My favorite ice breaker. What do/did you want to be as an adult?
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As a kid, I hated that question, I didn’t dream of working as a kid, early misfortune in life taught me some interesting lessons.
I think I grew up with a vague idea of wanting to be free of money, as I associated with misery growing up and as a result, never had an answer to the question outside of “I just want to help people”.
World could use more people who want to help other people so I hope you get to do that
an “astronaut paleontologist” who digs up fossils on other worlds
That sounds hella cool. But I’ve seen too many Ridley Scott movies, which makes me hesitant to root for you to achieve that dream.
Inventor!
and now, I kinda am.
I wanted to be a professional illustrator. Nowadays I barely illustrate as a hobby. Although I still enjoy it I don’t really have the skills for it.
I’m a lawyer and a programmer though. For many years I hated being a lawyer, but I would say that I’ve finally reached a point in my life and career where I’m happy with it.
I’m in a somewhat similar boat. I wanted to design video games. Create worlds, write characters, work on mechanics. I went to school for computer science and took a bunch of classes to learn skills necessary to make games. Then I made two games. Turns out I hate it.
Now I’m a lawyer and I sue drug companies for a living. I still spend time building my little worlds, but I don’t think I’ll ever make them into anything more than TTRPG campaigns.
An astronaut, until I discovered I hated rollercoasters.
And then an aerospace engineer, until I failed pre-calculus twice.
And then I had a random computer programming course in high school, and ECPI visited our high school. So I settled on computer programming.
I’ve been in the field of computer programming for about 20 years now. I like coding and it pays good too.
Very early on was silly stuff – a dentist, a gangsta rapper. Glad those didn’t ever pan out.
In college I decided I wanted to be a comedy writer for TV. Dream job was to work for Conan. I ended up getting an MFA in creative writing and nobody could explain the process to becoming a comedy writer for TV, but I was naturally talented as a serious/literary writer and colleges could explain that career trajectory well enough, but then I needed to feed my wife and kid so I became a journalist. I worked my ass off as a journalist, rose through the ranks to locally prominent positions, and then I got burned out in my early 40s and quit. Now my wife makes money and I do projects around the house, meditate, and write essays that are infrequently published, don’t make much money and aren’t at all funny.
Turns out life is funny.
Now that you have a little time on your hands, time to put your writing skills finally into good use and become a gangsta rapping dentist
A voice actor. I do call center work. It’s sad but I get people asking if I’m an actor every now and then which is nice.
I never had that kind of goal focus as a kid.
I’m now in my late 30s, am unemployed with an engineering degree and still have no clue what to do as a job…
How do you get food?
I go to the supermarket and buy stuff.
I’m not saying, I’ve never had a job, so I’ve got some savings on the side. I also live in a country with a somewhat functioning social security system. Although it took all of my energy to navigate it at times, that secured a bit of income for some time.
Lately, I depend on my spouse though.
Honestly, pretty much what I do now just probably a more glamorized or idealistic version of it. My favorite toys growing up were wooden building blocks and Duplo and from a very young age I (incorrectly) mapped what I enjoyed about those things to the profession of architecture and that’s what I always told people that’s what I wanted to do.
Luckily I was able to figure out that what I really enjoyed and wanted to do was engineering. As long as I’m designing things and solving problems I’m pretty happy. It doesn’t really matter what the context is.
My dream as a child was to become a full time artist. My family did not think it was a good idea so my academic life went somewhere else as did my career. Thirty years later I am a working artist with my own atelier.
I’ll start: A psychologist
Took a dumb “assessment” in grade school and it said I should be a pilot.
Later I didn’t know tearing apart computers and getting apps to work could be a job and studied engineering. Halfway through that I found systems administration.
I went through a few things but my favorite in retrospect was demolition derby driver
A hobo, going from place to place subsisting.
homeless ( zero-rent )
An inventor. I was so sure I could make flying cars just by strapping a few downward-pointing jet engines to a regular car. The only thing I ever actually invented was a pen (by breaking and taping together parts from multiple other pens).
