Alain de Botton in this article. “Every family has a range of occupations that it grasps, because someone has practiced them and in the process brought them within the imaginative range of other family members.”

But beyond simply being unaware of the existence of certain jobs, suspicion or hostility could play a role too. This article reminded me of a great Dutch initiative called The Weekend School, that has been going on for almost two decades. It provides disadvantaged youth with exposure to jobs they often never heard about or thought weren’t for them. Working professionals come to talk about their work and let the kids have a real-life sense of what their job is like (a great explanatory video here).

As De Botton says: “We’re liable to have received many little messages indicating that certain careers are inferior – and therefore beneath us, dangerous, phoney or not quite right for our sort of station in life.”

There is so much to win.