You have been asked this question. Almost every adult you met, from your aunties to strangers, asked you the same thing again and again: “Who do you want to be when you grow up?”
And then you came up with some sort of answer that changed every other day: doctor, pilot, president. The list goes on.
At first glance, it seems like an innocent question. What harm could there be in asking children what they want to be when they grow up?
Well, not much at first. But then, as they get older, the question doesn’t change, but the way it’s asked does.
When you are 16, your parents or teachers aren’t asking out of curiosity. They are asking to see if you have already decided on a path you will follow. They want to make sure that you know what you will be doing with your life. They want to make sure you can get into a decent school, secure a job, and most importantly, avoid unemployment.
Suddenly, the innocent question you used to be asked is gone. It feels judgmental and pressurizing. God forbid you are a high school senior with no idea what you want to do with your life. You will probably be seen as a failure because supposedly everyone else has already figured it out.
Sure, the pressure often starts with parents, but it certainly doesn’t end there. University admissions only add to the problem. The way applications are designed pushes high school students to prematurely choose their life’s direction.
I’ve been down that path. When I was applying to colleges, I stopped thinking about what I wanted to do. Instead, I started optimizing my activities to fit a “career narrative.”
I thought I wanted to do business. But since I hadn’t done anything resembling “real business,” I convinced myself it was a weak application. On the other hand, I had plenty of experience in politics and international relations, so I decided to apply in that direction.
I found myself crafting a story, connecting my activities and honors into a cohesive narrative that supposedly proved I was destined to be a politician.
I had to choose. I had to declare a career path. I had to pick a major. Most importantly, to even have a chance at a good university, I had to identify my “spike,” my narrative, my supposed passion, and build my application around it.
It became a game of optimization:
If I apply to economics, how do I make my experiences fit that story?
If I apply to politics, how do I turn my TEDx talk into evidence for that?
At just seventeen or eighteen, I was forced to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
Looking back, I realize that even that “choice” was never entirely mine. It was shaped by what surrounded me: the opportunities I had and the ones I didn’t. If I had grown up exposed to different paths, maybe I would have chosen differently. The truth is most of us just pick from what we can see.
Educational systems in most countries expect you to commit to a field when you’re barely starting your life. You have no idea what you truly want, yet you’re already pushed to pick a high school focus that leads to a college major that leads to your first job. It is an unnervingly linear process, built on the assumption that teenagers are capable of making a lifelong decision about their future.
But the world these systems were designed for no longer exists. The meaning of “career” itself has become unstable. Our parents could pick a profession and keep it for decades. Today, the ground moves constantly. Technology reshapes industries every few years, and people are expected to reinvent themselves more than once. The idea of one fixed professional identity has quietly collapsed, yet our institutions still behave as if permanence were possible.
Universities continue to sort students into narrow lanes because that is how their infrastructure was built. They need to forecast which departments will grow, how many faculty members to hire, how many classrooms to allocate. It is simpler to admit a “future economist” than an undecided student whose interests might span several fields. Employers rely on those same signals when they hire. The result is an education pipeline that favors efficiency over exploration, even when exploration has become the only realistic way to adapt.
This is why the problem goes beyond individual pressure. It is not just about ambitious parents or overbearing teachers; it is structural. The system rewards early specialization because it is convenient to manage, not because it reflects how life actually unfolds.
And so the question, “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” carries an outdated logic. It assumes there is a single, stable answer waiting to be discovered, when in reality, the answer keeps evolving.
A better question would sound more open: What do you want to learn next? What direction feels meaningful right now? What are you curious about? These questions allow change, which is what real growth demands.
I still think about that original question, though. Adults keep asking it, just in more careful ways. Sometimes they mean “Will you be safe?” or “Will you be useful?” or “Will you be okay?” And maybe the only honest answer is that safety today comes from learning how to adapt by staying curious, staying capable, and staying willing to change your mind.
And if you asked me today who I want to be when I grow up, I’d probably still pause, because there’s still no way to answer it. But I’ll tell you this — I’d like to be someone who keeps learning, who doesn’t mistake a temporary path for a permanent identity, and who’s at peace with not having a final answer.