When I was a child, I was terrified of what working life might hold for me. Even from that young age, I could glean that working life was an ENORMOUS aspect of being an adult, and, from my parents’ experience, it seemed bad. I grew up with one parent who, during my younger years, had an incredibly stressful working life, and I found it quite frightening. Lining up your adult career seemed like an enormously high-stakes game: if you got it wrong, you were in for a world of pain.
The millennial school experience didn’t help with this anxiety. Our careers were framed to us as the ultimate objective of our educational endeavours. Everything seemed to be preparation for working life: not just the classes, but your hobbies, too.* When people asked us ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’ they were simultaneously asking ‘how do you intend to earn a living’ and ‘who do you want to be’, and the merging of economic activity with personal identity began from there. The implication was that your career would not only define your adult years, but your adult persona, and therefore, you better choose wisely (and also work hard at school).
Framed like this, the career you’re aiming for says a lot about you; how interesting you are, how ambitious, how clever. I probably couldn’t have explained why at the time, but I always felt deeply uncomfortable answering that question, because I must have implicitly understood that it said a lot more about me than just what kind of office hours I’d like to keep. Having watched one of my parents endure a harrowing working life, my primary goals for a career were to be happy and do some good. But the adults asking me ‘what do you want to do when you grow up?’ were definitely looking for a specific job title, rather than a loose description of a desired lifestyle.
That career equals identity wasn’t the only narrative about working life at play when I was growing up. As well as the extremely unreliable ‘work hard at school and get a great job’ story, there was also the ‘office jobs are death’ narrative (see: The Office, Black Books, FRIENDS) and the ‘follow your passions and you’ll never work a day in your life’ bullshit. I believed them all, and it was terrifying. My passions were drama, writing, and playing The Sims. Actor, author, and professional Sims player were all highly competitive (or highly fictional) jobs, and I was also quite passionate about having a relatively stable income and not being super stressed all of the time. But it seemed like I had to make the most of my one wild and precious life by either pursuing my passions into a (most likely pretty stressful) career, or slide into an office job, which was apparently the equivalent of becoming a silent extra in your own life.
Luckily, as an adult, I’ve found these narratives to be false. The dichotomy between either ‘following your passions’, or ending up in a soulless job is obviously nonsense. The implication that ‘passion’ jobs are super exciting, varied and rewarding, whilst ‘office work’ is mundane, repetitive and soulless is obviously a lie. Jobs in either category can be wonderful or totally shit. Also, while we’re at it, who gets to decide what the ‘follow your passion’ jobs are? Some careers definitely sound more impressive, but being outwardly interesting doesn’t necessarily mean a job is any more enjoyable. My current job is unlikely to turn up in a Richard Scarry picture book, but it’s pretty much the most fun I could have whilst being paid.** In reality, you can turn your passions into a career and absolutely hate it, when the thing you loved suddenly has to pay the bills, or find that it bring you joy.*** Similarly, there are plenty of shit office jobs, but you can also find office-based jobs where very meaningful, challenging, purposeful and varied work takes place. There is no ‘dream job’. There’s a lot of different ways we can be happy.
I still feel that work is one of the most definitive aspects of our adult lives. It’s the bedrock on which the rest of our existence is built: it could consume your every waking hour, or it could help you to balance your life; it could take you around the world, or tie you to one town; it can grow you, shrink you, bring you joy and purpose, or cause you anxiety and make you ill. It can give you security and financial comfort, or it can have you struggling from one payday to the next.**** I have learnt, though, that your actual job title matters less than I believed it did as a child. Back then, I believed there was only one ‘true’ career for each person, one ‘dream’ job and if you didn’t find it, you’d be forever miserable. This is another way in which adulthood has surprised me: I have found joy and fulfilment, as well as anxiety and frustration, in a wide range of jobs. The job title had very little to do with it. It was almost always down to who I was working for, who I was working with, what we were striving for.
* I’ve already written about the way we tend to turn kids’ hobbies into CV building activities so feel free to give that a read, as well.
** You’re making your own jokes in your head, aren’t you?
*** And of course, the idea that you can only follow your passions by turning them into a career is another thing I’ve found to be false in adulthood. I’ve written about this before, but you don’t need to be paid to continue weaving the things you love through your life. No one’s paying me to run, act, write or paint, but I still do all of those things on a regular basis.
**** As a millennial, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of people who have enough passive income that they actually don’t need to work. They are invisible to me through the fog of my extreme jealousy.