YourJobIsNotYourLife, and neither is your career. Young people are realizing today what has been predicted for over a decade: that most people will go through several careers in their lifetimes.
So what is an appropriate strategy?
How about:
I've opened this page half a dozen times now. Something's been bothering me about the basic premise.
I think I have a handle on it now. All irony aside (and that's tough when talking about life), for many people it seems their job does indeed wind up being their life.
Not that it should. However, there are a couple of factors.
- Having no long-term objective (something to attain regardless of employment) the thing they do most often becomes the defining attribute in their lives.
- (... and a little harder to articulate ...) The living of life really should be more than the mechanics of staying alive. If you can get good at a trade/profession/whatever and get useful, remunerative work done in progressively less time, you eventually should have a sort of time (and maybe money) surplus that can be used to do a little (or a lot of) living.
- If one were intent on keeping a population off-balance and disoriented and therefore incapable of doing a serious job of enjoying life, one could ensure that employment conditions made it necessary to continually retrain in ways that constantly invalidate previously accrued knowledge or expertise.
- If, on the other hand, one were interested in improving the opportunity for individual quality of life for a population, then it would seem prudent to establish conditions that made it possible to
- 1) accrue skills and knowledge, and thus personal value;
- 2) continue to obtain compensation commensurate with this increased personal value.
Doesn't sound much like the current "market-driven" "shareholder-benefit" society, though. I probably need to refine this for the sake of consistency, but for now let's see how this plays.
-- GarryHamilton
CategoryEmployment
Your Job Is Not Your Life