Absurd Interview Question: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

Absurd Interview Answer: “I see myself, in ten years, being the Sales Director of X Company, or the National Events Director of a Brand living in the Hudson Valley, in a refurbished barn, with a dog, commuting to the city.”

If this answer sounds like you, your corporate dreams are killing you.

Has someone scripted your dreams for you?

Is the corporate ladder as high as you can imagine climbing?

Dream big.

Manager.

Don’t try to be original, just try to be good.

Regional.

Go big or go home.

Director.

Nothing is impossible.

National.

Sky’s the limit.

Executive.

Reach for the stars.

Global.

IF THESE ARE YOUR DREAMS, I HAVE ONLY A FEW QUESTIONS FOR YOU:

Are all of the personal achievements you desire for yourself tied to a monetary bonus or some other quantitive, numbered measurement of success? Are you willing to trade in all of your waking hours, all of your dreaming hours, your sweat, your blood, your imagination to help build somebody else’s — or some entities’ — idea of what every day reality is? Are the modern luxury lifestyle magazines selling you happiness, or are they really just keeping you from happiness in it’s purest form?

Can you imagine a world that you build yourself, where you write the rules and run free? What if joy didn’t come purchased in an expensive bottle, or satisfaction from knowing that you’re sitting pretty in an exclusive place where others can’t come inside? Do you realize that when you walk around in your $300 Italian loafers, you’re losing the benefits of pressing the soles of your feet upon the bare earth? Are you disconnected from the true nature of reality because you’re constantly connected to the images everyone wants to be?

Images are deceiving. Digital distractions seem so real — but they aren’t.

The sinister nature of the photograph has been so normalized into society that all we ever do is take and photos and look at them without really living. You can spend your time desperately trying to make your life like that movie, like that Gucci commercial or like that celebrity’s… but more often than not, it’ll leave you bankrupt of any real creativity or sense of self.

OR MAYBE: you will succeed in the dreams America has laid out for you: maybe in five years you will have ascended the organizations already built — no matter how many on the bottom suffer for it. Maybe you’ll be happy with that outcome: a six-figure salary, a 401k, health benefits and not a lot of free time but two weeks paid vacation, designer clothing, laundry and cleaning outsourced and expensive dinners.

Maybe you’ll even travel the world in style and recreate that scene from Hotel Chevalier by Wes Anderson in Paris, with a beautiful girl. It might not be real love, no, not at all — it’ll be tortured and dysfunctional and it might make you feel like shit but GOD DAMN if it won’t all look incredible on your Instagram, right? Maybe you’ll even live in a mansion like Taylor Swift in Blank Space and experience the joy of smashing a car that’s worth $500k.

You might continue the rest of your life on this hedonic treadmill and not think twice about what it all means. Maybe when it’s all over, it will just be like a movie: it fades to black and it didn’t really mean much but superficially, was quite entertaining.

NEWSFLASH: YOUR REAL LIFE DREAMS CAN BE WAY MORE EXCITING!

Listen: every night, anyone with a normal sleep schedule — and inevitably will, even if they don’t remember —dreams.

That is, we all experience another entire state of consciousness at night.

Even more exciting and less known: everyone has the ability to lucid dream, that is, every single person has the ability to control their own dreams.

This means that we all have the ability to exist in and even control a world literally unbound by any laws of physics. We usually ignore our dreams; we’re taught to dismiss them as children. Most people don’t think twice about what they’ve dreamt about. Which is actually kind of insane since we’re just throwing away hours of consciousness. Scientists have proven how what we do in dreams has the ability to bleed into the real world. See: Salvador Dali. Nikola Tesla. Stephen King. Albert Einstein. The list goes on.

When we wake up, when we go to sleep, the possibilities are endless. In dreamland, we can experience and create literally anything our minds can imagine. In waking life, this fact holds true just the same.

So why do we take the dreams dictated to us from television, Hollywood, US Magazine, Monsanto or other existing structures of hierarchy that do not work towards the overall betterment of humanity? Why do we struggle to mold our dreams into cookie cutter versions of what someone else thinks is the best one to have? Why do we accept the moral failings, inefficiencies and other problems of the world with a passive ‘that’s just the way things are’?

I’ve been thinking about that question since I encountered it: where do I see myself in five, ten years?

The word ‘where’ is too limiting — it implies that the world is already mapped out, that progress is atop a pyramid and we need to find our place on it. It’s a loaded question that holds you at gunpoint to stay on a set path.

Better questions to ask yourself: what can you dream up in ten years? Can you realize the true nature of dreams and of the world? What are you dreaming about? Can you be here, right now and exercise control over your own life? How do you see yourself changing the world, even if it’s through one person at a time? How can you bring your dreams into reality?

First things first though: are you even dreaming?