This is an excellent, excellent question, and I’ve been thinking about exactly this in the past few days. I’ll be on a show tomorrow to talk about this, actually, but since it’s not in English, I’ll explain my thinking here.
People ask, “how do I choose a profession? How do I decide what to become?” This is an outdated approach that worked in 1953 but causes pain and suffering in the reality we currently inhabit. Professions disappear. They get wiped out daily. If they don’t get wiped out, they get transformed beyond all recognition. What is my job, for example?
Is it a college professor? A scholar? A translator, an author, a university administrator?
No, no, and no.
My job is being Clarissa. I bring my skills, personality and way of being into different arenas, and since these skills and personality are good, I monetize them well in these different arenas. But these arenas aren’t me. I’m me.
When I describe the dismantling of my university, people assume I’m miserable. But I’m the opposite. Campus is where I come to practice my hobbies, pursue my projects of personal and intellectual growth, and use the resources available here to do that. It’s like when you are driving and you see police congregate around two vehicles that crashed. You feel compassion for the people involved but the crash isn’t really affecting you in any way. You are in your own car, going to your own destination. There might be a delay on the road because of the crash but you are still going towards your own goal.
I knew from very early in life that I need to arrange my existence in a way that will give me a lot of time to read, think, be by myself and live the life of contemplation. I’ve achieved that, I’m content, and everything else is other people’s car crash.
The disaffected, uninterested people from the original question went about choosing their profession in the opposite way of what actually works. They chose a field and then tried to squeeze themselves into it. That’s onerous and soon gets boring and heavy. The right way to do it is not to place yourself in a field but to place a job inside your way of being. Then, it becomes one of the many places where you enjoy the life that’s optimal to you. I love reading, so I organized my life around me reading. For others, it’s going to be something completely different but they should figure that out first and decide that this something will be their guiding light, so to speak.
Yes, what I’m saying is neoliberalism on steroids. I know that better than anybody but I look, for example, on the quit-lit academics who tied their entire sense of self to being an academic, and that’s not a fun place to be. I was a teenager when the USSR fell apart, and everybody simultaneously lost their professions. There were many people who were destroyed by it, and I knew even back then that I didn’t want this for myself.
In short, a job shouldn’t give you meaning. You have to find meaning and then bring it wherever you go, be it a job or a trip to the grocery store.
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