ruminations on careerism

so i've been mulling over this for a bit, as lindsey and i were talking about it on the way home...and by "it" i mean the whole question(s) of "why do you do what you do?" and "what should i do for the rest of my life?" and i've realized that my own attitude has changed pretty significantly since i last considered those questions seriously, but my justification for the new attitude hasn't really been thought through at length.

i want to argue that a lot of people do what they do for the wrong reasons.  and i fully accept that this will potentially start a comment war amongst a few particular readers.  if they still read this blog.  but anyway, i have a pretty strong opinion on careers and professional motivation, so i'd be happy to belabor my points if anyone wants to discuss.

as i see it, the two main problems with the typical cultural answer to "what do you want to do with your life?" are these:

1. "i want to help people" is an unreasonable desire, based on a whole lot of assumptions that you can't reasonably make about other people and their situations.

for the first 25 years of my life, this was what i wanted to do.  and from the time i entered college as a computer scientist, then changed to an english major (neither of which are very "people-helpy" professions), i felt guilty that i wasn't a doctor, or a vet, or an army sergeant.  but at some point along the road, i realized that wanting to help people, while noble, is also silly.

we all want to help other people (unless we're sociopaths), at the very least just because if we're nice to them, or give the appearance of being nice to them, they'll be nice to us and we'll get stuff.  however, i don't think you can honestly know when you're helping or not.  people lie (to you and you to yourself, if expedient) all the time.  now, if life were really black-and-white, like a lot of people like to think it is, then sure, "helping people" would be awesome.  however, let's take a look at "doctor" for example to see where the "help" starts to fall apart...

okay, so you're a doctor.  you keep people's hearts beating.  you keep people from dying of infections.  people tell you how happy they are that you saved their lives.  that's pretty badass.  however, you also probably occasionally don't help people.  people you can't fix, who come to the hospital assuming that they're going to get fixed.  people who come to the hospital and actually get worse.  in the worst case, which hopefully happens very seldom to never, you kill someone.  maybe someone who would have been okay otherwise.  this is why doctors have huge insurance premiums.  not because they help people, but because occasionally one of them (or the hospital) kills someone.  of course, you can chalk this up to ben parker's mantra all you want, but the fact is that "helping people" is complicated and relies on a TON of assumptions on your part, assumptions that you often don't or can't share with the person you're supposedly helping.  sure, you save a kid's life who has a broken leg that otherwise would have resulted in infection.  that's nice (it really is).  but, you could also look at the same act from this (extremely cynical) angle: the very health system and hospital your job and your "helping" is built on propagates a medical system that has widespread negative economic, environmental, cultural, etc. effects all across the globe.  most likely, people in other, poorer countries died indirectly so that your medical machinery could be built to save the kid you saved.  am i inferring that doctors should go to work everyday feeling guilty because they made some third world country a little poorer so we can keep americans alive?  of course not.  but at the same time, that's the reality of the situation...and from that you begin, maybe, to see how difficult it is to help someone with no strings attached.  you simply can't trace the chain of causality far enough to know you're only helping.  on some level, you're lying to yourself.  which sort of leads into my other point...

2.  ...which is "when did we decide that the only time you can make a difference in other people's lives is the 8 hours a day you're getting paid?".  if you are the charitable type and you want to help people, why does it have to be during your job?  can't you help just as much if not more in your day-to-day non-work life?  i think a very significant part of this problem is that we're so obsessed with creating concrete identities for ourselves that we'll jump at the chance to be able to say "i'm a teacher" or "i'm a musician" or "i'm a sculptor" and the dark side to that is then we believe that that particular sub-identity is the only one of worth, simultaneously putting too much pressure on what we are at work and devaluing what we do with the rest of our lives.

so what do we do then?  i believe the only thing that really makes sense is to find something that makes each of us happy, and do that for a job.  you're the only one you can be completely sure that you're helping, and if you're happy and content with a significant portion of your life, that's going to bleed over into how you interact with other people.  work on improving yourself and the rest will follow.  at least that's the theory i've been trying to work under.  and it seems to be working, mostly.  at least as much as it can be expected to, considering how little i actually have control over.  i mean, we have the ability in this country to be well-off enough in a global sense to have a measure of control over "what we want to be when we grow up".  unfortunately, this creates a situation similar to the one that Pollan addresses in In Defense of Food; we have so many kinds of food and as a result so many layers of confusion about which foods do what, that we've literally forgotten how to feed ourselves as a culture.  given simple, raw produce, or a plain old dead animal, the vast majority of our country wouldn't even know how to prepare it to save themselves from starving.  similarly, we have so many choices in terms of careers that we're making it harder than it has to be, believing that if we choose "the one" that we'll be able to singlehandedly better humanity...when in reality the point of having a job should just be to find something you feel relatively satisfied doing each day in a personal sense, and which earns you enough money to keep food in your mouth and a roof over your head.  i'm not saving the world being an english teacher, but i became a much better and happier person when i realized that i didn't actually have to.

note: i'm still a little sad that i'm not a doctor.  doctors are awesome.  i only ripped on them because they're the poster-children for the whole "get a job that helps someone" idea.

note 2: i was reading my old livejournal today.  hilarious.

note 3: HOW AM I STILL HUNGRY?!

note 4: i will try to blog more soon.  it really IS fun, just time-consuming and not as fun/meaningful/expedient as tweeting, playing with friends, doing homework, reading shit that's not homework just to learn about the world, writing poetry and/or music, watching good TV/movies, playing video games, eating, or sleeping.