Growing up, Drifting away, and Becoming People we Never Expected
Finding Meaning in the Lives We Never Lived and The Strange Evolution of our own Human Lives
I wanted to become an astronaut once. Today I have a different life entirely. I don't regret it, but sometimes I wonder about the person I never became. Maybe all of us carry a few forgotten lives within us.
The People We Slowly Become
I can’t help but wonder whether growing up is simply the process of becoming someone we never imagined. Not exactly better or necessarily worse. Just… different. Perhaps the stranger part is that we barely notice it as it happens.
How do so much of us just change?
I mean, there was a time when I could not even think about staying away from my parents. I was a child who wanted them in the next room, always. Look at me now. I barely see them once a month. How does that much change happen without anyone warning you about it first?
We all had so many other dreams that ultimately turned to dust. We all had high hopes of becoming so much more than we can even imagine now.
The Life We Chose and the Life We Didn't
For me, these sudden deep thoughts about change and forgotten dreams started at ‘The Astronaut I never became’. I once had a huge dream of becoming an astronaut. Somehow, with time, I realised both the difficulty of that path and my own inability to deal with such complex science and the sheer pressure of research that comes with it. Instead, I went for the easier way. The trendy engineering degree that everyone around me seemed to be choosing. To me, it seemed like the easier and more practical route. Now, I wonder what that other life would have felt like.
I actually did have an offer letter from a good university for pure science, but I ended up giving it up for a good institute of technology instead. Therefore, it is truly difficult not to wonder what would have happened if I had done the braver thing. Well, I was never that good at science, if I am honest. And as I later found out, I was not exceptional at engineering either.
As of now, I have a decent job, something I had expected engineering would eventually give me. But then again, on some dark, sleepless nights, the mind goes wandering back to it anyway. What if?
Maybe it would have been better. Maybe not. But it is more of a wandering than a guilt, if that makes any sense. I don’t completely understand it. Sometimes a random reel about outer space on Instagram is enough to remind me of that old dream, and for a moment, the child who wanted to become an astronaut comes back and sits with me for a while.
Changing Dreams and Reality
It is not just that one thing. There is still so much more. Even if we keep aside the childhood dream job, there are still other wishes we end up giving up. I also dreamt of exploring and visiting every part of the world. Sadly, the dream to travel the world full-time is simply not financially possible for most people who come from a middle-class household. I believe everyone carries something like this inside them. A version of the same ache, just wearing a different name. A lot of it fades because life asks something different from us.
There are also things that appeared out of nowhere, dreams that were never there in childhood at all. I never thought about writing when I was young. But somehow it became something I actually wanted to try as I grew into an adult. Probably because I only started reading books and novels at a later age than most people do. Even this, I do not fully know how that happened. One thing gives birth to another, somehow, in ways you only notice long after it has already happened.
I think this is true for everyone, in one form or another. Some dreams get replaced. Some get killed outright. Some new ones are born entirely without warning.
The People We Slowly Grow Away From
It is not just about dreams. It is also about the people with whom we shared our lives, the friends we spent every single afternoon with, who we now meet once in a blue moon.
It is true that meeting old friends is still a lovely experience. But there is always that strange undercurrent beneath it, the realisation of just how much everyone has become someone else while you were not looking. Just slowly, the way a face changes so gradually in the mirror that you never catch the exact moment it happened.
Even our political and societal views change. A person who once cared nothing for politics can go on to dedicate their whole lives to it. People whom we could never imagine leading even a small team eventually end up leading entire companies. So much becomes better with time. And yet so much is sadly left behind, forgotten, misplaced somewhere in the years between who we were and who we are now.
Life strangely reshapes all of us while we are busy living it.
Do Our Old Dreams Ever Really Disappear?
Another question that I often wonder is, Where do the Forgotten Dreams Actually Go?
If we look closely, most of those forgotten dreams do not fully disappear. They just keep living in a smaller, auxiliary kind of way.
For me, the dream of becoming an astronaut slowly became a fondness for science fiction instead. I will probably never travel among the stars. But I still get to visit them, in books, in shows, in whatever version of that dream still fits inside an ordinary life. I think, even through all that change, we still get to keep some of the feeling from those lost periods, even if the shape of it looks completely different now.
Perhaps many dreams survive like that. They simply find another form.
Adulthood Reflections Against Memories of Childhood
There is something else that changes, too. Our Innocence.
It is not only dreams and people that go missing. Our naivety goes with them, one small portion at a time.
As a child, I genuinely believed things like alcohol or smoking were something I would never do. Years down the line, somehow, the thought shifts into something else entirely — what’s the harm in doing this once a quarter? Everyone does it at the office party, so why not me?
The same thing happens to honesty. As a child, lying felt like something close to unforgivable. As an adult, somehow, it often becomes: what’s the harm in telling my boss a small lie to get my leave approved? These things feel realistic enough to justify once in a while, mostly because everyone else seems to be doing them too, and that seems to make it lighter somehow, even when it probably is not.
I do not think this happens because we become worse people. I think it happens because life turns out to be far messier than childhood ever prepared us for, and somewhere along the way, we start making the same small trades everyone else around us has already made.
Little by little, our certainty softens. The world slowly teaches us that reality is rarely as simple. While teaching us, it kills the certainty we had in our own innocence.
Philosophy of Identity and Change
Another question worth asking is whether we are still somehow the same person?
There is an old idea, first written about by the Greek historian Plutarch nearly two thousand years ago, about a ship that belonged to the hero Theseus. Over many years, every single plank of the ship was replaced, one at a time, until not one original piece of wood remained. The question Plutarch asked was simple: Is it still the same ship? I think about that a lot, especially now. The person who wanted to be an astronaut, the one who still believed lying was unforgivable, the one writing this right now. None of us are built from the same original planks anymore. And yet, somehow, we are still called by the same name.
It is genuinely so difficult to grasp how everyone and everything changes this much, this constantly, without ever even asking our permission, while we still carry the same mind and soul throughout our lives.
The Many Versions of Ourselves
A lot of that change comes from outside interference. Exposure, a better understanding of your own abilities, and often just sudden, innate realisations that arrive with the brutal passage of time. There is still so much to understand and explore about ourselves, let alone anyone else’s.
It really is amazing, and also a little sad, how change is so necessary for growth, and yet so responsible for losing and forgetting so much of who we used to be, almost without us ever noticing it happen.
Maybe that is the price of becoming an adult. We gain experience, but we lose certainty. We gain a kind of wisdom, but we lose the innocence that used to make things feel so safe.
Maybe growing up was never about becoming a completely different person after all.
Maybe it is just learning to carry every version of ourselves at the same time. Perhaps it is simply learning to carry the hopeful child, the uncertain teenager, and the imperfect adult, all at the same time.
That might be enough or maybe not. Strange lives we human lives. Don’t we?
Thank you very much for your time, and really hope you have it better than me.
Regards, D Roy