“Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” and other terrifying questions
JANUARY 2002
I had been driving for just over a month and the joy was palpable. I loved my little grey Peugeot 205 more than is strictly healthy. It was physical full stop to the period of my life that required me to spend hours in a cramped car with a chain smoking driving instructor who made me pull over to ogle passing girls and make pitstops at off-licences.
On the day I passed my test, on the third try, I came home to discover the letter confirming I had a place at university. I would be the first person in my family to go besides a distant relation called Raymond who I don’t know and didn’t like the sound of.
If someone had asked me then where I saw myself in 10 years, I would have said something vague about writing. I could see no further than seven months into the future when with the right grades I’d be at Cambridge for three years of pretending to be a grown up.
The imminent moment of reinvention was coming. The Mic Wright of high school could cease to exist. I didn’t need to think about who I’d be in 10 years because I was too busy forgetting who I’d been so far.
JANUARY 2012
The new year is 12 days old and in 17 days I will be 28. That’s the basic kind of maths I can handle but the results are a little unsettling. I did what the 18-year-old me vaguely hinted at. I did go into writing things though I doubt he would have predicted a start in pensions before swerving into technology through music and into the uncertain apocalyptic wastelands of freelancing.
On Tuesday, I was asked: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” I don’t know.
I had an answer. In interviews, you always have an answer. It’s not socially acceptable to just blink slowly like a pug staring up at the vast expanse of the butcher’s window.
My answer was a kind of Consequences construction about family and being the best at what you do and fulfilment. It was an inelegant fudge. What I would give for the confidence of a fortune teller truly convinced that they can gaze into the mists and make out what shape the future will take.
Where do I see myself in 10 years? Often I don’t know where I see myself in 10 days or 10 minutes. It’s a question that implies you should have some Soviet-style plan, that your personal ambitions are just so much pig iron to be produced, shipped and shifted. Write a list. Make a plan. Then watch as live swerves round your roadblocks and goes careening in an entirely unexpected direction.
In 10 years, I will be 38. That’s a presumptuous sentence. In 10 years, I could be dead. I’m hoping I won’t be but what with cancer and asteroids and the threat of a zombie menace, it’s unwise to assume. “Never assume, it makes an ass out of you and me.” That’s not an appealing situation outside of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
When my dad was 28, I was already 2-years-old. By the time my mum was 28, I was 5. I can’t get around to putting up shelves and they at least come with rudimentary instructions. I suppose one blessing with children is that they come fully assembled.
On Facebook, pregnancies blossom across my newsfeed and pictures of weddings have replaced feckless flick books of drunken nights. My contribution to adulthood is a fully-fledged commitment to anxiety and some half-decent jokes on Twitter.
As a kid, you just assume that at a certain point you’ll be an adult as if you climb into a cocoon on your 21st birthday and emerge the next day understanding mortgages, dinner parties and the right thing to say to wine waiters. Then, on some frightening occasion, you realise that the state of “being an adult” is just an impressively sustained bout of pretending. For the past few years, I’ve been a terrible actor. If there were a reeducation camp for lapsed adults, I would be shipped there.
I hate being asked “where do you see yourself in 10 years?” because no answer can ever sound right. But perhaps it’s a question I should be asking myself. Do you know where you’ll be in 10 years? All I can hope is that you won’t be sat here, reading another post from me about where I think I might be in 10 years.
