Unlearning

Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, Woman and Child, c. 1900. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

When I first moved to Spain seventeen years ago, I taught English. I gave private lessons to kids, and I remember asking them what they wanted to be when they grew up. Many of them answered with a word I wasn’t familiar with: funcionario.

I tried to get a translation. Functionary? Civil servant? Government employee? None of them fit the proud and confident way they declared it.

Nearly two decades later, the best translation I can come up with isn’t literal at all. Funcionario doesn’t really describe a job. It describes a relationship to life. It’s someone who values safety. Someone who builds a life where their job is only a part of it. A life where you spend your hours with the expectation of a livable salary and time off that actually belongs to you.

That idea didn’t make sense to me then. In fact, it bothered me.

I came from a place where people told you that you could grow up to be anything. And I believed that for a long time. I was in my late teens when a logical thought crossed my mind: I am not tall enough to be a model or a basketball player, and I’m done growing—which means I can’t be anything I want to be.

I remember the moment because it was jarring. Not devastating—just confusing. Like, hang on a second. This isn’t quite right. They’ve been lying to us.

I brushed it off. Physical limitations were surely exceptions. The promise mostly held.

Then I graduated from college in 2009.

The recession was everywhere. I woke to daily headlines claiming there were no jobs for college grads. I don’t remember feeling panicked, though. Probably because I didn’t have a clear dream job waiting to be denied. I wasn’t standing in line for one specific future with twenty other people ahead of me. I applied for jobs that matched my degree in hospitality and tourism management, mostly at corporate hotel chains. I made it to the final interview stages but didn’t get any offers.

I could have felt frustrated. Instead, I felt relief. At the time, I didn’t know how to say this, but those jobs rewarded values that weren’t mine. I just knew, instinctively, that I was better off without them.

So I did what I normally do when things get uncomfortable. I distracted myself.

I opened an email from a Spanish professor. The email said something like: come to Spain, teach English, get paid a stipend. It sounded great. An exit ramp from a stalled economy and the chance to pause without calling it failure. I signed right up.

I moved to Spain to begin my year as a teacher, something I quickly realized was also wrong for me. But I stayed. And I started learning the nuances of Spanish life. And everywhere I went, I kept hearing that word. Funcionario.

What do you do? I’m a funcionario. What do you want to be? A funcionario. You’re in school? What are you studying? I’m going to be a funcionario.

It drove me crazy.

I was judgmental. I thought: what a strange and sad culture, to not have ambitions beyond this steady, mediocre state. At least say what kind of job, I thought. Post office employee. Administrative assistant. Something specific. But no. It was always just funcionario.

Years later, I see how unfair that was.

By choosing stability, these people built lives that were so much bigger than their work. When you go to a party here in Spain and meet new people, it’s genuinely rare to start with “I’m Lauren, and I am…” followed by your job. I’ve been to birthday parties for our kids, all-day weddings, and leisurely holiday meals, where I have no idea what the person next to me does for work. And if anyone asks, it’s almost always me—I can’t undo the programming.

Here, what you do is part of who you are. It is not who you are.

I didn’t grow up with that distinction.

My father is a successful attorney, defined by his career. My mother, a stay-at-home mom, is defined more by what she does not do than by what she does.

In the currency of suburban American life, her work was invisible in a way my father’s never was.

I absorbed both lessons without realizing it. From my father: your work is who you are. From my mother: if your work isn’t visible, it doesn’t count. From both: you’d better be someone who does things.

I grew up knowing I wanted to be someone important. Someone who did things.

So when I heard funcionario and felt irritation, I wasn’t really responding to a career choice. I was responding to a threat. Here were people who had opted out of the system I’d organized my entire identity around—and they were fine. They had full lives, long Sunday lunches, August vacations, and hobbies that weren’t side hustles. If they were fine, then the game I was playing wasn’t the only game. And if it wasn’t the only game, then everything I’d sacrificed to play it was a choice I’d made, not a requirement I’d met.

That is a deeply uncomfortable realization. It’s much easier to judge.

Ironically, I never had a clear “I want to be X” plan either. What I wanted was almost the opposite of funcionario. I didn’t think much about stability. I wanted challenge. Growth. The possibility—if I’m honest—of fame and fortune.

Now I look around, and I see people struggling to get by, no matter their title. No matter their resume. No matter how polished their LinkedIn profile looks. Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet. People who climbed the ladder they were told to climb, and somewhere near the top, realized it wasn’t actually anchored to anything. There’s no safety net. You’re only one misstep away from a fall with no bottom.

And I think back to all those kids and young adults who told me they wanted to be funcionarios. I think about the judgment I passed so quickly.

I cringe.

The stability provided by a social democracy like the one we have in Spain gives me peace of mind every single day. When people ask why I stay here, or whether I’d ever move back to the U.S., the first reason I give is the stability. Not the weather, not the food, not the lifestyle. The ground. Knowing there will be some kind of social network to catch us if things go wrong.

And they have. Public healthcare when you go into labor at 29 weeks and need 24/7 hospital care to ensure your babies survive. An unemployment system that supports entrepreneurship by allowing you to take your benefits in a lump sum to fund a new venture. This is how Ale and I started our businesses: with 6K of his unemployment and a bus ticket to Madrid.

The mental health that comes from this deep structural stability is hard to overstate. And I value it because I know what it’s like to not have it. To hear my dad say—only half joking—that he’ll die at his desk because we’re always just one health disaster away from ruin. To see my sister work 14-hour days as a single mom to four kids and still not make ends meet.

I still want growth. I still want challenge. I still care deeply about building things and doing meaningful work. I’ve been in Spain for 17 years now, and I haven’t become a funcionario. But I’ve had to unlearn the idea that wanting stability is settling—that the funcionario life is the small life, and that ambition is freedom no matter the sacrifice.

These days, I think about my kids. They’re six and a half. They want to be zookeepers and “jungle rescuers.” They say it with the same confidence those Spanish twelve-year-olds had when they said funcionario—no hesitation, no justification.

But they’re already absorbing things. Every day. From me, from each other, from a world that’s changing faster than I can make sense of it. I’m modeling something for them whether I mean to or not, and I’m doing it while I’m still mid-unlearning myself. That’s the part no one warns you about—you don’t get to finish figuring it out before your kids start watching.

I want to set them up for something, but I’m careful about what. I don’t want to hand them my ambitions or my anxieties. I hope they grow up feeling grounded and capable, in a world where their answer might be YouTuber, or funcionario, or something we don’t have a word for yet.

Soon enough, someone will ask them what they want to be when they grow up. I don’t know what word they’ll choose.

What I hope—what I try to model, even while I’m still figuring it out—is that their answer comes from curiosity and joy, not fear or ego.

I used to think stability flattened ambition, that it dulled the edges of possibility. Now I see it differently. Good scaffolding doesn’t limit what grows—it gives it something to grow from. And I feel grateful that whatever they choose, they’ll have that beneath them.