What does the future hold?
When you’re in high school, you’re constantly asked, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Maybe it’s on a college application or during an interview, maybe it’s a guidance counselor. Regardless of who is doing the asking, the context of the question is always the same: what does your future hold? At 17 or 18 years old, we make up some answer about what we think we want our lives to look like and continue on with the day. Some people may fulfill those teenage dreams, but I think most people don’t truly know what they want or who they want to be until the actually get through college and discover a different side of themselves.
For me, when I was applying to college I had only 1 single thought on my mind: I wanted to be a photographer. My dream job was to work for National Geographic, travel around the world taking pictures. Whenever I told someone this I always got snide comments in return to the tune of “What are you going to do with that? Work at Sears?” with the emphasis on Sears like it was the worst insult you could deliver (weird not so funny fact: I ended up working at a portrait studio for 2 years after graduation). If I had told people I wanted to be a teacher or doctor or lawyer I wouldn’t have been met with that kind of attitude, but because my dream at the time was something they didn’t see as reasonable, people shot it down.
After college, however, I was just as confused as when I graduated from high school. I didn’t know what the future held for me. I still had photography dreams, but I’d become a little more realistic in knowing that the odds probably were not in my favor. I worked various retail jobs just to pay bills and never really found my footing. Even after getting laid off from 2 jobs within a week’s span, I still didn’t feel like I had a path. All around me, people were starting their dream jobs, moving across the country (or elsewhere!), getting married, starting families and I just felt… lost.
If someone had asked me at 24 where I saw myself in 5 years, I would have shrugged and changed the subject. A much different response than how I would have answered 8 year’s previously when I was so sure that photography was my future. So where’s my question:
Why don’t we keep asking where we see ourselves in 5 years’ time?
Is it because this question should only be asked to idealist teenagers with huge dreams or because it’s naive to think that once you’re “grown up” that your dreams don’t change?
If I think back through time in increments of 5, the lives I see are so completely different from each other.
5 years ago (2016): I was living with my ex in the 2nd to last apartment we’d have together. We would be getting married in November, though I didn’t know that in August. Mojo had just come into my life that May. I was working for the same company I’d been with for nearly 6 years, but was constantly looking for work elsewhere. I was extremely unhappy and miserable in my relationship, but couldn’t voice it.
10 years ago (2011): I’d been living with my ex for almost a year. We were about to move into a new apartment. I’d only been with the insurance company for a year and relatively enjoyed my job, though it was increasingly stressful. I didn’t have too many complaints at this time.
15 years ago (2006): I was about to enter my final semester of college, graduating that December. In the fall I would meet a guy that would change a lot of things for me, but I didn’t know it at the time. I’d just come out of one of the toughest years of my life and was ready to take the future head-on.
20 years ago (2001): Entering my Senior year of high school after the disaster that was my Junior year, I was determined to make things better and graduate with my class. I was just diagnosed (mis-diagnosed) Bipolar that spring and it really defined me at this time. I would only be applying to a single school for college because all I knew was that I wanted to study photography.
That’s a crazy timeline right there! When you break your life down into 5-year increments, you see so many changes not just in your surroundings, but in yourself. I am not the person I was 5 years ago and I’m certainly not the person I was 20 years ago. The things we go through change us drastically so it’s impossible to be the same person as the years go on. So… why don’t we keep asking where we see ourselves in the future?
Maybe it’s because as we get older we know that the future isn’t written. We know that anything we encounter or any people we meet might divert us from our “path.” We become more about living in the now because as you age the future becomes more and more scary (at least for me). Sure, I could imagine what my life might possibly look like in 5 years, but 3 years ago I never would have imagined the life I’m living now. There’s no way to predict what’s in store for us.
I’ve begun to make a “things to do by 40” list. It’s just a small list of things that I’d like to accomplish in the next 3 years. Are a couple of those left over from my “things to do by 30” list? Yes, but that’s ok. Things come up, life happens. Bucket lists, dreams, aspirations they’re all great, but we can’t let any of them get us down if they don’t happen. I think asking a 16/17/18 year old what their future holds or where they see themselves is asking them to predict something they can’t. I think we should, instead, be asking, “What kind of person do you hope to be?” Anyone can spout off dreams of being rich and famous or becoming a world-class doctor, a pulitzer price winning author or an astronaut, but it takes courage to really think about the kind of person you wish to be.
I think about this a lot… who I am and what I bring to the world, my family, my friends. I wonder if I enhance their lives or cause aggravation. I wonder if I’m a good person, if I make the world a better place, and if really doing good (RE: Mr. Feeny). These are things that have always stayed with me regardless of where I’ve lived, the job I’ve had, and other factors in my life. While my aspirations may be different now at 37 than they were at 17, my general wish for myself is the same: I want to be a good person.
There’s a famous quote from the legend that was John Lennon* that sums this up perfectly:
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.
When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.
(*in looking up the wording of the quote I’ve come to discover that there’s actually no evidence that Lennon ever said this)
Whether John Lennon said it or not, the genius of the quote remains the same. Our lives change, careers change, people come and go, and all you have control over is whether you’ve stayed true to yourself throughout the changes… whatever version of that self you are at any given time.
I’ll always wonder if I’m a good person. I could spend hours upon hours contemplating every minute of my life and pick apart the moments where I wasn’t. I could zero in on those and say, “See, I’m a terrible person. Here’s the evidence!” I could list every bad thing I’ve ever said and done, but that doesn’t help anything. At the end of the day, did I learn from the bad and have I tried to made amends… that’s what matters. There’s a reason why one of the steps in AA is to make amends for those you’ve wronged. In order to grow, you have to be willing to look at the whole picture and acknowledge where you fell short, where you hurt people, and how to make it better.
All this to say…
I don’t know what the future holds. I’m writing this in the middle of August 2021, while NYC is getting slammed with a heat wave, and I’m just trying to get from one day to the next. With the state of the world it’s hard to know what will happen in 5 months, so thinking ahead 5 years seems insurmountable. No one even knows what the world will look like in 5 years so it’s nearly impossible to imagine what my singular life will be.
I still have dreams and aspirations. I have things that I’d like to do, conversations I’d like to have, places I’d like to see. I have dreams that I share with others and those I keep to myself. I have lifelong bucket list items and new things that have only come up recently. No matter how these things ebb and flow around each other, one remains the same: I simply wish to know that I’ve been a good person. If on my death bed I can look back and know that I was, then it will have been a good life.
- Danielle
