Unfulfilled and Unfulfillable Ambitions

Well, that was fun. In early days I wanted to be an ad man, an artist, a natural foods baker, and a wooden boatbuilder. But all of those fields meant truckling to the rich, producing stuff of not much utility for people who already have too much.

So I became a nurse.

So, who knew that natural foods or wooden boatbuilding would be growth industries (my high school classmates founded Starbucks).

Nursing is a growth industry too, the problem is, the pool of available nurses grows much faster than the pool of money to pay them.

But it’s still nice not to deal with rich people.

I’d wanted to be a lawyer since I was about 10. Then I watched friends go to law school and saw what it did to their thinking, and decided I didn’t want that to happen to me.

So I’ve spend the last 5 or 6 years of my life desperately trying to avoid becoming a lawyer. This is made more difficult by the fact that from all indications I’d be an excellent lawyer. I’m dating a lawyer. But I went to business school, goddamn it, and I’m going to be a management consultant.

I found a job I enjoy and a degree I enjoyed and didn’t go to law school, and I consider this a substantial personal victory.

I was utterly lacking in ambition and had no inkling whatsoever what ‘I would be’ after I left high school. I did, for a time, attend a community college, largely at night, while working during the day. I knew one thing for certain: I did not want to follow my father’s footsteps into the corporate world, for he had gotten a job at IBM in the early ’60s, and I watched his politics and worldview slowly change as a result: from a committed liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican, in no small part owing to the influence of IBM’s corporate culture upon his worldview (after all, it did allow him and my mother to raise five of us in the comforts common to those of the middle class in the most affluent nation in the world). My mother was horrified when he voted for Nixon, and I think cognitive dissonance soon followed. I was also dimly aware of the fact that I resented anyone attempting to identify me with my occupation (e.g.: ‘What do you do?’—the conflation of ‘doing’ with ‘being’), perhaps a subliminal motivation for drifting from job-to-job over the years: I’ve worked as a dishwasher; cook’s helper; food service worker; amusement park ride operator; answering service switchboard operator (very briefly: turns out I simply couldn’t ‘multi-task’); laborer and silk-screener for a sign shop; stationary supplies delivery driver; truck driver (office furniture); laborer and truck route driver for a recycling center; trail construction worker and forest firefighter; construction laborer; bookstore clerk; medical lab driver; landscape maintenance worker; beekeeper’s helper; driver in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles (for the village at UC Santa Barbara); finish carpenter (job I held longest and by far the most satisfying) and now, part-time academic and landscape maintenance worker (I’ve left a few jobs out!). I did not enter the academic world until my early 40s, and am only tenuously tied to same (my dear wife wears the pants in our family, earning far more than I do at present).

I got the opportunity to teach while re-building the home of two of my former teachers (the parents of the travel writer, Time essayist, and now good friend, Pico Iyer). Their home burned to the ground in the ‘Painted Cave’ fire here some years ago, and during the construction process I occasionally had extended conversations with Mrs. Nandini Iyer, from whom I learned a bit of Sanskrit and other things while in the Dept. Of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara (I took classes in political theory from her late husband, Raghavan Iyer, author of a nonpareil study of Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy). She first asked me to substitute for her a few days at a time when she had to leave town…later I taught one of her classes an entire semester, and they eventually gave me a couple of my own courses, which meant I was able to hang up my toolbelt (it was easier to do a little landscape maintenance part-time than attempt to maintain clients in construction on a part-time basis [especially when most clients were extremely wealthy and very demanding], so my days as a finish carpenter were over). I’ve since published a few articles and encyclopedia entries and have a book contract to complete (through the good graces of Oliver Leaman in Philosophy at the University of Kentucky and Dennis Patterson in Law and Philosophy at Rutgers): in short, I’m doing the sorts of things I never would have imagined when I was a young whipper-snapper fresh out of school.

One more thing: experience has taught me that those academics who’ve never spent much time outside the ivory tower can be more than a wee bit strange. In other words, they would enormously benefit from a few sabbaticals engaged in manual labor, getting some dirt under their fingernails and so forth…(a voluntary decision, mind you).

physicist.

Got the BS degree, noticed the PhD’s were not getting jobs. Let my self get hired as a software engineer and never looked back. Having most of a career behind me, I can say with some certainthat that I probably made about the same with a BS as I would have earned with PhD had I stuck it out in physics. Sad to say.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a baseball player. By the time I got to junior high school I had acknowledged this was not going to happen. I spent most of high school uncertain what I wanted to do- law maybe? I went to MIT and started a bachelor’s degree in physics. I enjoyed the major but realized I wouldn’t enjoy the career. So I added a second degree in engineering. Its been everything I thought it could be. Not super exciting, but really the best possible job for me. I have thought about going into academia in the past, but I decided that wouldn’t really make sense for me.

I wanted to be a research physicist. Worked hard in high school to get into MIT, got math and physics degrees there.

The job still exists, but there are very few openings, especially compared to the number of applicants.

I became a programmer since it was the most congenial option once I decided it wasn’t worth the sacrifice to go through a Ph.D. Can’t say I’m especially happy in terms of life fulfillment, but it pays the bills and fits with my aptitudes and idiosyncrasies.

Now, the job programmer will still exist for a while, but it’s under pressure from oversupply and globalization.

Indeed, it was fun doing computer programming 25 years ago – but now? What can be more boring?

I wanted to be a vet–which probably would have been a good idea since I like hands-on applied science activities, have no particular interest in research and love animals. Then my mother told me that girls couldn’t be vets. So I decided to be a musician. I went to music school at 16 but on my own with a little money started reading philosophy–and stopped practicing. I got kicked out of music school after three months, decided to be a philosophy professor and never looked back. All these jobs still exist–and can’t, as far as I can see, be outsourced.

What strikes me about the kids I advise is their wild optimism. They think they can be anything, though most aren’t intensely interested in much of anything; lots are directionless and go for the current default: business.

I was overly pessimistic. I didn’t even know what jobs were out there and in any case once I got to high school at which point we were supposed to become “realistic” about career plans I assumed there weren’t many “realistic” options: if you went to college you’d be a teacher at some level in some subject or other–music teacher, English teacher, or whatever; if you didn’t go to college you’d be a secretary; if you couldn’t type you’d be a salesgirl or a waitress. There was some notion by that time that there were a few other possibilities, e.g. being a lawyer, but these possibilities were very, very far out and “unrealistic”–like wanting to be a movie star, a one in a million shot.

That was definitely overly pessimistic, even for the time at which I was going to school. But it still boggles me that students I advise simply don’t narrow the options to what’s feasible first and then choose from amongst the real possibillities, that they don’t even have the idea that some options aren’t feasible.

I take advising very seriously–I wish someone had given me a better idea of my options and given me the somewhat cynical advice I give students on how to work the system. But it’s hard because for the most part I’m dealing with kids who don’t have intense preferences or aversions, who don’t feel any sense of constraint whereas I’ve always had mega-intense preferences and aversions and have been intensely aware of contraints.

I wanted to be a poet, and then I realized how bad the pay was. I’m an educational technologist now, which allows me the benefit of hands-on practical work combined with the intellectual activity of research without the sword of tenure hanging over my head. I think I would have made a good lawyer (andrew, like you I have that sense and my friends keep telling me so). And I still sometimes long to be a “real” writer, that is, to make a living writing. But the blog is a good outlet and there’s no real pressure there.

And by the way, my husband does design robots and abb1, when the programming involves making robots play soccer, it’s not boring at all.

Only one? that must be a record for me! Fixed, thanks.

…when the programming involves making robots play soccer, it’s not boring at all.

Programming is pretty much like stenography these days. Okay, fine: suppose you’re Albert Einstein’s stenographer. Still boring.

When I was 7, I wanted to be a writer.

Now I’m 39, I am a writer.

(Between 7 and 17 I wanted to be a bunch of things, vet, naturalist, pilot, the usual show: but mostly, I wanted to be a writer. Monomania accomplishes things.)

I wanted to be a diplomat, then entertained being a lawyer. Finally I decided I wanted to become a computer game designer. And that’s what I’m doing now.

Etat:

Career as an anarchist? I admit to never having thought of that as a career option…however, one could always be a ‘philosophical anarchist’ of sorts, and hold down any number of jobs meanwhile.

And I don’t think ‘alternative America’ has ever had ‘lots to offer in the way of working in collectives, cooperatives, and other alternatives to mainstream employment,’ rather, at one time and in a few places, America had more folks willing to create and commit to such options: today, sincere hippies or countercultural types diggin’ in for the long haul are conspicuous by their absence. Still, I’ve known quite of few individuals who did such things as begin and staff community credit unions, ‘free’ community health clinics, food co-cooperatives and small-scale organic farms, communal housing, humane-scale community and political activism, and the like, and/or work very-low income jobs so as to pursue their full-time dreams in writing, journalism, or one of the arts, such that it truly could be said, ‘O shit, I forgot to have a career!’ Some of these individuals are still around, they haven’t, as we used to say ‘sold out’ (like Bob Dylan making ads for Victoria’s Secret), that is, they’ve held true and fast to fundamental values and principles that obligate them to pursue what Buddhists term ‘right livelihood’ (of course they may not be Buddhists). They include, for example, our VW mechanic and his sister: honest, hard-working, of the utmost integrity, they listen all day long to public radio, keep abreast of current political and cultural topics and developments locally, nationally and abroad, support and shop at businesses that likewise evidence fidelity to principles and practices that preclude exploiting one’s workers or taking advantage of customers, etc. They’re more articulate, say, about housing issues or foreign policy matters than any of the pundits in our local media. They remember what was best about the ’60s and are still nurturing the products of seeds that germinated in that period: they live and act in a manner that evidences their refusal to worship the Almighty Dollar, they are not conspicuous consumers, they are not solipsistic or selfish, nor do they believe one must act as we if the life we live is by design or default, a Hobbesian state of affairs at once solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (it may at times and for some, be any number of those things, yet we refuse to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, our lot by fate), they are not enchanted by the latest technological gizmo or gadget although they appreciate mechanical ingenuity or technological sophistication as much as anyone, they believe ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ is a slogan rich with meaning that reverberates to this day, and so forth and so on.

Yes, in many respects, these are darker times, but there’s virtue in persevering in spite of all that…. Fortunately, if we look hard enough, we’ll find individuals still living exemplary lives characterized by eudaimonia, by the instantiation of values and the kind of flourishing Robert Nozick (yes, I know, I’m a Marxist citing Nozick–but truth is truth, whoever or wherever the source) memorably wrote about on pp. 510-514 of Philosophical Explanations (1981). Without specifying or elaborating upon the values Nozick had in mind, he elsewhere reminds us that ‘We are to care about, accept, support, affirm, encourage, protect, guard, praise, seek, embrace, serve, be drawn toward, be attracted by, aspire toward, strive to realize, foster, express, nurture, delight in, respect, be inspired by, take joy in, resonate with, be loyal to, be dedicated to, and celebrate values. …[W]e are to be elevated by, enthralled by, love, adore, revere, be exalted by, be awed before, find ecstasy in these highest values.’ That should suffice, be it in the ’60, ’70s or today. Some are fortunate enough to find a vocation that fits, and still pay the bills, the rest of us will have to remain content with jobs that at least allow us to pursue worthy lives that carry on the dreams and ideals, principles and practices, sown in the sixties.

I wanted to be a field archeologist until I was 15 but went on to study Computer Science instead. Now I design and build networks and do applied research and analysis. But I’m (at 26) still not really sure this is what I want to do.

John Quiggin,

Lord knows we need more economists interested in economics, and not theory as such, or for its own sake (leave that to the mathematicians), otherwise it’s so much talent and intelligence wasted (thinking here of the common or public good). We need economists like Tibor de Scitovsky, John Kenneth Galbraith, E.F. Schumacher, Juliet Schor, Richard Freeman, David Schweickart, Amartya Sen, Serge Kolm, Jean Dreze, John Roemer, Richard Thaler, Partha Dasgupta, Deirdre McCloskey, Michael McPherson, Philip Mirowski, Kaushik Basu, etc., etc. To be sure, philosophy of economics and economic theory is important, but it sure helps to have it make some connection with economics on the ground, or it’s so much intellectual masturbation (yes, it brings pleasure, but of a selfish sort). Neo-classical economists are often quite adept with the rhetoric of mathematical formalism, so much so they sever all ties with economic history and ‘real world’ economies (McCloskey’s complaint; by comparison, Platonic Forms are rather practical). Those of us in the proverbial Platonic cave need economists to return now and then from the Agathon, after all, the dialectic is ascending AND descending, as Iris Murdoch, among others, reminds us.

I’ve wanted to be a sci/tech person of some sort as far back as I can remember. Until age 12 or so this was a more or less undifferentiated “scientist/researcher/geek in lab coat” sort of wish; then when I discovered computer programming it specialized to that; then it swung toward pure math, then recently back to computer programming when I discovered that there were two subsets of academic math jobs:

A. ones I could actually get
B. ones I would be happy doing

and while both A and B were actually fairly large, they were unfortunately disjoint.

Funnily enough, though, this is the first time in my life I’ve had absolutely no idea what I want to be in 5-10 years.

Intriguing… am I the only one who didn’t so much want to be something but rather someone in his youthful search for a place in life?

I can remember wanting to be, alternatively, James Bond (ages about 8 through 12), Joe Strummer (12-15), Frank Lloyd Wright/Howard Roarke (15-19), Ludwig Wittgenstein (19-22), and Saul Bellow (22-28), before finally giving in and becoming, with much less celebration (and a fair amount of chagrin) myself. We’ll see how that goes… not bad so far, to be honest.

In the meantime, Patrick–your later-in-life–ascent to academe (if I’m reading you right) is inspiring. I had more than half given up on America’s providing second chances (especially in its universities), but I’m happy to see that I’m proven wrong. But then, logicguru’s post seems to reaffirm, in the face of your experience (and shouts out from a former Marine, long-haul truck driver, masonry laborer, etcetera), that the way through the gate to the path of higher (and fiercely competitive) social goods is a straight and narrow one, indeed.

I wanted to be a theoretical physicist for most of my youth. I changed my mind after my first year of university and decided on software development. I’d been programming since I was a kid so it wasn’t exactly a stretch. I love my job.

abb1: Programming is pretty much like stenography these days.

Bollocks it is. The work that I do is closer to poetry than stenography. Sure, programming can be like that, if you work in the sort of intellectually and creatively bankrupt shop where they think software development is analagous to a manufacturing production line. However, at least in London, it is easy enough to find challenging, well-paid work that those sort of jobs can be avoided.

I forgot to mention that my brief Trotskyist period was during ages 15 and 16. Make of that what you will.

5-18: Honest Politican. Turned out that occupation never existed.

Ever since I read Descartes at the age of 15, I wanted to be just like him. It took me a while to realize that that meant having no job for the rest of my life, following a brief professional participation in a world-historic conflict. These days, I make like Spinoza by grinding an occasional lens.