How you should choose your career and why we all chose wrong

(Except Elon Musk)

Has anyone else noticed recently that everything is, like, really wrong?

And I don’t mean that in the ‘oh every time I look at the news it sounds like a constant replay of that Mitchell and Webb skit that says ‘Hans… are we the baddies?’’ sense. 

I mean everything is really wrong here, here where we are, in our western comfort and exceptionalism. Fundamental elements of society are faltering and no one seems to have any sensible plans to fix them. Real estate is practically unreachable already, grocery prices are scandalous, childcare is inaccessible, healthcare is …. barely existent? And all of the roads are constantly under construction and yet simultaneously forever full of pot holes. 

Well hey, little Miss, I might hear someone say - what are you doing looking for The State to fix all your problems for you? Why don’t you apply yourself and provide for your own needs? 

And I could do a little diatribe here on the toxicity of individual exceptionalism we seem to have fostered, and the questionable benefits of expecting everyone to be solely responsible for aspects of their own lives they can’t possibly self-manage (like, say, road maintenance, or mental health support), but I won’t do that, that might be preachy and boring. 

I do want to reflect specifically on gainful employment. 

This panacea offered as a solution to all social ills. Don’t panhandle on the streets man, get a job!! Don’t ask for handouts to feed your kids, get a job! You have one? Get two! Get a better one. Educate yourself until you are paid what you’re worth! Heck get a third job while you’re at it. You don’t like them? They’re not treating you fairly? Suck it up. That’s life, baby. You don’t get to like your job. Kids used to work in the coal mines. Y’all spoiled and soft.

Now I understand the basic notion of this. We should all strive to contribute to society as we are able. Our contributions should be commensurately rewarded. We should all find a niche where we can be useful, and hopefully fulfilled, and hopefully reasonably paid, and that’s part of the social contract. Cut your check, pay your taxes, manage your budget, live your life.

But things are going, like, really wrong.

Mosaic I ran into in Burlington. Hope whoever made it got paid.

So if I start from myself, we immediately run into issues. I traded in a weirdly lucrative office job for a career in the arts. 

‘Arts!!!’ I hear you gasping exasperatedly already. ‘Well of course things are not working out if you decided you wanted to draw flowers for a living! Get real, woman! Do something useful!’ 

And sure enough, I can concur that me drawing flowers probably isn’t, like, the greatest driver of economic prosperity. Aside from the fact that every product needs attractive packaging, that we still crave new books and films and paintings and series, that the arts are literally inseparable from the world we live in and losing them would definitely hurt us - I get it. The Hollywood writers who went on strike, the actors, novelists, musicians, painters and ceramicists who work their daytime jobs to let them keep creating their unique stuff - they’re not doing anything REALLY important. If they wanted to make money, they should have made better choices, shouldn’t they?

Then we start noticing all the news on how many STEM and IT people are sending off literally hundreds of job applications without being called for an interview once. Remember when we were younger and everyone was saying how you can’t go wrong with STEM? Get an engineering degree and you’ll never go lacking! No worries for you if you learn programming! But whoops - that seems to have not really worked out. IT is mass-firing people by the truckload. Engineering is becoming Hunger Games level competitive. I guess everyone got the same memo, and here we are. Your bulletproof career no longer is. 

Well, well, I mean…. You should have known, shouldn’t you? When a field becomes oversaturated…. Umm….. Supply and demand, you know….. if a lot of people have gained those same skills… you just need to be exceptional in some fundamental way, you know? Really stand out from the rest! You can’t expect a great life if you’re not uniquely deserving!

Then you come across the story of the UCLA astrophysics professor, with raving student reviews, who is making millions for his University in tuition while getting paid so little - 70,000$ per year - that he has just had to move out of his apartment near campus because he couldn’t make his rent. 

Well…. I mean…. Uhh…….. Well, who needs this astrophysiology anyway? Maybe his thing is not useful? Maybe he should go pick a better employer? I mean just because the guy has a PhD in, like, literal rocket science, doesn’t mean he’s so darned special…. Maybe he should do something more useful!!

Mmm. Useful like the nurses, teachers, and support teaching staff who have spent three months striking here due to awful pay and working conditions and insulting salary increase offers that were set to consistently lose out to inflation? Useful like those people? 

Or useful like all the people doing the desperately necessary and desperately underpaid jobs that literally keep our lives running - delivery drivers, fast food and service industry workers, beauty industry workers, farm workers, general construction workers, cleaners, and myriads of others we barely even notice? The ones that keep being told they should ‘get a REAL job if they want better pay’ even though we literally desperately need what they do and would lose our collective shit if they weren’t there to do it?

Alignment of the planets.

So you go ok hold on. Hold on. Wait a minute. 

Who actually picked right? 

What the heck is happening?

We can’t all be doctors, bankers, and lawyers. It makes no sense. The world wouldn’t function that way. 

But we seem to be ok with the idea that only a tiny minority of all professions actually deserves a….. decent life. 

Everyone else only has themselves to blame, right? You should have become a doctor, banker, or lawyer. Even better, you should have been born wealthy and inherited your father’s business empire. Everything else is a loser move, frankly. You should have thought it through. 

I find it pretty crazy that we’re so quick to accept this twisted world view. 

We all know who brings actual value to our lives. It sure as hell isn’t the S&P Fortune 500 CEOs. 

And yet we are passively accepting of a world where they have yachts, and everyone else has anxiety and existential dread.

The truth is, literally all our numbers have soared except for one. Productivity has increased massively over the decades. Corporate profits have risen shockingly. Cost of living has soared. Real estate has skyrocketed. The only thing that keeps lagging and lagging behind is wage earnings. 

Professions that used to be surefire tickets to a great life no longer are. Did you know pilots are poorly paid now? PILOTS?!?!? Like how the heck did THAT happen?? More and more professions are being devalued as all the profits they create with their work are assiduously slurped up by the handful of very wealthy people at the top. 

And the weirdest part about it is how fiercely people seem to defend it. ‘You’re not supposed to enjoy working! Nobody wants to work anymore! Just do what you’re hired for, take what you’re offered and be grateful!’

………….Why?

Why wouldn’t I get to do something I enjoy, at least marginally? Why wouldn’t every job worth doing deserve a proper living wage? Why wouldn’t the lives of the masses matter more than the yachts of the few? Why wouldn’t we be entitled to free time? Why wouldn’t we actually build work-life balance? Why would we accept to go into debt for degrees that are no longer able to let us pay that debt back? Why would we expect the people who literally carry our food, health, and transport systems on their backs and shoulders to live in subhuman conditions, because someone determined the extremely crucial labor they provide isn’t worth paying? 

Why should we accept the idea that we deserve the shittiest life possible, and should be grateful to have even that? 

Now I absolutely understand that restructuring all of society is a bit of a major project, and nobody is super clear on how we even approach it. That’s fine. This is not a call to revolution. 

It’s more an exercise in practical philosophy. 

How do I see the world? 

Whom should the world be good for? 

Everyone? The twenty richest people? A small percentage? The majority? The well educated? The Lucky Ones? Those Who Choose Well, based on some arbitrary ever changing rule? Everyone? Maybe everyone?

…why not everyone?

‘Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology.’