Be a good person. Build useful things. Protect something living. Learn constantly. Stay curious.

For most of my life I thought I was supposed to have a career plan. Society treats it like a sacred document. Some polished little roadmap proving you deserve oxygen and access to electricity. What do you want to be when you grow up? The question arrives before you even know who you are. Lawyer. Builder. Nurse. Police officer. Artist. As if human beings are vending machine labels instead of living creatures. No one asks if you want to be kind. No one asks if you want to protect ecosystems or raise thoughtful children or become someone who leaves places better than they found them. We get trained early to confuse identity with income. Your worth fused directly to your productivity like a receipt stapled to your forehead.

What is your career plan?

The older I get the more absurd the whole thing feels. Career is often just cage wallpaper. You get to choose the pattern while pretending you are free. Some cages come with office chairs and Friday drinks. Some come with steel capped boots and bad backs. Some come with applause. Some come with debt. But most of them quietly pull people further away from themselves, from nature, from slowness, from community, from the simple biological reality that humans are animals pretending not to be.

I have spent years bouncing through hundreds of jobs. Lawn mowing. Café owner. Gallery operator. Maintenance officer. Artist. Illustrator. Podcaster. Worker. Dreamer. The strange thing is every single job taught me something useful except the lesson society tried hardest to teach me, which was to build my entire identity around employment. I have seen people earning six figures who are spiritually extinct. I have seen exhausted nurses still radiating humanity. I have seen artists with extraordinary gifts crushed beneath rent, algorithms and self doubt while influencers film themselves unboxing sponsored water bottles for more money than a conservation scientist earns in a year. The machine is not broken. The machine is functioning exactly as designed.

Creative people, especially neurodivergent ones, often get sold a different version of the same trap. We grow up hearing freedom whispered through the cracks. Maybe I will be an artist. Maybe I will run a café gallery. Maybe I will build a little business around what I love. It sounds beautiful until the paperwork starts breeding in the dark. Licences. Insurance. Taxes. Endless administrative micro cuts slowly draining the blood from the thing that once made you feel alive. You realise modern systems are strangely efficient at punishing sincerity. They turn passion into invoices and imagination into content calendars.

I know because I tried. I opened the café gallery with my wife. I chased the dream. For two years it consumed nearly every waking second of my life. Not because I was lazy or untalented but because hustle culture quietly disguises self destruction as ambition. The modern world romanticises burnout because exhausted people are easier to control. Tired people stop asking bigger questions. They stop wandering into forests. They stop making strange art. They stop noticing birds.

Now I work maintenance across two country hospitals while building my art life around the edges like roots cracking through concrete. And honestly, there is dignity in that too. The oxygen systems matter. Heating matters. Gardens matter. A flourishing tree outside a hospital window matters more than most politicians will ever understand. Useful work is not the enemy. The danger comes when work becomes the entire definition of a human life.

My actual career plan now is far less impressive on paper and infinitely more meaningful in practice. I want to raise thoughtful daughters. I want to make art that reconnects people with overlooked animals and forgotten wonder. I want to leave patches of land healthier than I found them. I want enough financial stability to breathe without becoming psychologically owned by corporations or trends. I want to build slowly and honestly. I want my children to understand that success is not performing exhaustion for strangers.

A while ago my daughter got asked what she wanted to be when she grows up.

She said, “A forest wanderer.”

Buried inside that tiny sentence was something ancient and true. Humans were never designed to spend most of their lives trapped indoors under fluorescent lights proving their economic usefulness. We are pattern seeking mammals who once moved with seasons and stars and weather. Somewhere along the way we forgot.

I think many people can feel it now. The ache beneath modern life. The quiet suspicion that we traded too much of ourselves away for convenience and permission slips. We became consumers before we became ourselves.

So forget career, at least in the sacred identity sense of it. Be a good person. Build useful things. Protect something living. Learn constantly. Stay curious. Refuse to let systems flatten your imagination into a job title. Earn money if you must, because the world unfortunately still charges admission, but do not hand over your entire soul in the process.