Here’s my fantasy. I develop an inexpensive cure for cancer and patent it for the sole purpose of preventing greedy corporations from stealing it. I then give it away for free, requesting that those who benefit from it pay me what they can comfortably give (two month’s worth of disposable income is what I recommend). The poor are able to get the cure for free, and I still get really rich thanks to all the rich and a few super-rich people who are cured.
Having a womb so I can bare Hillery Clinton’s children.
I’m the corporeal manifestation of a pan-dimensional demigod from beyond the seventh dimension, whose sole mission is to mend the great space-time continuum rift by exacting cold, decisive revenge on wasps and termites.
Oh, you meant an actual fantasy. In that case, umm…I’m a rock star, I guess.
Mine generally involve space flight.
In real life, I’m easily disoriented and flustered, and feel timid driving in cities with populations of 100,000 or more. Plus, I get airsick, and can’t handle the air quality during commercial air travel. And I’m kind of a homebody. And not in very good physical condition.
Oh, yeah, one other thing – I think manned space exploration is kind of a dumb idea.
I suppose my favorite personal Walter Mitty fantasy is my own life…or what it almost was.
When I was 14 I had this plan for my life mapped out, a very audacious one. I was going to be working in an industry that is almost impossible to get into, despite the fact the relevant subject for it wasn’t even taught in the tiny high school I attended. I was going to be living in a place I’d never even visited but had read and heard so much about that I’d made up my mind to be there. And although I’d struck out every time I’d asked a girl out on a date up to that point, I was going to be married to a beautiful, intelligent woman from another country like…France. Yes, being married to a Frenchwoman would be a very nice fantasy.
Ten years later I was doing every one of the above things. Working in the impossible industry. Living in the place I wanted to be. Married to a beautiful, intelligent woman from suburban Paris.
And then…everything went just horribly, horribly wrong. Lost my place in the industry. My wife had an affair and left me for another man. Had a nervous breakdown related to the breakup, which in some ways I still haven’t fully recovered from. Was forced to move to another city to find employment, which left me with such awful culture shock that I ended up moving to another place (where I still live) within a year. Within three years I went from “the life I always wanted” to “a life where I barely scrape by.” I ended making a lot of bad decisions before I finally met the woman who would be my second wife…and, now, I am on the verge of having to leave her and my stepkids on account of employment, and this time mental health, again.
I feel I never really got to enjoy the fantasy I really lived for a year or two when things were going well. We don’t think things are going to last forever and then our mind doesn’t cope when they don’t. I don’t think most people would have imploded as badly as I did. I realize now that, audacious as my Plan A was, a less-audacious Plan B would have been just as important for me to have. I worked very hard to get that job and place to live (the Frenchwoman fell into my lap, almost literally, and considering how bad I still am at attracting women that part was just lucky). I wasn’t really thinking of what would have happened if things had gone wrong. I understand now that there were opportunities I’d given up which were solid and would have made me happy if I’d taken them, but I gave them up in pursuit of the Plan A.
But if the Plan A had succeeded…I know where my contemporaries are now. They’re not famous or even that well-paid but they’re doing what they wanted to do…what I wanted to do. And in my Walter Mitty fantasy, the terrible things that happened over the last 10 years that led to my bipolar condition didn’t happen. I suppose that’s all I really wanted.