"fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way"

Despite being on the verge of 40, having two degrees of higher learning, and a job with dental insurance (I am finally a bonafide taxpayer) - I continue to try to figure out what to do with my life.

I am wondering what I should do with the next 40 years of my life.

It's a question I devoted a lot of cycles to in my first 40 years and probably my longest running hobby. It's not the pressing and central pastime that it once was. These days I devote more cycles to my love life, beauty tips (that I don't follow), observing the aging process first hand, and lunch. It's become more of a background process.

The current methods by which I wonder are primarily daydreaming and seeing what the front page of Yahoo has to say.

Among the options recently under consideration are:

Rockstar
Folk musician
Captain of industry
Yoga instructor
MBA
Journalist
Accountant
Public intellectual
Opinionater
Account manager
Recycling and waste management specialist
Project manager
Rollerderby queen
Marketing manager
Bag lady
Art student
Cartoonist
Comedian
Bike mechanic
FBI agent
Middle management
Butcher
Behavioral economist
Computational ecologist
Malcolm Gladwell
Urban farmer
Charlie Rose
Avon lady
Sound engineer
Multimedia sensation
Founder of an empire
Genetic counselor
Politician
Grassroots organizer
Activist
Business development executive
Fact checker
Lab rat
Grant writer
Statistician
Leech on the ass of society
Essayist
Ghost writer
Venture capitalist
Small business owner
Academic administrator
Outdoors woman
Curriculum writer
Medicinal Chemist
Playwright
Bureaucrat
Internet start up founder
Jingle writer
Bassist for a punk band
Pet rescuer
Go-Go Dancer
Socialite
Luddite
Pamphleteer


I am qualified to do none (well maybe one) of the above. The rest would require a good amount of effort on my part and perhaps further education. Is it too late? It might be too late. It's probably too late. Dang it.

I have been hiding this list from my parents because every time I bring up the possibility of making a career change, their extreme enthusiasm at the thought that I might find a job that makes me really happy freaks me out.

They get concerned every time they hear me breathe a negative word about the job. Periodically they ask me what I am going to do with the rest of my life. On this visit, I mentioned the genetic counselor option, roughly describing what I thought it would be like. After my Dad had a day to ponder it he came back and said, "I think you should get started on that immediately." He spent the rest of my visit home asking me logistical questions that one would need to work out if one was going to get started immediately. How big of a student loan I would need to take, what program I should apply to, how long the degree program would take, what the average income for that job was, how many years of education and experience would it take to reach that income level, and on and on and on.

I should have gone with Avon lady.