Conspiracy Theory?

A thought struck me today. What if no one knows what they want to do with their lives? And that those that claim to are merely kidding themselves or worse, just plain lying to us. Maybe, as a society we are all pre-conditioned to hate work.

Look at how we’re raised…

I think of myself as having led a fairly typical childhood, for my generation. Boundary-less football matches that lasted for hours, yet only involved six of us on a good day (rush goalies, of course). Several mile long bike rides, the sole purpose of which was not to get us from home to the office (avoiding public transport or parking fees), but simply to ride our bikes, and perhaps, on adventurous days, see a field or woods we’d not seen before. Spending whole afternoons building entire Lego cities, not for one second looking ahead to the inevitable temper-tantrum inducing moment when mum decides to inform me that I need to clear it all away. But muuuum…

Not once did my mother sit me down in front of a computer and say “Son, can you build me a report to these specifications which are, if I’m honest, so vague as to almost guarantee failure?”, or “You seem to know your way around a computer - how do I archive my emails?”, or “Is there a formula for getting the highest number from a range of numbers?”. Neither did she ever force me to engage in trivial quasi-conversations about her evening, or weekend, or children (which would’ve been odd, admittedly, given that I was one of them).
Perhaps if she had introduced me to these things as a child, in a fun way, those associations would have remained, and I would not find them as intolerably loathsome as an adult. But she didn’t, and I do. So thanks for nothing, mum!

But no, of course I know that’s not realistic. Even the 8 year old me would have been able to see that the aforementioned activities cannot be even remotely fun, and I would have rapidly tossed them aside in favour of something more entertaining. Perhaps a Rubik’s Cube.