“When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, ‘What will I be?’”
And so begins Que Sera, Sera, a song many of us (of a certain age, I must add) grew up learning and humming as we went about our merry ways. By today’s standards, the song is almost laughably simple. No multilayered tracks. No music video. No auto-tune. No beat that could launch a viral TikTok dance. Just a woman asking life’s biggest questions and receiving what sounds like a philosophical shrug from the universe: Whatever will be, will be.
Today, most people would consider the song an example of how society once accepted fatalism. They see it as an anthem suggesting that people have no agency over who they become, and that we should gracefully surrender to fate’s indifference. But that interpretation collapses the moment you look at where the song actually came from.
Que Sera, Sera was written for Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. In the film, Doris Day’s character uses the song as a plot device to locate her son, who had been kidnapped by some unsavoury characters too complicated to get into in this article. This is not a woman simply accepting fate. This is a mother actively refusing to allow her son to die. Hitchcock turned this cheerful, fatalistic song into a clever tracking device to reunite mother and child.
A closer reading of the lyrics themselves also betrays the fatalist interpretation. The girl in the song is not someone surrendering to whatever life has in store for her. She wants to be pretty. She wants to be rich. She wants to paint pictures, sing songs, and apparently see rainbows every day. These are not the aspirations of someone content to let life simply happen. This is someone with ambition — and a surprisingly demanding wish list.
Which is why I’ve come to think of Que Sera, Sera not as advice for how to live, but as a sentence we whisper to ourselves after we have already tried.
It is not permission to stop striving. It is emotional first aid when striving doesn’t work out. It is what you say to yourself when your ambitions hit a polite but firm wall of rejection from the universe.
Growing up with this song taught me something profound: it is okay to want things desperately and sometimes fail spectacularly. The point is to dream outrageously. And if you miss?
Well… que sera, sera.
At least you cared enough to be disappointed.