What do you want to be when you grow up?

My son is at secondary school now, and all the conversations about the future are starting to come up more often. What subjects he likes, what he’s good at, where he needs to improve, what he might want to do later on.

He does, at some point, need to become a functioning adult who can pay for things himself, of course. I love him dearly, but I’m not planning to be washing his pants when he’s 43.

And so people have started asking him what he wants to do when he’s older.

I always find myself slightly irritated by this question, which is probably unfair because people are only being nice. Nobody is pinning him against a wall demanding a five-year plan or anything.

But it’s really just the grown-up version of that question we’ve always asked children: what do you want to be when you grow up?

And I keep thinking how strange that is. Be. As though the answer to who you are is supposed to be a job.

Why not ask where he wants to live, or whether he wants a house full of people, or if he’d like to travel, or stay close to home, or spend loads of time outside, or make things, or earn enough money to never have to worry too much about it, or have a job that pays less but lets him finish at three and go and do something else with his life?

Obviously, at the moment, his answers would probably involve gaming, pizza and never having to unload the dishwasher, so perhaps society knows what it’s doing.

But still, I keep thinking about how quickly we turn a whole magical life into a bloody career question.

Because I see the adult version of this all the time in my coaching work.

Someone comes to me because they want to change jobs, get promoted, retrain, go freelance, jack it all in and become a potter in Wales.

Another person genuinely needs a different job. Sometimes their job is making them miserable and it needs to go.

But quite often, once we actually get into it, they don’t necessarily want a shiny new career at all.

They want their life back a bit.

They want to finish work without feeling completely wrung out. They want to see their kids while they’re still awake, have some energy left for their partner, walk the dog before it’s pitch black, stop checking emails while they’re eating dinner, or stop spending half of Sunday with that horrible Monday feeling sitting somewhere in their chest.

And I think this is the bit we’re much less good at talking about.

We spend bloody years being taught how to think about careers.

Pick these subjects. Get this qualification. Aim for that job. Earn a bit more. Move upwards. Make choices that look sensible from the outside. And then post about it all on LinkedIn.

But we’re much less good at asking ourselves: what do I actually want my life to feel like?

And yes, I know there’s a bigger thing underneath all of this.

Most of us don’t get to design our lives from scratch. We need money. There are mortgages and rent and childcare and bills and jobs we can’t just merrily jack in because we fancy spending more time making sourdough.

And obviously, some of us have a lot more choice about this stuff than others.

But I do think it’s interesting how young it starts. So much conversation about what you’ll do, what you’ll be, where all of this is leading.

Much less about how you actually want to live.

I’ve had to work a lot of this out as I’ve gone along.

The funny thing is, I think I probably would have wanted quite a lot of the life I have now if you’d asked me when I was younger: living between two countries, working for myself, training as a psychotherapist in my forties, writing things, playing in a band, hosting a podcast, having animals everywhere and being around for my son.

I’m not sure Janet, the careers counsellor at my school in 1995, would have known what to do with any of that.

I definitely came away from those conversations with the impression that the sensible thing was to pick something respectable, get qualified in it, and then presumably keep doing it until someone bought you a carriage clock and you could retire.

Which, in fairness to Janet, was probably what careers advice was supposed to be.

But I think that stayed with me. This idea that there were sensible, conventional choices, and then there were the things I was actually interested in.

Perhaps that’s partly why it’s taken me so long to realise that life doesn’t have to make perfect sense on paper to be a very good one.

I like my life.

And I think that’s what I want my son to understand as he gets older.

Mostly, I don’t want him to grow up thinking he has to get it right first time.

I hope he changes his mind. I hope he does things for a few years and then thinks, actually, sod this. I hope the things he wants at 25 are completely different from the things he wants at 45.

Mine certainly were. I wanted to be a police officer for a while, which would have been an interesting career choice for someone who dislikes being told what to do…

I want him to care about work if work matters to him, but I don’t want him to think work has to be the main thing.

I want him to think about the whole thing. Who he wants around him, where he wants to live, how rushed or not-rushed he wants his life to be. All the ordinary bits nobody really asks about when they say, “So, what do you want to be when you’re older?”

Because maybe that’s the wrong question.

Maybe it’s more like: what sort of life would you quite like to have?

Which is an absolutely enormous question to ask a child who currently considers putting his socks in the laundry basket a fairly major personal sacrifice.

But I think I’d still rather he started there.