Quarter-Life Crisis

Children often have no concept of how daily life functions. Friends, family, school, and a room full of posters comprise the entirety of a child’s conscience existence. You bounce through life unconcerned with trivialities, mostly insulated from the harsher realities of life. Dreams are allowed to spiral out of control in your mind. Serious thoughts rarely invade your imagination.

Kids understand “being a fireman” as little more than sliding down a pole and jumping onto the back of a big red truck with a Dalmatian named “Spike.” “Being a doctor” is more about wearing a long white coat than realizing it takes a tenth of your life just to get through medical school. Careers are seen as idealized caricatures, sanitized for youthful audiences. You can be whatever you want (or so your told) to be when you grow-up, and the choices seem endless. One day a boy wants to be a carpenter, the next a racecar driver. Or a girl wants to be an architect on Monday, but by Wednesday she’s dead-set on a career as a concert violinist.

My observations on childhood are not earth-shattering and are fairly obvious. But as I look forward to starting my career, I cannot help feeling a little nostalgic. I have chosen a path, a path I do not regret. But no mater how excited I am about my future I am still mournful of all the things I will not get the chance to become. Like Kevin Arnold once bemoaned, (slightly paraphrased):

“When you are a kid you are part artist, part athlete, part musician, and part scholar. Growing-up is a process of slowly giving up parts of yourself until you are left with one, what you were meant to become.”
My nostalgia does not have anything to do with any sort of personal hobby-shortage or that I feel short-changed in the grand scheme of things. It is the end of summers off, the loss of infinite possibilities, and the steady creep of time that make me long for those simpler days. I know I’ll never get a chance to learn to hit a major-league curve ball, master pottery, or set foot on the moon.

It does not bother me that I will not get to do everything I’ve ever dreamed. But knowing that I will not get to try every exotic profession is somewhat depressing. What’s that saying?

Ignorance… something.