“Who do you want to be/become?”

A question with no answer

I'm guessing you've been asked this your whole life. At six, with a fond smile. At sixteen, with pressure. At twenty-six, it becomes “So… what are you actually going to do with your life?” — and there's worry in their voice.

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

Look closely at how it's phrased. Not “who are you?”, but “what do you want to be” — later, once you've grown up. The question is built as if right now you are nobody, and a profession is the thing that will finally make you somebody.

So you sort of search. You switch majors. You take career aptitude tests. You read about people who “found themselves”. You try design, then data analytics, or whatever else people try when they're looking for themselves. Every time it feels like: this is it. And six months later, again and again, the same emptiness or boredom inside — just with a new line on your résumé. And that's if you even got to work long enough to add one.

In situations like this you get the standard explanation: you just haven't found your thing yet. Keep looking.

But I want to offer a different explanation. You won't find yourself in a profession, because you aren't there. A profession is the fruit of your development as a person and of the development of the society around you.

This lecture is about exactly these two questions — the ones the search for yourself should start with. It's also about how little these questions are discussed, or how they're not discussed at all, in European families and schools, and what to do about it. It's the introduction to a course of ten short lectures.

To make it easier, let's work through it with an allegory: a house.

1. Who was supposed to teach this, anyway?

Let me start with something you can check against the people around you, no statistics required.

If you've been asked “what do you want to be?” dozens of times, now try to remember who, and when, ever talked to you seriously about how to notice that the person next to you is struggling. How not to wreck the relationships you'll still be in ten years from now. How to build a family, and what to do when things get hard in it. I had very few conversations like that, and judging by what I hear from others, that's pretty typical.

Which brings me to the question that interests me most: who was supposed to teach this, anyway?

Everyone is counting on everyone else

Schools mostly count on parents: there are subjects, there are grades, and family life is “something you learn at home”. Some parents count on the school, or on the child figuring it out eventually. Others would like to talk about it but have nothing to pass on: their own experience of family was complicated, or nobody ever taught them either. I don't see any ill will here. It's more that each side assumes this is someone else's job.

And right when it matters, parents are heard the least

From around thirteen, a person starts separating from their family and looking for an identity outside of it. That's a fairly normal part of growing up. The awkward part is that this is exactly when a parent's word carries the least weight. A teenager usually needs a third person: someone older, from outside the family, whom they trust and whose life they'd like to echo in some way.

Where the time actually goes

Look at where teenagers and young adults spend their time outside the family. School, then university, maybe a couple of clubs, gaming with the guys, hanging out with friends, then work. People say there's nothing wrong with that — that's what a living life is supposed to look like. But think about what you're taught along the way. Subjects, skills, eventually a profession. The rest of the time usually goes to rest and fun, which is needed too — it just doesn't replace a serious conversation about yourself and about other people.

What comes out of it

The picture looks roughly like this. Everything to do with knowledge and profession is provided institutionally: school, university, courses, internships, certificates, state standards. Everything to do with the ability to sense another person and hold your own boundaries is left to chance — to the family, which hardly anyone helps, and to random encounters. And then we're surprised that a twenty-five-year-old with two degrees doesn't know how to live with someone close and doesn't understand who they are.

A few numbers, so this isn't just an impression

As I see it, this has little to do with individual bad families or bad schools. It's more how responsibility is currently divided. And to talk about it concretely, we'll need two things: names for the things that aren't being taught, and some order among them. That's the language I give in the next part: my own view, in which human development rests on three distinct capacities, and the order between them is not arbitrary.

2. Three capacities, and why the order isn't arbitrary

So I needed names for things that aren't taught anywhere, and some order among them.

One of the fruits of my life in Korea and Japan, and of roughly a decade of working with Koreans and Japanese, is my own philosophical view of upbringing. It describes human development through three different kinds of upbringing. Below I lay it out the way it took shape for me, not the way that would be most convenient to explain.

The first stage of upbringing: the heart (shimjeong)

I prefer the modern interpretation of the term. Shimjeong is the inner impulse to find joy through giving love. And at the same time, it is the core of a person's character.

So I'd put the goal of raising shimjeong like this: to raise a person who loves other people and all of creation with a higher purpose. In other words, it's raising a person of character, whose intellect, emotion and will are developed in balance and rest on shimjeong, which makes it possible to give love.

Shimjeong is meant to develop first in the family, as the first school. First we learn to receive our parents' love and care well, developing a child's heart. Then we learn to share with our brothers and sisters, and to resolve conflicts. Later we create our own family, where we learn to share everything equally as husband or wife. And finally we bring children into the world, through whom we learn to give unconditionally for years. That's how the cycle of raising shimjeong closes, and a heart is considered full and developed when a person has gone through all four.

The second stage of upbringing: norms and rules

Love on its own doesn't tell you exactly how to behave with your father, your younger sister, your wife, your own child. More often than not, a person doesn't invent these ways from scratch — they inherit them, and they inherit them from an order that is older than they are.

That's why I understand teaching norms as something broader than teaching manners. It's learning how to behave in those same four positions: what it means to be a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, a husband or a wife, a father or a mother. This also includes something that, unfortunately, is taboo to talk about today: restraint, and taking sexual relationships seriously.

It follows that if norms and rules are raised well in the family, a worthy citizen of one's country and of the world is being raised at the same time.

And one more very important nuance. Teaching norms must go hand in hand with raising shimjeong. If there is no love in the rules, they become formalistic and legalistic. A person follows the rules only while someone is watching. But love without norms is no better. It breeds blind love, and children tend to stop respecting that kind of love rather than value it, and they grow up spoiled. And if there are many norms and little love, a person simply rebels against whoever brought those norms. So norms are passed on in an atmosphere of love, not separately from it.

The third stage of upbringing: dominion, or raising the genius

And only after that comes learning how to deal with the natural world. At this stage we gain professional and technical knowledge, skills, mastery. This covers everything we've come to consider the main thing, and what almost all our time in education goes into: school, university, profession, career, competencies, portfolio.

In effect, it's the development of the genius. Because everyone has the seed of a genius: the ability to create is given at birth as a possibility, and individuality determines what kind of genius a person will become — musical, mathematical, political, culinary.

And one last thing worth adding here. The raising of dominion has to stand on the first two stages. If shimjeong and norms are weakly developed, creativity doesn't disappear, but it doesn't fully unfold either: the person has no one to create for and no boundaries to create within. In the end they do what they were commissioned to do, and exactly as well as they're paid to do it. And how can a child develop their creativity in any field when the parents fight at home, so the child is starved of love and gradually loses the will to live?

What each capacity gives

I consider the order of this list important in itself: to me it looks like a chain of causes and effects.

Later in the lecture we'll look at this in practice, so I'm not asking you to take this order on faith. I'll test it against what can be seen both in dry data and in life.

That's why I consider the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” a poor one. It looks for identity in the third capacity, the capacity of the genius, whereas identity, by all appearances, begins with the first. What that “by all appearances” rests on, I go through in the following parts.

3. The diagnosis: we only develop the third capacity

Now let me boil everything down to a single thesis, which we'll test together from here on:

No, this isn't a complaint against particular parents or particular schools, and it isn't nostalgia for a past that was supposedly better. It's more a question of where our efforts go today. Almost everything we call education works for the third stage.

But let's not stop at the philosophical side of this question — let's look at research data, mostly from Europe. I present the figures as they were published. Including the ones that don't help my argument.

The next two parts are two different ways of testing this thesis. First we'll look at how young people are raised today, and then at what happens to people whose third stage is developed to the limit.

4. Evidence one: we develop the third capacity well, but people have nothing to lean on

Young people can't choose a career — and it's getting worse

Notice the shape of this crisis. Some older people argue that young people today simply don't want to make an effort and don't want to work. But the researchers above say that young people can't make up their minds — and this at a time when there is more information about careers than ever before.

On the first kind of upbringing — raising shimjeong, which happens in the family

Translated into the language of the three stages of upbringing, “easy to talk to Dad” is an indicator of whether the home has living relationships in which love is actually passed on. For almost three in ten European adolescents, there is no such channel with their father. And shimjeong develops only in relationships. Love from a distance isn't enough; providing materially is good, but it doesn't make relationships much closer either — let alone sending a child to a good kindergarten.

The second stage of upbringing, which happens at school

Social and emotional skills decline exactly when they should be growing

If you map this onto the three stages of upbringing, you could say that responsibility belongs to norms and rules, trust and tolerance derive from shimjeong, and curiosity and creativity are fuel for dominion. And according to the study, everything is falling at once. These data don't prove that it's falling because of the first two stages — they only show that it all falls together.

Consequences we can already see

I'm not claiming that loneliness and depression among young people are caused solely by a lack of raising shimjeong — these are multifactorial phenomena. But please notice that in none of these studies do people say they lack knowledge, skills, or access to education or technology. What they lack is connection, and the sense that someone needs you for who you are, not for your function.

Schools would like to, but don't know how

5. Evidence two: what happens to the genius without the first two capacities

If the order of the three capacities really matters, it can be tested by contradiction: find people whose third capacity is developed to the limit of human ability, and look at what happens to the first two.

Such a group exists: scientists. They have gone through years of selection precisely for knowledge and intellectual mastery. And science, like few other fields, has clear rules: don't make up data, don't massage results, credit other people's ideas. So if the third capacity can develop on its own, without shimjeong and norms, this is where we should see people who genuinely advance science for the good of humanity and follow the accepted norms and rules.

Scientists admit to faking data — and say even more about their colleagues

The more carefully you measure, the worse it looks

Scientists know it's wrong, and do it anyway

A record number of retracted papers

It isn't about knowledge

I'm not claiming that all of science is rotten — it remains the best method we have for testing claims about the world. Confession rates are sensitive to wording and survey method, some “questionable practices” are more carelessness and poor methodological culture than ill intent, and comparing countries and disciplines is difficult. But even on the most cautious reading, the conclusion stands: these people don't lack knowledge, because knowledge is exactly what puts them at the top of the global distribution. What they lack is what should come before knowledge.

Research integrity researchers themselves point to the main factor: publication pressure. Translated into the language of the three stages of upbringing, the system rewards the third stage well (number of papers, citations, grants) and barely rewards the second: accuracy, admitting failure, retracting your own mistake. And people respond to incentives quite rationally.

Except that responding to incentives and having nothing above them is precisely the description of a person with nothing higher than incentives. But if shimjeong is developed — if the very impulse to love specific people lives inside you (the reader of your paper, the doctor who will prescribe treatment based on it, the patient who will receive that treatment) — then faking data stops being merely risky. It becomes almost unthinkable, roughly the way it's unthinkable for most parents to hit their own child for a bonus.

So a strong third stage on top of an undeveloped first one produces a person who knows how to do untruth professionally. That's the second half of the evidence: dominion on its own saves no one if there's no shimjeong and no norms beneath it.

6. How did we get here? An unnoticed glitch in the very idea of equality

It remains to explain why we're raising this question now. Why societies that are objectively richer, better educated and safer than any before them fail the first two stages of upbringing so systematically.

My working hypothesis concerns how the very concept of equality has changed.

A person always holds two positions at once

A head of department is a subject for their team and, at the same time, an object for their own boss. A father is a subject for his child, but remains a son to his own parents. A teacher leads a class and keeps learning themselves. Notice that this isn't a hierarchy in which someone humiliates someone else — it's simply a structure. There is no position from which you only give and never receive.

I call this the state of an interconnected body, in which awareness of yourself as an object comes first. First you receive (language, love, a body, knowledge), and only then do you give. A person who has forgotten that they are first of all an object before something higher, and only secondly someone who guides others, becomes a dictator — and the size of the position changes nothing here.

How equality before God became equality before the law

With secularisation, the formula survived, but its foundation didn't. “Equal before God” became “equal before the law”. In effect, an equality of objects (receivers) turned into an equality of subjects (people who initiate and give).

The problem is that subject-to-subject relationships easily become antagonistic: if nobody is an object for anybody, there's no particular reason to yield. As long as a religious and cultural memory of a shared “higher” remained, this barely showed. Once that memory faded, everything came to the surface.

Why “what do you want to be?” sounds the way it does

That's exactly why the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” sounds the way it does today. It's a question of pure subject consciousness. It assumes that identity is something you assign to yourself, or discover in yourself and assert by yourself, competing with other equally self-appointed subjects.

I'd put it with a line from one of my favourite films, Dune:

Identity works this way because it rests on relationships. You are someone's son or daughter, someone's friend, someone's partner, someone's support. Such positions aren't picked from a catalogue — you accept them, and then you carry them. So you could say that a person who has no accepted position at all, only self-appointed ones, is looking for themselves where people usually don't find themselves.

7. The reversal

What we end up with

If we briefly gather everything we've seen, today's reality looks roughly like this:

1. We develop abilities and knowledge from childhood
2. We choose a profession
3. We hope the profession will give us an identity
4. No identity → we change profession → back to step 3
5. Norms, decency and meaning get postponed to “someday”, if there's time left

What happens if we simply change the order and add the development of shimjeong, norms and rules

1. Shimjeong. First, through our different positions in the family and in society, we develop the inner impulse to seek joy through love, which is where love itself comes from. It develops in the family, in the four realms of the heart, in living relationships
2. Norms. In parallel, we learn to respect the hierarchy in the family and in society and build norms of behaviour. But we take the purpose from step 1 — inside an atmosphere of love, not instead of it
3. Profession. We naturally look for how exactly I can serve people as no one else can, because only I have this ability in this form.

In this scheme, a profession answers the question “who needs me, and what exactly can I do for them?”, not the question “who am I?”. The answer to that one — identity — comes from the first stage, and the profession becomes its instrument.

In this situation, the need for the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” naturally disappears.

Gen Z already wants to serve — and it can even be measured

And what about Europe?

It turns out the problem lies not so much in the work itself as in what a person brings to it. If shimjeong is undeveloped, there's no inner impulse to give, and then people choose a profession in order to become somebody, not in order to be needed by somebody. And with that approach, by all appearances, even useful work doesn't give meaning.

So you could say that meaning isn't a pleasant add-on to a career. Judging by these data, it's one of the strongest known predictors of whether you'll be able to sustain that career at all.

8. What to do about it in practice

I'm not giving step-by-step instructions here — that's the job of the next lectures. But here are three things you can start today.

1. Change the question you ask yourself

Instead of “what do I want to be?” — three others:

• Whom do I love so much that their joy becomes mine? Not “which problem outrages me” (that's an opinion), but specific people whose joy and pain genuinely reach you
• How do I behave in each of my positions — as a son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, partner — and do I keep behaving according to that position when no one is watching? If in some position you don't know what's expected of you, or you keep to it only in public, that's exactly where your second stage is sagging
• What can I do that the people whose pain I feel actually need? And only here does profession come in, or other skills.

The order is what matters: first shimjeong, then norms and rules, and only then skills.

2. Check whether you have at least one accepted, not self-appointed, position

Where are you not because you chose it, but because someone needs you? Son, daughter, brother, sister, partner, father, mother, the friend people call at three in the morning. If all your identities are self-appointed (I'm a creator, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm such-and-such personality type according to a test), there's nothing to lean on. These roles aren't bad in themselves — they all just grow out of the third stage.

3. Run a one-line check whenever you make a career decision

Before agreeing to a job, a project, a commission: who exactly benefits if I do this well — and can I name that person? If you can't, then it's precisely your third stage at work, with no support from the first two. And in Part 2 we saw that without shimjeong, dominion almost automatically slides into exploitation.

Questions for reflection

1. Remember the last time you felt genuinely joyful because someone specific was better off thanks to you. How long ago was it? What does that say about your shimjeong — your first stage? This isn't a reproach, just a measurement.
2. Name one of your positions (son or daughter, brother or sister, friend, partner) and how you behave in it even when no one is watching. Where did that come from in you: did you reason your way to it, or did you pick it up from a specific person?
3. If your profession disappeared as a thing tomorrow, who would you be? Try to answer without naming a single skill — that is, without leaning on the third stage. Then see whether your answer turned out to be about relationships.
4. Recall the data on scientists: 51.3% frequently engage in questionable practices, 4.3% admit to fabrication. What would hold you back in their place, under the same pressure? Fear of getting caught, a rule you know, or specific people you would let down? Notice that only the last one holds when nobody is checking.
5. Who would notice if you stopped doing your job well? If the only name on the list is your manager, you're most likely working for a grade, not for people. And this question is less about how your job is set up than about whom you see behind it.

What's next: the course

This was the introductory lecture — a map of the territory. Next come lectures that turn the map into working tools. It's best to read them in order: each one uses the vocabulary of the one before.

The foundation: three lectures, one arc. How life is designed to work. Why we break what we love. How what's broken gets restored — and by what rules.

Then, in-depth lectures. Raising the heart in a real family, without metaphors. Norms that don't kill love. Work as service: what it looks like in a real career, not on a poster. Plus a thinking toolkit: how to see systems, how to tell causes from coincidences, how to recognise your own biases, how to argue productively, how groups build trust.

Each lecture is a 25–40 minute read, with sources, with “Don't take my word for it” boxes, no paywall and no mandatory email.

Subscribe to the next lectures — one email per lecture, nothing else.

What's next: live meetings

And separately — the part that doesn't work through text.

The first capacity isn't developed by reading — which is inconvenient for a course made of texts. Shimjeong develops only in relationships with specific people, in the four realms, in real time. A lecture will give you language to describe it, and not one gram of the capacity itself.

That's why, alongside the course, I'm organising live meetings: small groups, working through these ideas on participants' own situations, no stage and no guru. The format is a conversation, not a talk. The ideas from the course get tested there on real lives, including mine.

If you've read this lecture and something resonated somewhere inside — that's exactly where it makes sense to continue.

Sign up for the next meeting — online and offline, small groups, free of charge.

What this work is, and what it isn't

Sources