That was fascinating…
I agree with msmith. I think striving for work that is tolerable, that you can grow to like, is a far more realistic goal than pursuing what you lurve.
We spend 8 hours every day at work. We spend 8 hours asleep. You can fill the remainder your day with fun and passionate activities. Expecting life to be fun and enjoyable all the time…that’s a crazy expectation. If that’s what Gen Yers expect in life, well, no wonder they are angry. But I wouldn’t put that on a banner. 'Cuz that DOES sound like whining.
My parents may not be typical. They never told me to pursue what I loved. No one at school ever told me that either. Yeah, it’s a message that I’d catch “on the wind”, as they say, but even as a kid I knew it was dumb.
I agree. According to most people, I am doing what I love, and I identify strongly with my job, and I still think it’s harmful. It gives you a fucked up sense of loyalty to your job, tries to make you feel guilty for trying something else or thinking about quitting, and promotes working way more hours than a sane person should, and for what? And I say that as someone who likes their job and is doing ‘important’ work. Being totally invested in your job is good for employers, but I don’t think it’s that good for anyone else.
My husband, who is excellent at his job but makes no bones about the fact that he’s doing it for the paycheck, has a much healthier attitude, in my opinion.
I don’t even think it is really that good for employers. It creates a cultlike atmosphere where criticism or differing opinions are not tolerated. A culture that does not lend itself to constructive criticism makes itself resisitent to positive change and opens the door to incompetence and corruption.
But what Millennial or Gen X would want to even work in an environment like that? I work for a start-up and these are the sorts of companies that kids out of college should be working for. Working a flexible 80+ hours week for a new, young company where the worker bees are in their 20s, the managers in their 30s and the owners/executives in their 40s, trying to get the next Facebook, Google or Amazon (okay, maybe the next Doubleclick) off the ground. Maybe doing some bullshit with “social networking”.
I like this post. A lot.
It’s great if you can do what you love, but not everyone has that luxury or luck. If you can do that or wait to do it, fabulous. If you can’t, do what you can tolerate until you either can do what you love or can just do what you do, do it well and go home at night to enjoy your actual life.
I once went to an excellent seminar where they recommend that parents not focus so much on children’s happiness. The speaker said that happiness was important, but some kids are harped on so much by their parents to be happy that they feel like something’s wrong when they’re sad, mad, bored or just blah. I think that adults who’ve grown up like that and have been told all their lives that they’re special are in many ways being set up for disappointment.
You don’t need to tell the kid over and over again that life ain’t all sunshine and roses, but at least give them the emotional and intellectual tools they need to cope with it when it sucks, including doing jobs they don’t love, to get through.
So, you’d tell your kids that since shit needs to be cleaned don’t even try for anything better? I sure didn’t tell my kids that. My kids learned to try for what they love, and go for things maybe beyond what they thought they could do. They’ve often got those things also. There are people for whom a steady job of cleaning up shit would be great. But they are a minority.
The people I’ve known who hated their jobs either weren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were, and so decided that they didn’t make it because people were out to get them, or so negative that if silver dollars were raining from the sky they’d complain about headaches.
We all have lots of choices about what we study, where we go to school, and where we work. Granted you might not be able to make a random job a passion, but why not try to have a passion and find a job to match? Given equal abilities, someone with passion will outperform someone who just does it as a job.
Not everyone will find a job that is a passion, but they might as well try.
Found on Facebook:
I think a better point would be “If you want anything better than X, get a degree” not “A degree guarantees you better than X”.
When the job market picks up, who do you think will move off grill duty first? The guy with a degree who had to work there during the downturn or the guy who never went to college?
But, the point is, the latter is what the under-30 set have been told their whole lives. And their Boomer parents don’t even remember they said it.
Mine remember. My mom is going back to school in December for a two year program one of my sisters just completed. They both remember, and when I joined the military in 06, they cried, when recession hit in 08, I looked prescient …
This is part of the problem We have started to hire, and a good chunk of our slots are dedicated to kids right out of college. They are the ones bringing enthusiasm and new ideas, things that we old fossils haven’t had time to look at for ages.
Most of our deadwood vanished in various layoffs, and for the most part good people stayed if only because there wasn’t any other place to go. I can see why people don’t want to hire kids, because there is a learning curve and they may feel they need help right now. But in the long run it hurts you. Not to mention hurting the kids.
Loving what you do is not the same thing as loving your job so much that you are tied to it - unless there is only one company doing what you love. if I chose to move companies I know of some which would have jobs which are as much fun as my present one. I started working for the Bell System so I learned the pointlessness of absolute loyalty the hard way. BTW, the one job I had which I didn’t love was the one I worked the most hours on. Loving what I do at work doesn’t mean not loving what I do at home. “I love my cigar too, but I take it out every once in a while.” </Groucho>
I feel sad for those who don’t both enjoy coming home Friday afternoon and going to work Monday morning. I wish I had about 8 hours more a day to do all the stuff I’d like that I don’t have time for, but that does not mean giving up the stuff I get paid for.
Encouraging kids to find the things that make them happy is far different from trying to make sure they are happy all the time. Kids (and adults) have to learn how to fail because if you never fail you’ll never do anything interesting.
My daughter discovered that if you booked one part in 16 auditions you were doing great. That’s plenty of failure. I can imagine a negative person thinking that any industry with these odds is bullshit. The positive person (and she is one) enjoyed auditioning and enjoyed being invited. Now being a kid getting or not getting a part didn’t determine if she got to eat, but happiness was in the process.
I would first instill in them the idea that they need to work hard, be able support themselves and make intelligent choices. People generally don’t need any extra encouragement to do stuff they like. That’s why they call it work and they need to pay you to get you to do it. Otherwise it’d just be “doing stuff”.
I doubt that. There are plenty of reasons people may hate their job which has nothing to do with how “smart” they think they are. Bad cultural fits. Poor work/life balance. Larger economic issues that affect the company or industry. Maybe they simply get burned out or bored.
And honestly, what sort of person has a “passion” for writing CRM software? Or building marketing reports? Or facilitating whiteboard sessions in a boardroom?
Not to mention that there is an old saying “best way to ruin a hobby is to make it a career”. No matter how much you love doing something, the minute you have to do it according to the specifications of another party, it has the potential to turn to shit.
Yes, if everyone is highly qualified, qualifications can become meaningless- but this comment was in reponse to ‘free education’, and I don’t think that’s relevant.
In my Dad’s day, he was given not only free tuition, but a grant to pay living costs, and could have walked into a lot of jobs when he graduated.
By the time my brother graduted, with the same degree? Pay, and be in debt for up to half the cost of a house. He got stuck working his way through a totally unrelated boring job- in fact, he was promoted up from his temp job, started during Uni holidays, so got in that field without a degree. He’s finally in a well paid position now, over a decade later, but still one with no connection to his degree, and I don’t think he’s finished paying back loans for it yet. My former classmates (at least those I’m still in touch with), a few years younger, are all still massively in debt.
But there are more universities than ever, and I seem to remember a government drive to get 50% of my age range into them. None of my former classmates that I know of have paid off their loans yet, some haven’t even started. I dropped out, dimly realising what position I was going to be in, after my brother graduated. I was pushed into signing up by my mother, despite not really knowing what to study, and wanting to take a year out to decide. Not going was not really an option for many of us.
In the current situation, the deposit on a low-end flat is more than my parents paid for their first house (normally a year or two’s total earnings at the low-end wages we’re getting), and studies in this country have found that those who did not go to university do better financially on average that those who did, counting debts, until the age of around 45, and even then the gap is not large.
Encouraging more education costs now is frankly nonsensical. Those whose parents can pay for education will, but the as for the rest, the majority.. well. It would be a step backwards to where your life chances are settled at birth.
Less universities offering silly courses, more competition to get in, basing qualifications on educational merit, rather than ability to pay? That I can get behind.
I agree and disagree with that. Depression has been a major part of my life, and it came on with adulthood as a sort of massive existential crash - a realization of how alone and unimportant we are in the real world. The lesson I learned was that who we are matters very little compared to what we do, so we had better do our share and do it well, or else that alone-ness and unimportance will come to dominate our lives, like a kind of living death.
Yet I can’t help thinking that if we bring young people up with that understanding, they are just going to adopt that attitude of disappointment all the earlier. There might be a way to break the kiddies in carefully and gradually to life’s existential truths, but I don’t trust any of society’s institutions to do it. Not parents, not schools, not the marketplace, not peers, not the church, not the helping professions. All they can do is variations on A or B: coddle the individual or throw him overboard.
Absolutely. But it could be that those tools only come at a very high price in empathy, understanding and involvement - a price far too high for any family (let alone any other institution) to realistically pay.
This is spot on.
I like my job as a job, but there’s a reason they have to pay people to do it. It’s not like writing marketing reports, sitting in meetings, etc. is what I would choose to do if I were independently wealthy. And my coworkers are pretty decent (most of them), but it’s not a group I’d choose to spend 8-10 hours a day with if I didn’t have to.
I have a lot of respect for people who follow their dreams and make a career in the area of their passion, but they have to realize a large portion of their career isn’t going to be all that fun either. My good friend is a photographer. Taking pictures is only part of her duties. A larger part is just running a business: dealing with customers, marketing, billing, doing taxes, applying for financing, tracking down people who violate her copyright, making connections, etc. None of that is “fun” for her, but it’s critical to doing the business she’s in.
I think you shouldn’t hate what you do to the point it makes your overall life miserable, but people should realize that a large portion of most jobs is shit you don’t like doing and only do because you have to.
Even the acceptance that comes from understanding that mundane activity supports and enables greater endeavor - even that is a rare luxury in the working world.
Far better advice for most of us is to learn to accept that most of our time will be spent doing things that matter little or nothing other than that they must be done. Most people, in any workplace, matter more when they fail to meet their responsibilities than when they meet them.
And, at the time, it largely was true. Now things have changed and it’s time to stop blaming mommy and daddy and time to stop crying on Facebook and accept the reality of the situation – your payoff might not be immediate. But, hey, you’ve got one up on the high school grad competing for the same job stocking shelves at Target and you’ll have one up on him again when things turn around. Roll up your sleeves and make it through with the rest of us and we’re ever-so-sorry that to all these people that gratification wasn’t immediate.
(“You” being general; I don’t know “you the poster” from anyone)
All this insistence to stop whining on behalf of society at large - or at least that segment of society that’s had their ticket punched - gets goddamn tiresome.
During the 1930s depression, there was at least some public sentiment along the lines of “The best things in life are free” or “Life’s just a bowl of cherries, don’t take it serious, it’s too mysterious.” People were known to do their best to keep a cheery face and spread it about. “A smile is a frown upside down, so turn that from upside down.”
That is totally gone from the public sphere today. The way we say “stop whining” is more like Patton cracking that shellshocked GI upside the head. It amounts to nothing less than “get out of my face.” Maybe “get out of everyone’s face.”
The understanding that nobody has it easy is still here, but there’s no longer a feeling that we might as well make the best of it and get along with decency.
Are we all spoiled brats?