“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.
“If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”
Oscar Wilde
I find it disappointing that one of the first things we tend to ask people we’ve just met is; ‘so, what do you do?’ And, we all know the person asking the question doesn’t really want to know how we spend our time, and we probably don’t want to tell them.
The interesting thing about ‘what do you do?’ is that it’s a euphemism for ‘what’s your title what industry do you work in’. It has nothing to do with how you spend your time, despite the question meaning just that. And that’s the thing. Work has become a path to a title and a paycheck. We don’t give any thought to how a career will expect us to spend our time. When we choose careers we think about the status a job will bestow on us and the size of the bank account we’ll require to keep our salaries safe.
We train our children to think in these terms. As adults we push them to identify with titles and labels. We ask them what they want to be when they grow up. At school we train our kids to think of themselves as astronauts, lawyers, pilots and doctors. Where as we should be helping them define what their ideal day looks like. And then trying to help them find a path that will give them an abundance of what they hope to experience.
Humans are ‘doing’ animals
Stephen Fry, in reference to Oscar Wilde’s quote above said, ‘We are not nouns, we are verbs.‘ And it’s true. Humans are designed for action. We are not trees or rocks or algae. Humans are ‘doing’ animals that build stuff. We drive, run, fly, swim, crawl, explore, learn, act, make, create, the list is limited only by the number of verbs at our disposal. We’re different to cows in that we do more than stand in a pasture and chew cud while staring at the horizon. The number of activities we are able to engage in far outnumber those of other animals.
The fact that we’re this adept at taking action should be an indication of how important what we do is to us. We should be more considered about what actions we take, how we spend our time and what we choose make.
And yet most of us want to be CEOs, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, doctors, influencers, celebrities, rich even happy. But, as Oscar Wilde said, when you become any of these things, that will be your punishment. The label will be your prison. Because freedom lies in being able to do what you want to do.
We should learn to know what we want to be doing because in the end it is more important than only knowing what we want.