Work sucks. Everybody knows it.
Work is the main thing that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Even if you never get married, never have kids, never assume a mortgage, never even own a car, you have to work. And that means being reliable, having responsibilities, accepting authority, and doing a lot of things which aren’t fun and which you have to do whether you feel like it or not.
This sucks, and the child inside us will never truly understand it. It wants to just go and play and indulge itself and never worry about anything. That’s what children want. And if we left it at that, our children would have every reason to view the coming of adulthood with great dread.
But in modern society, we have created a dream of a perfect workaround for this problem, and it is this dream which we teach our child. The dream is of the job that is not a job, the job that you enjoy so much that it is far more like play than work.
It is a dream we called “a career”.
The idea is promulgated by guidance counselors, teachers, children’s media figures, and our cultural backdrop in general. As you trod the pathways of the educational system, you will slowly discover what it is you truly enjoy doing and what you are good at. (These might not be the same thing, but they don’t tell you that. )
By the end of the process, so the story goes, you will have a good enough idea of what career path best suits your personality, skills, goals, and desired lifestyle. That way, you can slip into the world of work with the minimum of pain and with clear goals and achievements planned out in front of you.
That’s the dream sold to all children, and it is sold with the best of intentions and the honest belief that life can be just like that. But there are a number of problems with this idea.
For one, it does not take into account the asymmetry of competition resulting from the imbalance of number of jobs versus the number of people who may desire that job. There is no system or force in modern society to insure that there is the same number of every possible job as there are people who are leaving the educational system with that job as their life goal. Some jobs, generally obscure or inglorious ones, may starve for fresh blood, while others, generally ones that in some way appeal to the notion of “getting paid to play”, like the arts and sciences, may well have a massive glut of potential candidates, and this mathematically guarantees that the vast majority of them will have their dreams crushed.
Hardly seems like we are doing our children a kindness by setting them on this path, does it?
And even those who somehow survive this mad and brutal race for the small number of brass rings on the crazy merry go round of adult life face disillusionment and disappointment, because there is no such thing as a job that is not work.
No matter what you do, no matter how much it supposedly suits you, there will still be aspects of it that you simply do not like. Just the act of taking something you enjoy doing in your own time and turning it into something you are obligated to do whether you feel like it or not can turn a sweet dream sour. You may find yourself hating the very thing you worked so hard to make into a career.
And even if you don’t lose all appetite for that which you once loved, there will still be a lot of aspects of the job that are not loads of fun. You will likely have to follow a timetable, get up when you would rather be asleep, make compromises when you would prefer not to, and do all kinds of things that are simply not part of the brochure you got on Career Day.
So taken as a whole, I am forced to ask whether this “career dream” that we teach to our children is really the best thing for them and society in the long run. Might be we better off giving our children a more realistic (but still highly positive) idea of what lies ahead?
We have gotten away with selling this dream for so long because by the time the downside hits home, the child has become an adult and is therefore considered responsible for their own destiny.
But who is really to blame when the dreams we feed our children turn sour as adults?
Another problem with guidance counselling and career planning is that it doesn’t take into account that you may not know what you’re good at or what you want to do, and that even if you know what you want to do, you may never have the ability to do it professionally. But primarily the first problem.
The real problem is the feeling you get of there being no second chance. You’re only in high school once. Even if you can get a guidance counsellor to talk to you and get them to do their job and examine you for career aptitudes, or even if you live in Europe where there’s academic streaming in senior high school that has students apprenticing at a job one afternoon a week, what if you choose wrong?
Presumably you just abort and try again. But when to abort? After how long? What if you abort too soon?
I agree. It puzzles me how people don’t seem to grasp how much of a gamble life is… or if they do, it doesn’t bother them like it does me.
Perhaps a certain amount of obliviousness to that fact is healthy.