Posts tagged Little Time

Every question has four ingredients: The person asking, the person being asked, the relationship between them, and the motive behind the question. For example, a young man hears, “Why are you getting married?”

When posed by his best friend, the question could be suggesting that he is making a mistake because there are “so many women and so little time”.That same question could be coming from a broken heart when it is the little brother who sees his big brother, and best friend, abandoning him and all the fun they had playing ball and video games.

It will mean something else completely when coming from his dad who wishes he’d remained single but “had” to get married after a night at the drive-in spent in the back seat of a ’64 Ford.And the question could be expressing great dismay and sadness when coming from his mom who had always dreamed of her son becoming a priest.

The motive is everything, the truth of it, and especially the perception of it, a perception that can be accurate or completely wrong. Suffice to say you can answer a question neither truthfully nor honestly unless you understand both the question and the motive behind it. If you misunderstand either, your answer might be sincere, honest, and truthful, but still be wrong. You could, for example, ask me, “Are you Randy?” Unless and until I know whether you’re asking me if that’s my name (capital “R”) or if I’m sexually aroused (small “r”) and why you’re asking, any answer I give can be right or wrong, truthful or misleading.

I asked a question in the third grade that foreshadowed what has become, for lack of a better word, my destiny. I asked the teacher why the woman, not the man, changes her name when they get married. The classroom erupted in laughter. I was embarrassed, humiliated. The teacher was great. She said, “Randy, I honestly don’t know. All I do know is that it’s a tradition.”

That question and brief bit of dialogue established forever my relationship with authority figures and my peers. To this moment I respect honesty of character, no patronizing, condescending tones or words. For example, she (the teacher) could’ve said, “Randy, you’re too young to understand.” She didn’t.

As for my peers, I’ve had many years to ponder this seemingly innocuous event. I have a name for their laughter because I’ve seen it in action time and time again. It’s the smug laughter of those who know the answer and can’t believe anyone else could be so stupid that he didn’t also know it. But it’s also the nervous laughter of both those too shy to ask the question and those who didn’t think of it for themselves in the first place. Theirs is the laughter of wanting to fit in, to belong with the rest, to not be seen as “different”.

I call this the maniacal laughter of the damned. They’re “damned” because chances are they will spend the rest of their lives exerting more effort at trying to conform than searching for meaning and truth. I know this because the other kids stopped laughing as soon as the teacher answered my question. I know this because I see adults repeat it over and over in every conceivable setting.

Yes, every kid goes through this. By adulthood, however, most have chosen to remain silent, to not ask questions. It is as though asking questions immediately translates into open defiance and disobedience. Maybe this is why most people prefer to follow the path of obedience because it truly becomes the path of least resistance. But whether it’s actual and intended, or a perception that can be accurate or erroneous, motive is what can interject conflict into something as simple as asking a question.

A long time ago I knew a man who told me he shot groundhogs because they dig holes and the farmers’ cows would step into the holes and break their legs. “Do you fill in the holes after you’ve killed the groundhogs?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Well,” said I, “what’s the point of killing the groundhog if you’re not going to fill in the hole?” We never spoke much after that because he correctly perceived the motive behind my question, the unspoken “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

So what then is the motive behind asking every young person in this country, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This question falls under the category of “You know what I mean” simply because what’s being asked is what type of career, occupation, employment, vocation is one considering in order to earn a paycheck or make money.

But “work” is not the same as “employment” any more than is “earning a paycheck” the same as “making money”. “Work” includes not only the labor and employment required to earn money but also-and far more important-the “work” of everyday life, trying to make sense of, perhaps even resolve, the conflicts and complexities we all face on a daily basis.

So while asking someone “what do you want to be when you grow up” may carry with it the best of intentions, with rare exceptions it is an exercise in futility. And in the darkness of this this nation’s emphasis on money and materialism, I won’t argue the need for young people to give serious consideration to these matters. Failing to do so, lacking a clear vision, choosing nothing by default results in someone like me, a man with some sixty employers in his past. With no specificity in mind, one goes where one can find suitable employment. Sometimes it works out that such jobs do indeed become the stuff of careers and lifelong occupations. But when that doesn’t happen, the choice, by default, is to merely have a “job,” or more than one, maybe dozens.

There is, however, a double-edged sword contained within that question. Encouraging young people to decide what it is they “want to be when they grow up” is asking and expecting them to first pick a career, then choose a college that best prepares them for that career, then invest all those years, all that energy, and all that money so that they can, for the rest of their lives, day after day, do the same “work” over, and over, and over.

Now maybe I get bored easily or need new challenges from time to time, but I can think of few careers, few occupations, few anything to which I would want to commit the rest of my life for money and materialistic gain. I will make a comparison.

Your son or daughter tells you he/she is getting married. He is barely twenty years old and you insist he’s too young to make such decisions. You try with all your might to get him to think in terms of the rest of his life in order to dissuade him. But when it comes to money? Oh, then we encourage them to make this commitment and trust them to be “mature” enough to make such decisions. It’s madness. It’s folly.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

If you ask a six-year old girl that question, she might say something like ballerina. At ten she’ll want to be a puppy-doctor. At fourteen, nurse. A boy will say cowboy, then fireman, then secret agent. I’m applying stereotypes from the 50′s, but the point is made.

Why then is everyone so convinced that a young man or lady in their late-teens or early-twenties has any more of a real vision and understanding what they want to do with the rest of their lives than they did only a decade previous? Do you not know that boredom with a career is just as likely as boredom in marriage and that an initial “true love” with one particular occupation will eventually prove to have been mere “puppy love”? Giving birth to lifelong occupations based on intercourse between youthful notions of perfect careers and financial security is still a shotgun wedding. The chances of passion and romance years down the road are very slim.

And no, I’m not forgetting the insistence to “do what you love and the money will follow”. Yes, it would be wonderful if each and every person was afforded the luxury of both knowing what that elusive thing is to which they wanted to commit the rest of their lives for the sake of making money, as well having the means to make that dream come true. That is not the reality of the situation and if you say otherwise, you’re either lying (to me, yourself, and everyone else) or selling something, or both.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

The worst of all consequences with this question is that you successfully create people who identify themselves by the labor they perform in order to make money. “I am a doctor.” “I am a truck-driver.” Neither is true. Whether I like it or not, I understand the “hyphenated-American” thing. But to identify yourself in terms of what you do merely to make money? If suicide is killing your own body, I wonder what they call murdering your sense of identity?

The essence of a man or woman is not to be found in what he or she does to earn money. But isn’t that precisely what the phrase “Human Resource” has accomplished? It has reduced the essence of man to nothing more than his usefulness in the pursuit of commerce, consumerism, profit, and greed.

And that becomes the motive, intentional or not, behind “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You are to place your confidence, your trust, and your energies in the institutions (colleges, universities, employers) and philosophies (capitalism, “business 101″) to be followed in this pursuit of financial security. And in return you are dehumanized and reduced to a “Human Resource”.

You are nothing more than a necessary expense required for the company to remain in business and make a profit. And if the company could find a way to replace you with a piece of machinery or furry barnyard animals, it would do so without blinking an eye. True, you’re a “human” resource, but your humanity comes in a very distant second-place to your role as a resource.

If “growing up” means becoming a willing part of that system, I am glad to say that to this very moment I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. Getting old is inevitable, but from what I’ve observed, “growing up” usually means “giving up” your own dreams and visions, your very personhood. And what else is that but “making a deal with the devil”?