I have long admired people who say they have a dream, and who knew — pretty much since childhood — exactly what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.
When I was a kid in Denmark, our neighbors' 9-year old daughter already had it all figured out that she was going to become "an animal doctor," and that had been her dream since she was about 5 years old.
Indeed, she went on to go to school to become a veterinarian and last I checked (about 12 years ago) she still had a veterinary practice specializing in horses. She never once deviated from that dream.
Over the decades, I've met a number of people who had similar clarity with respect to what they were going to do with their lives.
Alas, I never had that sort of clarity. To be honest, I never really thought much about what I was going to ”become” when I grew up, and even in adulthood I have never had much clarity as to what I was supposed to do with "this one wonderful life" of ours.
To the extent that I ever had career working dreams I was mostly focused on finding something simple and repetitive that I could do and become extremely good at so I would be able to work at it, make enough money to get by and otherwise save enough to reach a point where I wouldn't have to work anymore. I have long joked around with friends that I work very hard at finding ways to NOT have to work.
In a strange and slightly twisted sense, you could argue that my "work ambitions" revolved around finding some way to not have to work, or only have to minimally work.
Sadly, I failed pretty miserably in that particular "ambition!"
Most of my goals have been short term, based around whatever I felt I could take on to help overcome the next hurdle that would present itself, in life.
The question I have often been asked is ”So you're just really lazy, huh?”
The truth is actually I'm not. The truth is that I am just highly resistant to doing anything that doesn't have significant meaning, and that additionally strikes me as providing more gain and benefit for others rather than for myself. That would be about… 100%… of Korporate Amerika.
The "talking heads" and self-proclaimed work purpose gurus talk a lot about the idea that we should follow our passions, often presented with the small addendum that "the money will follow."
Without really being aware of this particular saying when I set forth on my journey through adult life, that has been pretty much what I have pursued for the majority of my existence. Writing, art, photography, the study of the mind, beachcombing, growing things... there's a long list.
At least I've gotten it half right!
I have pursued many of the the things that I love, and I have generally done them well. The half that I got wrong concerns this idea that "the money will follow." That part is pretty much a fairy tale, designed primarily to enable experts with workshops to charge lots of money for their programs. That is, of course, unless your passion happens to be something that is commercially desirable.
I think this small detail is one of the things that often causes people to become disillusioned with what they're doing (aka, following their passions), and results in them leaving their dreams behind and going back to jobs as accountants, or burger flippers, on filing clerks, or medical billing specialists.
I suppose it is just a fact of life that everything we encounter comes with a price. It may not be a direct price... but it'll show up as an opportunity cost.
You choose to take a particular path, and it comes with the "cost" of that path, something I learned when I broke away from my well-paying job in the IT industry and became an independent technical writer and editor.
The "benefit" was getting to do what I wanted, on my terms; the "cost" was a 70% reduction in income... and (obviously) having to massively re-evaluate and rearrange my lifestyle.
Perhaps the path was made more challenging by the fact that I did not have one of those life-long dreams to pursue... choosing instead to flit from opportunity to opportunity like a somewhat deranged bee.
I'm still flitting!
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Created at 2025.07.27 19:58 PST
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