The "Grown up" myth

As a child you only have one job – you are expected to grow up.
The idea of staying forever young was not even considered – although right now it doesn’t seem that absurd to me anymore.
As a child you were expected to transform continuously, to reach that magical point of adulthood.
Once you have passed that imaginary line – some time around 18 – you had arrived.
From then on you were a “grown up”; an adult. Job done! Mission accomplished!

Or at least that what we thought… but wait! – Life seems to have a different agenda.
That Promised Land, where you have finished growing up, where you know everything and are in control of everything, never materialized.
Like it or not, life keeps throwing you new problems and challenges.
Like it or not you have to learn new tricks and keep changing.

The idea that you are a “grown up” was a pure myth.
You are and will always be “growing up”…

I remember starting up my work as a video engineer – one of my many career moves.
I had to clean and vacuum behind the equipment racks – not a job for a college graduate, I thought.
“You have to pay your dues” – They told me – “We all start like this but one day when you will become a “senior” engineer you will have your own new, guy going through the “initiation”.

Well, I am the “senior” engineer and that day never came.
Instead of becoming the “accomplished” engineer – that fountain of knowledge for the new generation – I have become obsolete.
The new –computerized – generation is looking at me not like a source of wisdom but like an antiquated, obsolete relic.

After the “midlife” crisis I thought I will finally arrive to that “golden” age in every man’s life.
That age of total fulfillment, of stability, of meaning and reward.
That never happened.

I have no idea who I am and where I’m supposed to go.
It is that “unknown”, it is that “emotional storm”, that “emotional instability” that kills me.
I know I have to “reinvent” myself – the question is: Why, to what end?
To change just to survive?
Well, it seems logical, but to me to survive just to survive never had any meaning.

Without the “grown up” destination life seems just to drag on to its inevitable extinction without rhyme or reason.
We need to find another purpose for our “grown up” population.