When we were children, we all had an answer to the question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A doctor, an engineer, a pilot, maybe a lawyer or a teacher. Something with a name, an office and a certain dignity attached to it.

We did not imagine that one day, the question would become harder. We did not imagine that growing up would mean graduating into an economy where the first challenge was not choosing a career but finding a job.

For many young Kenyans, university was supposed to be the bridge between who they were and who they wanted to become. You studied for four years, sometimes five, believing that on the other side, there would be a place for the knowledge you had spent years acquiring. Instead, you graduated into silence. Applications disappeared into inboxes. Interviews came and went. Internships demanded experience. Entry-level jobs wanted two years of experience for someone who had freshly graduated. Eventually, you stopped asking for the job you studied for and started asking for any job at all.

And that is where the story changes.

Because unemployment does not only take away a salary. It can quietly take away a direction. You begin by applying for anything. A sales job because they are hiring. Customer service because you are good with people. A business development role because the description says graduate and you have a degree.

You tell yourself it is temporary. Just something to keep you busy. Something to put on the CV. Something to help with rent while you wait for the real opportunity. But Kenya has a peculiar way of turning temporary things into careers.

A year becomes three. Three becomes five. You become good at the thing you took because you could not find the thing you wanted. You learn how to sell, negotiate, follow up, manage clients, hit targets and write reports. You become dependable. Your employer gives you a title. Your salary increases. You move from one company to another and slowly, almost without noticing, you become someone you never planned to become.

This is the tragedy that rarely gets discussed when we talk about unemployment. We talk about the young person who cannot find a job, but less often about what happens when they finally find one. Because sometimes the first job does not just rescue you from unemployment; it sends you in a completely different direction.

Very few people in Kenya today are doing exactly what they studied in campus. Many are not even remotely close.

The engineer becomes a salesperson. The economics graduate works in customer experience. The journalist enters communications. The microbiologist moves into banking. The lawyer sells insurance. The person who wanted to work in development ends up in finance. The person who studied something they genuinely loved spends 10 years becoming excellent at something else.

And nobody can really blame them because well, bills. There was rent, parents who needed help and younger siblings who needed school fees. There was the pressure to stop being a graduate and start being an adult. At some point, the question stopped being what you wanted to do with your life to who was willing to pay you. So you took the money, then changing direction became harder.

Experience, which is supposed to make your life easier, can become a trap. At 32, you may be a manager, but you cannot simply walk into an internship and start again. You have years of experience but not in the field you actually want. And you cannot easily take the salary you could survive on at 22.

At 22, Sh10,000 could feel like a beginning. At 32, there is rent, transport, family, loans, food and responsibilities. You cannot tell yourself to follow your passion when following it might mean losing the income that keeps several other people standing.

So you stay.

You tell yourself you will leave when things settle down, or when you have saved enough, or when the right opportunity comes, or even when you have time to study. But life rarely settles down. There is always another bill, another responsibility and endless reasons to wait. Except the longer you stay, the more expensive starting over becomes.

You become senior in a career you never intended to build.

That is when the grief can become difficult to explain. Because from the outside, you are doing well. You have a job. You have experience. Perhaps you have a respectable title and a salary that looks good on paper. People congratulate you for your progress.

But inside, you sometimes wonder what happened to the person you thought you would become. You are not necessarily unhappy every day — that would be easier to understand — you are simply aware that you have become very good at something that does not necessarily feel like yours.

You can be employed and still be grieving a career you never got. Perhaps that is the quiet tragedy of our generation. It is not that we have no ambition. We simply discovered that ambition is easier to protect when you can afford to survive.

We grew up being asked what we wanted to become, then we became whatever was hiring.