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.

been a long time...

so i've obviously been pretty busy lately.  this is my last semester taking classes, and i'm taking 3 while teaching 2 and trying to juggle a few conferences and the requisite paperwork, random school functions and social obligations.  also, the small amount of free time that i do have is more and more often spent hanging around with friends and having weekend get-togethers, hikes, and those sorts of things.  this weekend, for instance, it was a jam session on friday, conference all day saturday, wrapped up by a rico's night last night and then working on presentations for this week all night and day today.  i find there is much less time and desire to blog when i'm increasingly out and about doing, you know, fun real-life stuff.

also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it.  usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever.  with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure).  i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr).  and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar).  so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.

having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"

but i didn't.  and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.

the count so far

i've gotten something like seven or eight responses so far regarding which songs i should play at open mic (thanks guys!), and here's how things are lookin':

3 votes for millie
3 votes for not california
2 votes for molly
1 vote for palace
1 vote for the melody
1 vote for sunshine
2 votes for better to be loved

especially interesting because i figured people would think "better to be loved" was boring.  and because i like "love song in d" and apparently nobody else does :)

keep voting!  DO IT!

for any twits (or, as @rainnwilson calls them, "twacolytes")

from now on, when i tweet anything marginally interesting and germane to this blog (so, basically anything), i'm going to attach a #defiantlymaybe hashtag.  not that anyone cares, but hell, the hashtag isn't being used, so why not?

dreams

i've been having pretty rad/intense dreams the last few weeks.  i think it has something to do with the fact that i've been sleeping in 3-4 hour shifts, and when i do that, i tend to remember dreams better than when i sleep longer at once.  my most recent hilarious dream notwithstanding (which i'm not going to talk about because it would probably be retroactively embarrassing to a certain person...though still hilarious), most of my dreams have been pretty intense.

i have this one special kind of dream from time to time, and i thought i'd post about it to see if there are any fellow "sufferers" out there...it goes like this: basically it's a dream about being really really happy.  for some reason or another, there's a situation in the dream in which i'm just really goddamn happy, and this continues throughout the dream.  then i wake up, and in this weird way, it's actually sort of a sad dream, because in the dream i'm literally happier than i've ever been in my actual life (sometimes over really dumb shit, too).  which isn't to say, like, "aww...i'm actually not happy in life" because of course that's not it at all.  it's this super-cheesy happiness that actually probably couldn't happen in real life unless you were like on E or hydros or something.

i always have this urge to put an exclamation point after the E.  "hey guys, y'all want to do some E! Entertainment Network tonight?!"

anyway, this most recent dream was about a girl i sort of briefly dated a long time ago, who for some reason i was thinking about a lot yesterday anyway (and not in a particularly wistful way or anything, just being curious about what she was up to).  in the dream we were just doing sort of mundane things like wandering around one of the old parks i used to frequent back home in ohio and, i think at one point, getting groceries.  and for the entire thing i was just SO FUCKING HAPPY.  so much so that waking up was disorienting.

these sorts of dreams always sort of weird me out.  i mean, it wasn't even like a "wow, i'm with the girl i should actually have been with!" dream or anything relevatory or important, either.  it's just always a really stupidly pleasant dream for no discernible reason (when i have this type of dream)...i guess maybe it's frustrating because on some level, i still think that dreams might contain some kind of crazy space message that we're supposed to learn from (although that's obviously pretty silly).  and there is no message in these happy dreams.  it's like...YOU'RE SUPER HAPPY...BECAUSE THIS IS A DREAM!

and that's it.

i guess maybe this is a good thing...so many people i know have constant nightmares that probably relate to their subconscious being all stressed and wonked out and shit...i guess if i'm having dreams where i'm just obnoxiously happy i should be happy.

UPDATE: i was going to attach a video of the whiskeytown cover of fleetwood mac's "dreams" because it seemed appropriate, but youtube has failed.  so i blipped it.  if you want to hear it, just search the #defiantlymaybe hashtag on twitter.  god, social networking is so weird.  why do we do it?

now THERE'S a series of neverending posts...