“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” Herman Melville, ‘Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale’
You know how people title essays something cheeky like this, but it’s secretly about whether or not you have a [pseudoscientific thing] that leads to [random coincidence] and then you [have a cool icebreaker for parties]? About four paragraphs down, Malcolm Gladwell kicks in the doors with some blow-your-mind quasi-epiphany like “and that’s why every President is left-handed” or “and that’s why every basketball player is Nigerian?”
Well, I’m not Malcolm Gladwell, and not just because I don’t have six-figure book advances or my name on the Epstein flight logs. I genuinely want to know.
Did you want to be a marine biologist when you grew up?
It felt like everyone when I was a kid, everyone in TV shows and movies and a lot of people in my elementary schools wanted to be a marine biologist. It feels like a fallback job 10-year-old me would’ve had if “starting guard for the Chicago Bulls” didn’t work out. It’s definitely a job I have thought to give to fictional characters when I want them to have a job that’s shorthand for “cool person.”
Not to become a parody of myself, but I think Ashley (Schuyler Fisk’s character from Orange County (2002)) wanted to be a marine biologist. Before you go jumping to conclusions, though, my love for Orange County (2002) did not include a 13-year-old crush on Schuyler Fisk. Fine performer, heard she had a singer-songwriter career. But this isn’t me working out some “first crush” thing. I think everyone in pop culture from like 1990-2006 wanted to be a marine biologist.
Did you want to be a marine biologist? What would you study? It’s between rivers and oceans for me. My love for lakes notwithstanding. I grew up on a river, and rivers are just so cool. Lotta bugs, though. Lotta mosquito bites come with studying rivers, I’d imagine. Swamps, tributaries, the like.
The other big problem with rivers is persistent murkiness. Listen, I really love rivers, but the murkiness would bum me out after a while. That’s part of why lakes got eliminated so quickly.
Anyway, that’s a tangent: turns out I’m not the only person who thinks everyone wanted to be a marine biologist. Here’s a Reddit thread from r/AskHistorians where the OP wonders this same thing. A lot of people in the comments claim their parents were fans of Jacques Cousteau or that Free Willy inspired them. Totally believable! Anecdotal, but believable!
The moderator scolds at r/AskHistorians have some interesting theories, too, like “marine biologist is gender neutral if stereotypes are science = boys and animals = girls,” and “marine biologist sounds like a cool job.” Which, sure and yes, respectively. I’m being reductive, of course, there is some interesting stuff in there. Marine biologists make for great subjects elementary school-level picture books, for instance (which this article is only barely above that reading level). If it’s a book both boys and girls are clamoring to check out, you’re going to order more of them. They also mention “kids thought marine biologists were cool,” which is different from “marine biologist sounds like a cool job,” even though both headers strongly hint at a correlation between “marine biologist” and “cool.”
Let me know if you wanted to be a marine biologist when you grew up. Or if you wanna go kayaking sometime. Or if you’ve ever been on a whale watching cruise and actually seen whales. Or if you’re Boris Diaw.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris