What Have you Become?

A certain episode from the late night, often irreverent satire show, Saturday Night Live stands out in my mind. I can’t quite remember the episode number but it was hosted by Christoph Waltz, following his stellar performance in Django unchained. Many who have watched Inglourious Basterds will remember Waltz when he played a cold calculating Nazi officer who compared Jews to rats.

Top, Bill Hader weeping uncontrollably when faced with his "'before and after'', bottom Waltz tries to dance

The skit in question was a game show entitled “what have you become?’’ in which Waltz played a game master who had three seemingly ordinary contestants drawn from everyday jobs. The ‘’game show’’ involved asking the contestants about their lives and their jobs, to which they would reply that they were very happy with their lives. Suddenly some solemn music would play and Waltz would ask in a grim tone “what have you become?’’.

The contestant to whom the question was addressed would immediately go into a heart-wrenching melancholic lament of what they had actually dreamed of becoming, but ended up compromising their dream by becoming something else. The same question is put to all of them with some startling results of people’s forgotten aspirations, before the same question is put to Waltz who reveals that he had always wanted to be a dancer and goes about skipping like a ballerina.

What got me thinking was just how poignant the question “what have you become” is to many of us that are oscillating between spectacular highs and depressing lows on account of finding ourselves in the wrong vocation. Our desperation for societal coherence ending up being our undoing.

The choice of one’s job is normally a result of different factors, ranging from social conditioning, personal preference to most importantly availability. Unfortunately, availability does not mean suitability. Suitability is a whole different animal and if that were the only criteria, few of us would be in the jobs we have.

But how do we find ourselves in this place in the first place. Waking every morning, trudging to spend a good part of our days which will obviously translate into years, torturing ourselves. Is it not time we like the Zohan, decide to break off the chains that have been binding us, and declare that “from today onwards, my life has begun. I am done with existing, I want to live’’. After all in the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘’it’s better to be wrong in your own way than be right in somebody else’s’’.

You see it is not as simple as that. Most of us are daunted by the alternative to head-strongly pursuing your dream vocation. As a friend, Lombe once told me, the alternative isn't rosy either. It could mean years sometimes even a lifetime of doing nothing, a lifetime of trying, a lifetime of struggle and failure-while bills are piling and one is not getting any younger. And so many of us take the easy way out, after all jobs are hard to come by. ‘’Better I have a job now, then slowly work my way towards that which my heart desires, who knows maybe in time I may even learn to love it” we reason, only to realise later than one wrong career step can and does often take a hundred to rectify.

I still recall my first job immediately I left the University of Zambia. It was with one of the biggest accounting and professional services firms in the world. Back then I remember privately expressing some doubts about my suitability for the job, but encouraged by relatives and the fearful alternative of indolence, I accepted it, promising myself to do my best and grow into loving it. However as soon as the initial excitement had ebbed away, confronted by what I termed as “the rigidity of accounting” I found myself all at sea. Waking up to go for work became as daunting as facing a dentist appointment. My work performance became mediocre, I was desperately looking for a way out, which I did find although on closer examination it seems I jumped from the frying pan into the fire (but that’s a story for another day).

I am not the only one. There are many of us.  

So we trudge on, in our suits speaking polished English. Sometimes we manage to put a genuine smile on our faces, forget almost entirely about our calling… well till…till some innocent whisper in the corridor, a programme on TV or an article in the newspaper brings to remembrance all that we thought we had gotten over. In such times we find ourselves shaking like a leaf, scared of what we have become, willing the thoughts away. Till again nature conspires to ask us, “what have you become?