Why you would choose a wrong career

 

Why you would choose  an unfulfilling career 

It is one of the things that could prove a nightmare if became our reality. We go great lengths to avoid such a fate. And yet we do it all the same: we choose an unfulfilling career.

Partly, because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to fall in love with all sorts of subjects that we encounter.  We seem enjoy only a limited number of subjects among those. And hence our grades suffer. 

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to like something and hate things that disagree with with our beliefs or can read only the things that we are great with; perhaps we are tricky about being inferior when compared or we are too lazy to do the hardwork that is necessary for those unlikeble subjects. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before choosing our careers we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever our casual failures threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame people and circumstances. As for our loved ones, they love us too much to enlighten us about our flaws. One of the privilege of doing nothing is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to work upon ourselves.

Our batchmates and professors are no more self aware. Naturally we make a stab at trying to understand their reasons for pursuing so and so career. We spend most of our time with our career and yet it doesn’t help, does it?

We do need distractions to soothe us, calm us. We think we know this is our purpose. This is what we are called on to do. We aren’t. Careers end up as hopeful, generous, infinitely rational gamble taken by a person who don’t really knows who he is yet, what their career is realistically about, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of the recorded history, people chose career paths for very logical sorts of reasons: because career gave a lot of money, so and so career was a noble profession, Sharma Ji ka beta is having car and bungalows so pursue this career only, parents wanted them to handle family business, family needed a doctor in a family. And from such reasonable careers, there flowed depression, anxiety, stress, suicides, increased number of lost souls, increased crime rates, increase in corruption and most importantly loss of creativity that was once natural for that person. The career of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often narrow- minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the career of feeling— has largely been spared the need to account for itself. 

What matters in the career of feeling is that one person is drawn to a particular career is an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed the more imprudent a career appears ( perhaps it’s been only six months since your entry into your field of choice; we keep failing in our subjects or maybe we are not working hard enough), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatised reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason. 

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in our careers, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity— which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult subjects, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The teachings most of us will have tasted early on with was confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to have highest scores, being deprived of the appreciation from our teachers and parents, not being able to say that don’t really want to study, to recapture the feeling of making our parents proud, to receive those gifts that our parents gave for getting good grades. How logical, then, that we should as grown ups find ourselves rejecting certain career choices not because they were not good enough but because that choice was too right— too balanced for my eclectic tastes— given that in our hearts, such righteousness feels foreign. We choose the wrong career paths between don’t associate doing a job with being happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so deprived of a purpose. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a career when doing nothing feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of may years of prospect of doing literally nothing for many years in order to be appropriately pricky; otherwise, we risk having any choices to change our careers that bought us so much damage. 

Finally we choose a career to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that career will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of being a master in our field came to our mind; perhaps we saw someone perform that particular dance form, or we looked at a musician play. We choose our career to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of career.

Indeed career tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening responsibilities that kill the passion from which they came from. The only ingredient in common is the subject. And that might have been wrong ingredient to the bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we choose the wrong careeer.

We must abandon our career and find something else, only the founding romantic idea upon which the modern understanding of career has been based since past few years: that a perfect career exists which can meet all our needs and can be fulfilling. 

We need to swap the romantic view for a tragic ( and at points comedic ) awareness that every career will frustrate, anger, madden and annoy us— and we will (without any malice) do the same. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness or incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for a new career. Choosing whichever career to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most likely to sacrifice ourselves for.

The philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around career. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon purpose. The failure of one particular career to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The career that is best suited for us is not the career that shares our every taste ( that career doesn’t exist ), but we can be someone who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently— the career which is not totally likeable. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” career. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its pre condition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in career seem exceptional and appalling. We end up failing and convinced that our choices are not normal. We should learn to accommodate ourselves to wrongness striving always to adapt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple example in ourselves and in our careers.