I have always loved the work I do. The idea of helping people find their way in the work world has always been my jam since 1994. However, in 2021, I'm beginning to wonder about what I'm actually helping people toward. We have told people to follow their bliss and do what they love. And you know what, many of those who have a degree of privilege have taken us up on that offer. But today, while we watch the decay of our planet, health systems in crisis, and frankly a lot of people still doing fairly meaningless work, I have to say perhaps we were a little shortsighted in our prescription of career well-being.
It seems that the world of today is calling for altruistic people to step into the breach to attend to the really pressing matters at hand. It doesn't mean we all need to be scientists or health professionals, but we need to support the mechanisms that allow them and engineers to do their work. Sadly, this flies in the face of a capitalistic world where people's motivations can be more easily driven by financial gain over the health of people or the planet.
I am certainly aware that most people I help are not looking for a philosophical approach to the issue of career choice and I will say I keep my philosophy mostly to myself. But, on this page, I allow myself to say what I'm thinking. Not because I have an answer for what to do about it, but because it needs to be said. Careers for tomorrow need to be better aligned to the problems that are out in front of us. We simply don't have armies big enough to do this for us. Though, if we did have a 2-year commitment to the public well-being, it would likely help a lot. We did some masterful things when we were in the height of the Depression in 1929 through the end of the Second World War by creating the WPA and the CCC.
During this time of a global pandemic, we have used our national treasury to prop up individuals and companies during the worst of it. I wonder if we had given people the choice of working toward improvements to our electric grid through renewable energy development or replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones, if now, as we are watching a war that has caused gasoline to spike around the world--could we have saved ourselves some misery?
Work is a powerful thing. It can literally change the world. We must somehow find the courage to labor toward a brighter future than to become a bloated society that crashes and burns.
