The thing is that if I were a bad attorney you might have an argument. Despite my ambivalence towards the profession I actually happen to be really good at it. I went to a well-ranked law school, where I graduated cum laude. You can’t even make it into the fellowship I finished without a certain GPA and class rank. I’ve already handled well over a 100 million in federal funds and I just got promoted. I don’t go into work every day hating it. I just don’t go into work every day feeling super noble about being a lawyer (why should I anyway? I transfer money from rich people…to other richer people). When I am there, I work hard because it’s my duty and what I get paid for. Considering the fact that 1/2 the people in my profession seem to be terminally depressed and functional alcoholics I consider myself to be doing pretty well. As far as I can see, 1/2 my sister’s medical class is there because their parents are doctors.
Maybe you could invent a spirituality detector for lawyers and doctors. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with the fact that a ton of us fall into these deals whether it’s because our parents kind of expect it, for the money, for the power or the prestige. Until then, it’s probably to your benefit to gauge us by our skills rather than our soulful motivations. Whether or not people have an emotional distance from their profession should be neither here nor their for you unless you can show me some conclusive evidence that an absolute burning desire to be a lawyer or doctor is necessary for competent service.
Generally I do find that there’s a sort of jealousy towards people who say they don’t really care for their profession but are good at it. Frankly I would have been an emotionally distant lawyer, doctor, teacher, librarian, construction worker or anything all. I’m just not really obsessed with work.
Incidentally, you can run a search on my posts. I’ve said time and time again that I really really like my job. It only takes up 40 hours a week and the bennies are fab. Also, sad as it how the best programs the feds have out there can be taken advantage of for tax purposes by people who already have a ton of money-the money I work with actually goes towards “helping peepul!” I feel very ethically free.
I believe that certain professions demand a certain amount of comittment, not just in terms of hours but in emotional and mental energy, and certain personalities cannot do that if they don’t have a passion for it.
I know this because I’m leaving a PhD program because I didn’t have the heart for it.
However, it also seems to me that people like that tend to be weeded out pretty fast. They won’t graduate from school, or be fired pretty fast in their careers. Important careers like medicine and law tend to have pretty strong gatekeepers.
And yes, some people can give their all to careers they don’t love. I don’t know how, but I’ve seen it done, and they can do it well.
People who are following a “calling”. Who feel that their work fulfills them, that they were born for it, and they live and breathe it. Their occupation represents a huge part of their identity. They encourage others to “follow their dreams” and often perpetuate the idea that you can’t be happy unless you’re doing something you love.
People who hate their jobs. They ended up following the wrong career path, or their job was the best thing they could scrape together, given their credentials. Not much to say about them.
And then there are the people who view their jobs as a tolerable means of survival. They work for a living, not live for working. They like their jobs alright, but they are not in love with it. They don’t go home thinking about it. They don’t pray to the patron saint of their occupation, nor do they feel especially “chosen” or obligated to humanity because of their career path. They are pragmatic, knowing how to balance realistic expectations with their own idealism. They aren’t looking for the jobs to be particularly rewarding, although they like the rewards that may come, both the financial ones and the intangible kinds. For real rewards, they go to family and friends or to hobbies and community service. Their occupation is a part of their identity, but it isn’t the biggest part.
I fall in the third group, and I imagine most of us do. I’m a scientist and proud of it, but I feel like I could easily put on a different hat tomorrow and not even blink. That doesn’t mean I’m not a good scientist. It just means I’m not a romantic idealist who believes I was “made” for my job. I wasn’t “made” for anything. I think one of the worse lessons we’ve taught young people in the past couple of decades is that they have to find a career that they are passionate about. No, you have to find a job that pays the bills. Period. Love and happiness…these things are important, but if you can settle for “like and okeydokey”, you’ll do much better in life.
And about the lottery thing…since when are doctors priests? I mean, I don’t play the lottery, but every day I dream about living a leisure lifestyle where I don’t have to work. Again, that doesn’t mean I hate being a scientist. It just means that I don’t like waking up early and being stressed-out.
Actually, anu-la1979, you’ll notice that I didn’t specifically reference you because I felt it would be an intrusion on an innocuous remark. I figured the issue was interesting on its own. It would never occur to me to search your posts; this isn’t a personal vendetta.
But since you’re here, it’s really interesting that so many of your peers are, according to you, dysfunctional; I wonder why? Do you think it’s b/c they’re only there to please someone else?
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading the replies, lots of fascinating points to think about. It is true that passion doesn’t equal competence, nor competence passion.
And yeah, everyone has a right to risk a buck on a daydream (although I’d rather trust my life to someone who’s glad to be where they are, not a person who wants “out”).
If you take the guts out of a service profession, remove the quality that made it worthy of respect in the first place and make it just another job - doesn’t that defeat the purpose of aiming high?
What I know for myself is, I had a lot of jobs during the 20 years I spent in the workplace. None of them were careers, and I never really pushed myself or excelled. As a Mom, I find myself doing the extra things (researching, networking, putting in long hours) that people who are devoted to their careers tend to do. I couldn’t do that extra work without passion, and because of my passion I’m driven to do it.
I don’t see why doctors and lawyers should be held to a higher standard than anyone else. I’m a “software engineer,” I really like my work, I enjoy helping junior people, etc. but it’s not my “calling in life.” If anyone expected it to be, I’d have to laugh at them.
I became a lawyer, in the end, because no one could take it away from me unless I gave it away. I didn’t know it then, and I certainly would not have articulated it that way. What I will think in ten years, I have no idea.
I have had a lot of jobs in my life, both before and after getting the license. They range from operating a conservatory for endangered animals (specifically wild cats) to consulting on trial presentation to stage management to writing lyrics and vocal arrangement.
I think I can safely say that I didn’t do any of those things because it was an end in itself. Doing them well was indeed an end in itself, but that has nothing to do with the field, it’s a personal problem I have. I am a craftsman, not an artist. My dedication to the work I do is portable. It has something to do with me, and nothing to do with the thing before me.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. It’s wonderful if you can pursue your true calling, but most of us don’t. I went to graduate school and worked briefly in a field that I am passionate about. I loved what I did. But after a couple of years, I realized that I couldn’t afford to keep working in that field and achieve other goals–buying a house, staying in the same area as my family, being able to support children. Plus, I was constantly thinking about work, and other areas of my life suffered because of it.
I like my current job, and I’m very good at it, but I don’t plan to do it for the rest of my life. The pay’s okay, the benefits are good, and it leaves me with the time and energy to concentrate on things that truly bring me joy–my family, my friends, gardening and cooking. I have a life, and I’d rather have that than a career.
I think you’re right, and I think this is a huge reason why we Gen Xers are such whiny brats. We were raised in the era of Martha and Oprah and Mrs. Fields and have heard time and time again that we should pursue our “passion” and that if we find what we really love to do and find a way to make money at it, we’ll live happily ever after.
Which is nice in theory. But the world really only has room for one Oprah, and she’s still got the gig. In reality, it means that most of my 30something friends have six years of college and four majors and are still 12 credits away from a degree in anything, working at Borders and Starbucks while we figure out what the hell we want to be when we grow up, because we know it has to be something we’re “passionate” about, but *Doom *doesn’t pay the bills. I have never read of such a directionless generation, and I put myself squarely in the middle of that mess.
I finally decided to go back to school yet again and get a vocational degree (Nursing) that will be stable and allow me to make money at something I won’t hate, so I can have the family and life outside work that I love. I expect I’ll be a good nurse, but it’s not a burning passion I’ve had ever since I was a little girl. I’m 31, have a marriage and two children and I feel like in three years when I’m done with nursing school, I’ll finally be a “grownup”. Pathetic.
I’d really hope my doctor isn’t “really passionate.” I think really passionate people make poor doctors. Being a doctor takes a certain amount of ability to distance yourself from your patients and your circumstance. I want someone who can do that, not someone who is so emotionally invested that they don’t see straight. I don’t want someone who burns out halfway through my mother’s chemo because they can’t stand to see patients die.
Same thing with law. I want passion removed from my lawyer. A good functional, compentent attorney.
The saddest thing I’ve seen recently is a woman in my accounting class who wasted a B.S. and a Masters on becoming a social worker because she was passionate about it. She burned out in six months.
I feel directionless and I have a “real” job that I like “alright”. For me, I think it’s because I have the luxury of feeling directionless. I have no spouse, no children, no mortage, and no obligations to anyone right now. When my mother was my age (29), she had two children and was pregnant with twins. She didn’t have time or energy to navel-gaze and “find herself”. Her depression-era parents wouldn’t have cottoned to that kind of nonsense, either. When you have few real worries, you invent news ones.
I guess for Generation Xers, because so many of us have sacrificed our young adult years in educating ourselves, we expect immediate rewards when we graduate. We expect the “dream” to manifest itself before we turn 30, and if it doesn’t, we start worrying. And I don’t think the worrying is necessarily bad. I think our generation, moreso than our parents’, is more flexible and versatile in our skill sets because we think more about trying out “jobs” and “lifestyles” than settling into “careers”. This frame of mind definitely has advantages. But I do think we, as a generation, need to be more practical with our choices in life and start thinking with our brains rather than with our hearts so much.
Well, at least you have goals and a plan. Most of us wish we could have that.
And I am glad I have that plan. I just wish it hadn’t taken 14 years of beating myself up because I wasn’t feeling “passionate” about anything as a career to realize that I don’t *have *to be passionate - I just have to get a freaking job that will pay my bills and hopefully get us a house someday.
My grandmother looks at me like this: :rolleyes: , but it really was a huge revelation for me. I internalized that “passion” thing deeply.
The dysfunctionality may be because high-powered doctors and lawyers give so much of themselves to their work. It sounds like your family is your first priority, which is as it should be. If a doctor is putting in 70-hour weeks and giving all of herself to her patients, then she has that much less time and energy to give to her family. How do you think that affects people’s marriages/relationships? It would be interesting to see what the divorce rates for doctors and lawyers are like. I know that I’d get awfully tired of playing second fiddle to my husband’s career.
No, I think it’s because you have to have a certain amount of asshole in you to be in certain professions, not just medicine and law but pretty much anything that requires ambition and is difficult. I also think the quality of life you get (less time for family, more time to be an asshole) exacerbates these qualities and increases depression and certain behaviours in people. I have, whether from genetics or social conditioning, enough of these traits such that I am good at what I do but I keep the exacerbating conditions of my profession to a minimum so I’m not a complete shithead and so I don’t fuck up my own life.
Sorry to double-post, but this remark just struck me.
It seems you think the only people who deserve to go into professions with money and so-called “prestige” are those who are truly driven into it for a love of the subject matter. This, in turn, justifies their higher status, salary and gives you confidence in their competence in their service towards you.
The thing is that any service professional will lie to your face to quell your fears. That’s pretty much the entire point of being a service professional-whether you’re a server or a doctor. In the end you’re whoring for your dinner. Of course, we don’t call it “whoring” or “lying”-more like “gentle persuasion”, “convincing the client” and “the customer is always right.” But the fact remains that if you’re going to try to ferret out those of us that are really in it because we dreamt of being [insert profession] as little kids, you’re pretty much fighting a losing game. A truly competent service professional will snooker you into believing he dreamt of saving orphans as a child and that’s why he’s prescribing Amoxycillin for your kid’s cough at an exorbitant rate and you’ll go home satisfied that I’m a bad lawyer while he’s a good doctor. Then said doctor will turn around and mock your issues to his secretary.
Seriously, I think the idea of looking to certain professions for “nobility” is a losing game. Look to service professionals for the empathy they show you when you explain a problem to them, whether or not they are going to listen to you and absorb your viewpoints into their prescribed course of action, they treat you with respect since you are the client and their track record of success. The idea that we’re all expected to approach jobs the way you approach parenting is…I don’t know, I don’t even think I’m supposed to treat my job the way I’d treat my kid.
I hear you. I often wish I could go back in time and tell my 18-year-old self, “Fine, major in history. But do a double-major in accounting, too!” Of course, my 18-year-old self wasn’t thinking about mortgages, retirement plans, future young’uns, and a husband who has a true passion for a low-paying profession (elementary education).