Quick question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Young people across the world have answered that time-honored question as long as they’ve had an option. I make a point to keep asking it in my 300-level writing class for college juniors.

“Alright…now what about after that?”

The answers which following that second question tend to be a little more sparse and undefined.`

I’m now just months away from my 35th birthday — a milestone that currently feels very “old” in my current context, but is admittedly still “young” compared to a modern life expectancy — and I feel like sharing some insights that have fallen into my lap during a (simultaneously lengthy yet rapid) 15-year span, particularly in regards to careers, passions, and our life’s “purpose” (almost always framed as a singular when any experienced human would tell you it’s plural, and in the dozens if not hundreds).

I am, explicitly, full-heartedly, without reservation, giving you permission to experience multiple different lives during your journey here on Earth. They may have one (rapidly decaying, graying) body in common, but you can make them as distinct and different or similar and symmetrical as you’d like.

A Deep Gasp About the Future (From an Ill-Fated Classroom)

I enrolled in the Indiana University School of Journalism in Fall 2009. I considered myself a journalism “lifer” at the time, despite being only 19 and a freshman — I was (mentally) prepared to do whatever it took to make a public career in writing and reporting work, be it long hours or strange trips (or even learning about this newfangled “iPhone” thing that just dropped).

It was on the second floor of Ernie Pyle Hall — a building that historically housed the journalism school but was repurposed into the university’s welcome center about a decade ago — where an instructor I can’t remember told the class something I will never forget.

“Some of you,” he said, with a threatening rumble, “may have up to SEVEN separate jobs in this life.”‘

The room gasped. We were just weeks into the college experience, and here we were being told that the get-a-degree-and-the-job-will-follow mindset was likely bunk.

I just wanted to be a “reporter.” Would that mean I would report on seven different beats? Do it in seven different cities? Or (gasp), dare I say, would I be working outside of journalism entirely?

Now, as a guy who’s been out of college for almost 12 years, I’ve had at least 10 different jobs since getting the degree — about half of them relating in some natural way to my journalism degree (i.e. marketing or events), but the most memorable of them usually having little connection at all.

In a sense, I’d love to go back and tell everyone in the room (which no longer hosts journalism classes) to embrace the possibility of difference and variety in this life, rather than the sterile guarantee of one job from graduation to the grave.

And it’s not just about college and careers.

This is an entire mindset of life I’m talking about.

My ‘Jobs’ So Far

I’d be remiss not to share my own story here. Speaking strictly from a “jobs” standpoint (since my original question was about what I want to do when I grow up, which usually demands a labor-oriented answer), I figured I’d take you through each of the separate gigs I’ve had since college:

During College Itself: I had a rough month with guns pointed at me as a Comcast Repo Guy (1), a (thankfully) comparatively boring summer as a Hot Topic Sales Associate (2), and a few semesters working as the germaphobic assistant manager for Great-X-Scape Arcade in College Mall (3).

None of these are things I’d describe as “careers,” but they definitely influenced the sum of my life’s parts, even if for a few weeks, when I was carrying the academic load at IU. I’d come home after a fruitless 4-hour effort at Hot Topic with a Taco Bell burrito ($1.38) and a Steel Reserve ($1.49) and make do with $3 for “dinner,” if I had to.

After college, my job expectations — and culinary standards — did improve somewhat.

After College: I worked as a paid intern for the Chattanooga Times Free Press newspaper (4), then moved back to Bloomington to do basically everything but sell ads at The Herald-Times (5).

I ended up staying with “The HT” for the better part of 5 years, leaving in July 2018 only after seeing that my seat (which saw me design pages, take photographs, cover several reporting beats, and even write the consumer advice column) would inevitably be cut as part of a larger incoming sell-off to Gannett.

I went out with friends and cake, as I put it, instead of F-bombs and cardboard boxes.

If I was keeping score about “serious careers,” odds are good that my journalism career was folding right then. I haven’t written for a major newspaper since — but I do credit that to the demise of the newspaper and not the death of my writing voice.

The Myth of the ‘Diploma to Death’ Career

The K-12 public school is full of a lot of grandiose ideas meant to spark inspiration where specific help cannot be provided — “you can do anything you want when you grow up” is easier to tell a kid than “sure, you can be one of the world’s 9 astronauts” or something statistically more realistic.

But among these lofty platitudes is another, more silent, perhaps more malevolent idle threat: The idea that you will enter a career as a young person, maybe 25 or so, work your way up through the company, get married, buy a house, contribute to a posh retirement plan, call it quits in your 60s, and spend your days drinking lemonade by the pool with your Esquire Magazines and your Playboy centerfold wife.

Let’s all take a collective breath and say it: Bull…shit.

Surely it existed at one point. Maybe it only existed for a select few. And certainly, at least one person out there did luck into this life, be it through their connections or maybe a more predictable career field.

But this life archetype — which I saw in media as early as Looney Tunes set-ups and continue to see daily in any TV show or movie that crosses my eyes — clearly is more appropriate to be shown on a screen, where we only have 90 seconds to 90 minutes to tell a relatable story.

Not even NBA players stay with the same team for more than a few years — even the most financially secure and well-liked people in their cities still choose for something different or fulfilling rather than something stable.

The fact is, barring rare exception, whether you choose it to be your situation or not, most Americans are in a perpetual state of relating to what is, what was, and what they wanted in the first place — even as it changes from week to week, month to month, economy to economy, as we try to figure out what’s best for all of us.

Did any of you have visions of personal grandeur involving Ubering strangers around town in *your own vehicle* about 15 years ago? Did the idea of being a “freelance taxi driver” to make ends meet thrill you as a child? Probably not.

But this is the life we have, and we find the lives that make do.

Sometimes, we find ourselves taking a path on the map we didn’t even expect would exist 15 years ago — just like me entering journalism school at the advent of the iPhone.

It’s not quite “Adapt or Die,” but it is “Adapt, Stay Behind, or Find Something Else Entirely.”

Something Else Entirely

I felt tremendous personal loss in July 2018 when I put in my two-weeks’ notice at the newspaper and prepared for life after publishing.

I had entered the field in 2007 as a high school writer for the “New Palestine Press” weekly black-and-white bifold paper. And now I was hanging up the typewriter entirely, just a decade into what I thought would be my “lifelong passion.”

I didn’t think I’d ever find a job again, let alone anything that would make me feel “whole” or “complete.”

It, admittedly, did take a few trust falls on stepping stones that sank more than they said they would, but I write to you (and my prior self) now assuring that things ultimately work out, so long as you’re willing to Keep Stepping.

The week my mother died of pneumonia, I took a desperate stab at a temporary job at First Appraisal Group in Bloomington (6). I knew a little about real estate, based on my time as a business reporter tasked with researching the GIS ownership indices of local homes and companies.

Alas, they paid me $10 an hour to sit and wait for their beck and call, usually involving watching their grandson after school (I was cheaper than a babysitter) or listening to them talk shit about beloved businesses in the city, all the while having my education and experience languish behind me because I was too proud to try something besides writing or desk work.

I was fired that winter for having the flu. Three days of bedrest and they terminated me via phone call. Packed my stuff up into a box real hastily, like it was radioactive, and left it outside for me to pick up.

How low I felt, parentless and abandoned.

Next spring, I decided to try something a little different — a true marketing job for a K-12 professional development company named Solution Tree (7).

My first year was prosperous, as I found a manager that catered perfectly to my mental health (having just lost my mother a few months before) and embraced a job that had the money and resources to send me on work trips — including a special conference in San Antonio, where I had a riverfront hotel room and a per-diem and official status.

As fate would have it, I was laid off months later when everybody got the flu.

Life After Covid

We all experienced so much tumult during the COVID lockdowns and job restructuring that I’m not going to belabor spelling it out right now. But yes, I lost my Solution Tree gig to Covid.

Turns out, the company that puts on events for K-12 public schools wasn’t able to function when a pandemic shut down both events and public schools.

I get it. That’s a major fucking bummer.

But personally, above anything else, it showed me that no matter where you work, or when, there’s always some sort of exigent circumstance that can cost you everything. We know that now.

It was hard to swallow at the time, losing what I considered a dream job to someone else’s bungled response to a preventable situation, but change is the one constant of life. No amount of kicking and screaming can bring back the past. I was able to land a temporary gig as an adjunct journalism instructor (8) at The Media School (no longer in the aforementioned Ernie Pyle Hall), which continued to play more into the vibe that things would never be the same, professionally speaking.

So, to some extent, I started looking at the world around me — the one playing field I’ll always have control over, vis-a-vis the past — and looking to places where I wanted to be, instead of places where I felt like I had to be.

Pizza Time

I spent 3 months of Summer 2022 delivering orders for Pizza X (9) here in Bloomington. With a truck that was seemingly ready-made for slinging pies, I jumped into this role with virtually no prior service experience — if only because the Pizza X Twitter account believed I was worth a shot.

My debut delivery was a disaster — I forgot the HotBox and got lost in the first of many confusing apartment complex layouts — and my opening guest got a cold veggie pizza.

But I came back to the westside store with my head held high. Brenna, the manager, told me to take a HotBox next time. And she gave me a binder with the layouts of every apartment complex in town, so that I wouldn’t be left in the dark as to whether I was going to an “A builidng” or “1 building” sort of place.

The fact was, even in upfront failure, I was surrounded by people who believed in me. They saw someone who had started (if not started over outright) and wanted to do their best.

The world is full of people like this. It might surprise you, based on the news headlines I used to sign off on, that the majority of folks here on this rock want each other to succeed.

You shouldn’t be afraid of failure. It’s actually more common than success. Half of all teams in a sports contest are dealt a loss — and that’s just among the people talented enough to make either the winning or losing squads.

My time at Pizza X saw a lot of good and bad nights in tandem: The lucrative and the slow. The friendly and the hostile. The folks who offer you birthday cake when you deliver to a party; the sex pests who want you to enter their apartment at 2:15 a.m. and close the door behind you. I did get a real junk drawer full of rewards and repulsions on the brown-box beat, but it was worth it if only to realize one thing: You can be good at many different things in this life, if you’re not afraid to do more than just one thing.

Beer :30

The mentality of starting over began to grow in me, a guy who felt like he was going through “mid-life crisis” at 32 (which may be valid if you consider that Dad went at 46 and Mom went at 62).

In August 2022, I made the jump into bartending, starting with the troubled but supportive Switchyard Brewing Company (10). I decided that I was done working until 4 a.m., which is the sort of shot you start to take in your life once you’ve, again, had more than one kind of job experience. Choosing what’s best for you becomes a right and not a luxury.

As fate would have it, layoffs did snag me again at Switchyard, too — but not before I picked up a busload of intangibles about serving, brewing, pouring, cleaning, mopping, sweeping, and every other stereotypical bierhaus job. I made some lifelong friends there, too. But it also established that I was a force to be reckoned with in this new service industry I had dived into head-first.

It wouldn’t be long before I accepted other bartending gigs at a basement music venue (11; current), an arcade bar (12; most of two years), and a new brewery that opened about eighteen months ago (13).

Suddenly yet all at once — now on Job 13 since moving to college — it’s become plain to see that I’ll likely have closer to 50 different gigs in this life before retiring (if I should be so fortunate and interested).

In tow, it’s also become easier to realize that having more than just one static career vector has made my life socially richer and more experienced as a result. I can push a mop and balance a spreadsheet. I can report on city hall and restock the entire bar with the FIFO process.

It’s not just about jobs, though — this is life.

I look forward to the day I get over my phobia of baiting a live worm over a fresh metal hook and going fishing, even if I don’t catch anything, because it will have entailed some sort of personal growth and expansion in the process.

In Defense of Multiple Lives

Don’t get it crooked — this isn’t a post advocating for espionage or identity theft — but you have full license and leisure to mix up anything in your life, for any reason (or no reason) at all.

It’s just a shame how often financial viability is tied to so many of our opportunities for expansion.

The most compelling reason as to why we don’t make drastic life changes, usually, is that we’ve already invested so much time or money into our past choices that we feel like we have to make due on them, or make our money back, so to speak.

Whether it’s time or money, it’s already been spent. You should keep trying to make the most of what your past has been interested in, always, but I encourage you to always be looking for new or “multiple” lives as well, should you find them.

They don’t always have to be high-stakes to be wonderfully life-changing.

I grew up hating baseball, going out of my way to make fun of it. After catching the Ken Burns documentary about the sport in 2017, I found myself watching baseball at every opportunity, staying up late to catch a West Coast nightcap or waking up early to get to Indianapolis for a Triple-A affiliate game. My life is better for it.

I used to be afraid of the grill, asking for my friends to cook at parties I threw because I didn’t like the pressure of not ruining everyone’s dinner, let alone not being burned by a giant flamethrower. After a few years of owning my own grill, I’ve perfected a few recipes to the point I break them out on date night. My pork chops are frequently the talk of the block. My life is better for it.

I used to abhor country music. “For idiots and cousin-fuckers,” or something unhelpful I’d have said in high school. But since I started bartending at the basement music venue, I’ve heard some country and western music that’s altered my perspectives of people I used to discredit. I’ve even performed country hits twice on stage, once on my birthday and another time on New Year’s Eve. My life is better for it.

I grew up religious, following some vague sort of Midwestern Christianity. After my parents died, I fell out of religion and stepped into a sort of combative atheism to weaponize the spite that was growing within me. But now, with a few decades of both extremes under my belt, I frequently look to Bible quotes (knowing full well that I don’t believe in God) for clarity, as I know there is a duality to the Bible’s collection of fables that transcends whether or not you think Heaven is real. My life is better for it.

You Do ‘You’ (Because Only You Can)

Let’s go back to the very first thought of this essay — what do you want to be when you grow up?

Even if you feel like you’ve already “grown up,” there is still a tomorrow (or a next year, or decade) where you will be left to the daily decisions regarding what comes next.

You have the right to choose what you’ve always done. After all, you’ve put all this time and money into the process, I’d 100% understand why someone would refuse to abandon that sort of investment.

But the older I get, the more I realize that time is more valuable than money — sure, you always need both — but that I’m finding myself more interested in taking the uncertain path which could lead to spiritual growth rather than the steady sidewalk that will leave me exactly as it finds me.

In either circumstance, whatever you choose, the good news is — and always will be — that you will have more days and decisions and departures to come.

There’s only one singular axiom that’s really landed with me in regards to professional or personal success: The grass is greenest where you water it.

You will always have water, and you will always have grass that needs it. Water the grass, and you will have a fine lawn — wherever your home is in this mysterious and vast world.

Make the best use of your water. Demonstrate your best defense of living multiple lives.

What will I do with my next lives? I’m not sure yet. But please, stand by for the next great upcoming act.

I’m eager to see what you do with yours, too. 🙂

-moose