Education Quote by Paul Putner

The joke lands because it treats a wildly specific teenage ambition with the same doomed sincerity you reserve for “I’m going to be an astronaut,” except Putner picks a niche so impractical it’s instantly self-sabotaging. “Jobs that required scuba divers” isn’t a dream, it’s a bureaucratic query. He’s not fantasizing about underwater adventure; he’s already trying to route it through the school’s career pipeline, like there’s a checkbox for “deep-sea employee.”

That’s the comic intent: to spotlight how adolescence turns identity into a series of short-lived costumes, then let adult hindsight puncture the drama with one dry pin. “It was a phase” is the punchline because it retroactively shrinks the whole narrative. The build gives you a mini-epic of earnest planning; the tag collapses it into the throwaway category reserved for eyeliner, emo bands, or suddenly wearing fedoras.

Subtext-wise, Putner is teasing the adult desire to launder our past into something coherent. We prefer to remember youthful impulsiveness as a quirky chapter rather than evidence of how random we were. There’s also a quiet jab at the careers-advisor apparatus itself: the institution is designed to translate kids into sensible futures, but it can’t really metabolize bizarre, transient fixations. The image of an advisor trying to respond to “scuba jobs” is funny because it exposes the mismatch between a standardized system and a chaotic inner life.