This post wasn’t on my list to write, but I just had a realisation about twenty minutes ago, which I needed to write about.

Do you know where your ambitions came from? Do you know why you wanted to do the work you do? Have the relationships you have? Why you love some things and hate others? Most people would say that our conditioning and programming comes mostly from our family and from teachers and friends who are around us when we’re growing up. That’s why we end up dating replicas of our parents, because it’s what we know.

Well I just realised that my desire to have my own business, and my love of stationery and packing up goods into boxes and sending them out, came from a movie.

Yes, that’s right. A movie. And they say that media doesn’t have that much impact on us? The movie was my favourite, I have no idea how many times I watched it, but I know it was many times. It was called Baby Boom. It was about a high-powered business woman who ends up with a baby girl after her cousin dies, and who ends up leaving her job in New York and moving to Vermont, where she ends up starting her own baby food business.

Thinking about it, that may have been the beginning of my love of New York and New England too…

Anyway, my favourite parts of the movie were when her business is taking off and she is sending out jars of the baby food in brown boxes with the custom Country Baby label on them. I remember being fascinated by the idea of running a business, and I remember wanting to do that myself.

Now of course, I may have still wanted to do that, whether I had watched that movie or not, but it makes you wonder if it wasn’t that movie that planted the seed in my mind.

Was my interest in aliens and ghosts started by watching Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, ET and Ghost? Was my love of fantasy and sci-fi started by watching the Goonies, the Neverending Story, Hook or Back to the Future? Was it all the many movies I watched set in America that created my love of the US and created my desire to visit there and even live there?

I have no way of knowing the answers to those questions, but it does make you wonder how much of our lives are shaped by the media that we consume at a young age, and it makes me wonder how kids now will turn out in years to come, with the sheer volume of media they are exposed to. A few 80s and 90s movies are nothing compared to the movies, TV shows, games and YouTube videos that are available to watch now.

Just something to ponder, I didn’t have any conclusion to make from this realisation, I just wanted to share it! And if you’re wondering why I suddenly has this realisation, it’s because Baby Boom is currently on Netflix!