Interstellar holds a special place in my heart.
Partly because I have always been fascinated by space. Partly because it isn’t the typical science-fiction film about aliens and spectacle. But mostly because, underneath all the science, space and time, it is a story about a father and his daughter.
I am a father to a daughter too. And there are few things in my life for which I am more grateful. Watching her blossom, grow her roots in the earth and reach for the sky has been one of life’s great privileges.
Perhaps that is why the relationship between Cooper and Murph gets to me every time.
There is a small moment near the beginning that I particularly love. Murph is upset about being named after Murphy’s Law. Her brother has been teasing her that it means whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
Her father tells her that’s not what it means. Murphy’s Law, he explains, means that whatever can happen, will happen.
“And that sounded just fine with us.”
Possibility.
Later, Cooper is called to school.
His son Tom’s teachers have decided that he will become a farmer. Cooper asks about university. They explain that the world doesn’t need more engineers. It doesn’t need more astronauts. Food is scarce.
The world needs farmers.
And they are right.
At least, given everything they know about their world at that moment, they are being perfectly rational.
That is what makes the scene so interesting to me.
They aren’t bad teachers trying to limit a child. They are sensible adults looking at the world around them, deciding what the future will require, and preparing a child accordingly.
Don’t we do versions of this ourselves?
We look at the world as we understand it and tell our children what will matter.
Study this. Don’t study that.
This has a future. That doesn’t.
This is a good career. That’s too risky.
Learn this skill. That’s where the jobs will be.
But how much do we really know?
We are living through another period when people are trying to predict which jobs will survive, which will disappear, and which skills children will need. AI has only made those questions more urgent.
But what if we are wrong?
How much of what we call preparing our children for the future is actually preparing them for our present understanding of the future?
That is precisely what happens in Interstellar.
The world needs farmers.
Yet the world is eventually saved by an astronaut and his daughter—a daughter who never stopped looking towards science, space and possibility.
The very capabilities their society had decided were no longer particularly useful become essential to its survival.
I find that deeply unsettling as a parent.
What possibilities might we close because we are too confident about what tomorrow will require?
What if the professions we are steering our children towards change beyond recognition?
What if the work they will eventually find meaningful doesn’t exist yet?
And what happens when a child chooses a path different from the one we believe is sensible?
I don’t think the answer is blind trust. Children need us. They need exposure, guidance, good teachers, standards, correction, encouragement and sometimes a push to stay with something when giving up would be easier.
But guidance and prescription are not the same thing.
Loving a child deeply doesn’t give us ownership of their becoming.
Perhaps our responsibility is less about predicting where they should end up and more about creating the conditions in which they can discover what draws them, become capable of pursuing something deeply, and remain able to learn and adapt as the world changes.
What would we give our children if we thought about their future that way?
Curiosity?
The ability to learn something difficult?
The experience of practising until something they couldn’t do becomes something they can?
Judgement?
Adaptability?
The confidence to begin again?
The ability to form relationships, care for other people and contribute to something beyond themselves?
And this is where Interstellar asks an even bigger question for me.
After all the equations, spacecraft, black holes and the struggle to save humanity, we eventually see an elderly Murph in a hospital bed, surrounded by generations of her family.
She has lived an extraordinary life. She helped solve a problem that saved humanity.
But she has also lived.
Which makes me wonder whether, in all our anxiety about our children’s education, skills and careers, we sometimes make the future too small.
Are we preparing our children to make a living, or preparing them to live?
I don’t know what world my daughter will inhabit twenty or thirty years from now. I certainly don’t know what work will look like by then.
Perhaps admitting that is a better place to begin.
What if our job is not to prepare children for a particular future at all, but to help them become people capable of flourishing in many possible futures?
We need farmers.
And astronauts.