The larger problem is that, like most jobs, there is a reality about work that is slightly misrepresented in the mind of a starry-eyed third-grader. Let's call this one of the lessons saved for adulthood. Basically, what happens is that your first thought about a job might be the best part about the job, and then it's a matter of time before you learn about the other 99% of the work. If we use the example of when I was a third-grader, I might have said I wanted to be a professional athlete, but that answer was ignorant of the following - endless public scrutiny, road trips to places like Manchester or Qatar, missed holidays and milestones, long game days waiting to go to the stadium, the ever-present threat of injury, a constant diligence about what to eat or drink, and so on. It's not so much that I couldn't have handled any of this as a professional, it's just that I didn't think about it when I answered "what do you want to be when you grow up?" as a ten-year old.
So kid, do you want to be an astronaut? Imagine blasting off to space for a mission. You battle through the discomfort of liftoff, breaking through the g-forces or whatever, and swallow away the anxiety of having a billion five-alarm fires strapped to back of your spaceship as your main source of propulsion. Finally, you get the signal to sit back, and look around - it's space! So you look left, and there it is, God's little wonder in blue and green, then you look right... and there's your co-worker for the next few weeks, let's call him Bobby the astronaut, with one finger coming out of his nose... and now it's drifting... it's aiming... his lips part... I guess it's snack time?
I can barely tolerate riding from one subway stop to the next alongside a passenger whose headphones are just a tad bit too loud. How's a round trip to Neil Armstrong's flag going to go alongside Booger Bobby, whose nose grows its own lunch? And it's only the third minute of the trip - what other weird "personality quirks" are you going to discover on the way? Is Bobby going to breathe on your visor, too, until he can draw funny pictures on your fog? That's the thing they don't tell you about work - you can have some kind of notion about a dream job, but for the most a job is about the whole mess of other details where you slowly become frustrated by your lack of agency. What are you going to do when you realize your new colleague is an industrial-strength weirdo? Or a racist? Or just incompetent? Say what you want, but I know the answer - you aren't going to do anything about it. I guess this is a problem that can happen anywhere, but at least I won't be locked inside Apollo 53 when it happens to me.
