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Do any of you still hold on to childhood dreams?

Wolfnox

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
Seems like reality crushes it out of you. But, do you still want to experience things you imagined when you were a kid? And do you still believe you will?
 
Never grew out of wanting to be a Youtuber. I've always had few/no friends and I had bad social anxiety for a long time so I want to show the world who I really am. It's less about making money or having a huge fanbase and more about being as important to some stranger as my favorite Youtubers were to me growing up. Or some lonely guy who watches me and thinks "he's like me" for the first time. But I can never convince myself any individual video will pay off, so I never make anything.

There's this guy Umbrella Life, now he's living the dream. Stable fanbase (6k), makes quality content, no corporate ties.
 
I probably didn't understand the world well enough to imagine any realistic future, or goals even. I wanted to be a nurse because I had a nurses bag and cape outfit. But hey I don't like the sight of blood, would never be dextrous enough to do injections or fit canulas etc, this is totally stuff I couldn't do and from an older perspective, didn't want to.

I did want to help others, was always socially aware to some extent. But trying to work in a housing department did not fit for me when young. People ie some staff, were mean to the clients! I hated it.

Then teaching Infants, ditto. Got on a course was academically great but practically not great, scraped through but didn't want to do it any more because some of the staff were mean to the children, and to students!

Worked in hostels for adults, that went better, but didn't want to progress to qualify as a probation officer as I didn't like prisons or courts. I wasn't tough enough I guess.

So I did use my teaching qualification, going into further education to teach adults about basic helping skills. Then later qualified as a counsellor and subsequently taught on counselling courses.

I guess you maybe mean Jesus when you say in your other thread, only one person has saved others? But I feel like many socially minded people help and contribute to saving others, daily. And yes those clients do have to be working on saving themselves, too. But so often they totally are, they just need some support.
 
I was just reminiscing about my childhood. I don't think I had any dreams. I very much lived in the now and went with the flow.
 
When I was around 10, we had a writing project at school named "me after 20 years". All of my classmates wrote about their careers as football superstars, lawyers or flight attendants with bags of money and living the high life (I seriously can't remember a single classmate who did not pick one of those 3 jobs).

I wrote about being unemployed in a small flat inside a block somewhere in the bad suburbs, I owned a 15 year old Suzuki car which was constantly breaking down, and reminiscing about the time when I was a kid, 20 years ago and writing this school project, wishing I could go back to my youth.

In other words, thankfully, I do not.
 
I had a ton of dreams about what I wanted to do and be most got crushed as soon as I entered school but the nagging feeling that I must change the world has never left. I don't want people growing up feeling the same pain I felt so I have held onto that. Now I plan to do a lot of disability activism and I have already changed the practices of some professionals I have worked with. I may have been hurt but nobody else has to be.
 
The things that I have experienced are far better than what I imagined. Watching Jaques Custeau, I was amazed but also thinking that diving was beyond me, yet my last dive trip was to Sulawesi, Indonesia. Or reading John Wesley Powell, and facing many of the rapids he encountered, in a solo Canoe. I took a lesson from my Great Aunt, an early travel agent in Detroit, back when such agents had to know their stuff, and enjoyed visiting and working in countries around the world (the last, Thailand, less than a month ago). [and, I wonder what became of her advertising model of the SS Lurline? I imagined taking it to Hawaii as some latter day Gardner McKay to have my adventures in paradise.The time to Honolulu from San Francisco was 4 1/2 days so most people spent 9 days in Hawaii.
 
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I pretty much feel the same as I ever did. The 11 year old me is still there. I have the same interests and have added a few. As far as dreams I have reached the main ones. I spin off new ones from time to time.
 
Seems like reality crushes it out of you. But, do you still want to experience things you imagined when you were a kid? And do you still believe you will?
Oh heavens no. I don't even hang onto things I dreamt of ten years ago. In fact, it is getting very difficult to hang onto things just from last year. That's what age does to you. If you didn't do it when you could, you can't now.
 
The dream I’ve always had since I was a kid was simply to work with dogs. That dream has come true and far exceeded my expectations, or anyone else’s.

My current dream is to make a difference. It doesn’t matter if it’s animals or people or both. If I make someone smile (or wag their tail) every day then I’m doing my job correctly.
 
The dream I’ve always had since I was a kid was simply to work with dogs. That dream has come true and far exceeded my expectations, or anyone else’s.

My current dream is to make a difference. It doesn’t matter if it’s animals or people or both. If I make someone smile (or wag their tail) every day then I’m doing my job correctly.

From what I've read you seem to have accomplished that dream.
 
When my dad asked me when i was little what i wanted to be, i told him all illusioned i wanted to be a F1 pilot, i was expecting him to buy me a kart to start practicing lol, i was dissapointed and sad he seemed not to care much about that.
 
I wanted to be free, to be loved, to be in nature... then I wanted to have a house... I wanted to change the world for the better... I wanted...

Wanting is tricky for me, because after I get what I want the feeling seems to move into another new goal that now I want. As I am loved, I think I got my main dream. I also bought a house (a dream of mine) that I now want to sell so I can rent... which was what I did not wanted to do some years ago.

I already did things to change the world for the better, drops in the ocean. Now I am not that interested. I wanted to prove myself that I can live on my own. Now I do and Its not that important anymore.

I now dream to have a box truck home so I can travel and life in it, close to nature. But will it be so important for me once I get it? Is following my dreams that important?

I no longer know. I might pay more attention to my present. I have a very nice life to enjoy with my wife and daugther.
 
Astronaut or mountaineer were the ones for me. As a kid these sounded distant and isolated from worldly affairs yet packed with the majesty and wonder you can feel even from far away.
Of course you learn later these are some of the most intense group activities you could go for haha. The romanticism faded a little with that. I still look at the moon the same way though.
 
I now dream to have a box truck home so I can travel and life in it, close to nature. But will it be so important for me once I get it? Is following my dreams that important?
This is where "the journey is the destination" comes from. Life flows in a more intense directed way with a peak on the horizon. A flat landscape can be enjoyed too, but you'll find yourself making peaks before long anyway. Landmarks or small waypoints. It's orientation, because there can be no distance or change without relative points. So with that in mind, if you decide to live in the present, be careful you don't just hold on to the past instead.
 
I didn’t really have childhood dreams. I remember careers that sounded interesting to me when I was a kid though.
Three stand out:

At one point I wanted to be a veterinarian because I liked animals, but then I realized I would mostly be dealing with sick and hurt animals that didn’t want to be touched, and I didn’t want to be a vet anymore.

I also wanted to be an archaeologist and studied archaeology at university for one year. Then I found out very few archaeologists get to make interesting discoveries at dig sites. Most of them do academic research or work at museums. Since that wasn’t what I wanted, I stopped studying archaeology.

At one point I wanted to be a pathologist because finding out the cause of death by studying a corpse seemed pretty cool to me. I went to med school and did a long pathology internship. I did find autopsies fascinating (and great for my understanding of human anatomy) and I enjoyed dissecting tissue, but both of those are a very small part of the pathologist’s job here. They mostly sit in their room looking at slides through the microscope, and sit in a _lot_ of multidisciplinary meetings about the patients whose slides they have studies.
And the pathologists employed by hospitals don’t perform autopsies for any suspect death, there’s a forensic pathologist for that, and there’s very few of those simple because there’s not enough work. So I didn’t opt for that career either.
 
When i was only 10, I remember learning that there was free software you could find on the internet that let you make your own games. Some of these were really simple like Multimedia Fusion, GameMaker Studio... When i found out how simple they were, I had a bunch of different projects going.

One of them was supposed to be something like a cross between a breakout game and a horizontally scrolling shooter. I had the game nearly finished and then my computer gave out on me before i could release it. Another was just a tech demo with a character I had created, he was supposed to be able to kick off walls, power slide, pick up and throw objects, and lots of other stuff but when i got around to programming sliding, he would just ride forward on his back with his foot forward and dragging his weapon behind him.

I have a really interesting story that is about a game i had in production which was a little more recent. I was using a program called Stencyl, and I remember drawing my own player character for the game. He was a little green tater-tot shaped character that i appropriately named "Tater", and i made a little tech demo which included Tater himself, a few enemies that don't even damage you, some collectibles and a sign you could look at.

This was my most worked-on project at the time. Tater was going to have a story that would look something like this in the intro:

"Somewhere in a distant land, there is a nicely-sized little world hidden away from ours, inhabited by a race of creatures known simply as 'Waddlers'. They were named as such because their small sizes only allow so much room for them to walk with their legs. A young Waddler, Tater, was stargazing outside his home one night, when he saw one star that seemed to keep growing bigger and bigger, and bigger... Until eventually it turned out, it wasn't a star, it was a COMET! And it was heading straight for his home...! [PRESS Z] Tater rolled out of the way, and when he collected himself as the comet crashed into the yard, he took a closer look...[PRESS Z] Suddenly, a voice called out from the comet: [PRESS Z] (Dialogue box) 'Ah... Who are you? What is this place?' (Tater's dialogue) 'Uh... My name is Tater... You're on my home world.'

It looks like Tater's mission is clear. Let's get this poor creature back home! (Cookie cutter star pinholes to black, game begins)"

Unfortunately, the tech demo was all i could get out. There was supposed to be a physics engine used, and I had the intention to place a nice reward in the form of a Sandbox Mode on the title screen menu if you beat the game with all four items in your inventory.
 

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