The Life We Were Trained For

When people ask young people what they want to do with their life, they usually mean what will your career be.

Then we are told to train toward that career.

We are sent to school. We are taught to sit still, follow instructions, ask permission, compete for marks, and prepare ourselves for work. Then we leave school and enter a larger version of the same structure.

And it seems normal.

The next phase is to hold down a job. It does not really matter what the job is, because you have to make money. You pay bills. You get a mortgage or prepare to rent forever. You try to get promoted. You create retirement plans and hope that after decades of compliance, you might have enough time left to live a little.

This is our life script in a nutshell.

The question I am asking is simple: are schools mainly designed to create good thinkers, or do they also train young people to become obedient workers?

Schools may give us skills for work, but how often do they teach budgeting, independent judgement, self-direction, or the ability to make decisions without constantly seeking permission?

I am not the first person to wonder about this. Paul Goodman made a similar argument in Compulsory Miseducation, where he criticised schools for preparing young people to fit into society as it is, rather than helping them question what society could be.

I wish I could hold some moral high ground here and say I did question society from a young age. I’m 58 years old. I’ve lived inside that system. I worked, chased stability, was divorced and lost almost everything. I remarried, struggled, rebuilt, then spent ten years caring for my ageing parents until they died.

Those things delayed me. They shaped me. They narrowed my choices.

What changed my perception was not raging against the system. It was travel and homeschooling.

I spent one year travelling the world. That changes you. It makes you question why work matters so much.

Homeschooling my kids gave me pause. It made me seriously question why we send children into a system many of us disliked, only to have them repeat the same process.

I think many of us question this at times, then carry on anyway. I sent my kids to school for years and removing them was not an act of defiance, it was to travel for a while.

When they thrived and learned more and faster outside of school, it forced me to consider not sending them back.

This is not an attack on people who send kids to school, who work, pay bills, raise children, buy homes, or do what they must to survive. Most of us are not choosing freely from a blank page. We are making decisions inside systems that reward obedience, punish risk, and call it responsibility.

E. F. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, asked us to imagine economics as if people mattered. That question still matters, because much of modern life seems built around the needs of systems first: schools, employers, banks, governments, markets, and growth. Human beings are then expected to fit themselves around those demands.

Surely society should do better than that.

But what if life is not meant to be arranged that way?

What if work, money, education, and security are not the final purpose of being alive, but tools that should serve something deeper?

I don’t want my sons to inherit the same script without questioning it. I don’t want them to believe their life is something handed down by schools, employers, banks, governments, algorithms, or frightened adults who forgot they had choices.

I want them to ask better questions earlier than I did.

What does a good life look like?

Who benefits from the version of life we are told to chase?

What are we giving away in exchange for comfort, approval, and security?

And what would it mean to live deliberately, even if we can only begin with small steps?

That is where this begins.

Not with a revolution. Not with certainty. Not with pretending I’ve escaped the system completely.

But with a question.

What kind of life are we being trained for?

And is it the life we actually want?