Making Life Choices
George Monbiot offers some excellent career advice in an essay called “Choose Life”.
Many of the examples pertain to journalism, but I think it has a lot to offer for any one searching for a direction in life (or work) :
The first advice I would offer is this: be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you. In journalism school, for example, students are routinely instructed that, though they may wish to write about development issues in Latin America, in order to achieve the necessary qualifications and experience they must first spend at least three years working for a local newspaper, before seeking work for a national newspaper, before attempting to find a niche which brings them somewhere near the field they want to enter.
What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution. You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently, across the years…
This career path, in other words, is counter-educational. It teaches you to do what you don’t want to do, to be what you don’t want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all.
My second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable.
… when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – upon their walls.
Amen to that!
Update 2023: Having spent 25+ years working in a variety of organizations and industries (including a few entrepreneurial stints), I can attest to the fact that “choosing Life” is the path for me. I should also point out to readers that it comes with its own costs and tradeoffs – ones that I have agreed to – for the benefits this choice offers. Chief among those benefits is the ability to live Life on my terms.
The advice offered may resonate well with those who have a dream and a passion for something.Many of us are led to conventional careers only because we have material needs to support our lifestyles even if we wished otherwise. Organisations never claim to enrich you out of an alruistic spirit, instead they emphasize that your development is aligned with the organisation’s.that is a caveat we cannot afford to ignore as standard mumbo-jumbo.you will work for the organisation because you are compensated for it.never are you forced to trade your liberty and compromise your growth for the organisation’s ends.we dig ourselves deeper because we have enslaved ourselves to the comforts and trappings of the good life that money and only money can get for you. It is true you may get disillusioned eventually having found nothing of lasting value.I say that those who have a spark to ignite their passion for anything worthwhile are indeed rare.the conventional path tires them sooner than it does the plebeians.If you seek satisfaction and liberation from the humdrum life and have the wherewithal to support yourself while you work on your own terms, then by all means follow this advice.But stay rooted in reality and do not forget your circumstances.In summary i like the spirit of the advice but not all may be ready to take it to heart.Idealism must be tempered with pragmatism, for life is not perfect as we would like it to be.
* Editor’s Reply *It is, indeed, rare to find those “who have a dream and a passion to follow their dreams” only because there is no one to tell us in our formative years that such an option exists. I am hoping that this blog and other posts like Monbiot’s essay will eventually change that.Further, when you say that “organizations emphasize that your development is aligned with their’s”, it is merely another way of saying that the individual’s development will be taken care of only if it happens to further the firm’s objective. This, we all know, is not possible for the majority of us.What you say is right to the extent that the route Monbiot proposes is not for the very weak-hearted, but it does not demand extreme courage either. The advice he offers *is* pragmatic, not ideal. His ideas give us the truth about the rat race, and offer some invaluable advice to help us get by.At the end of the day, even if this writing is able to affect one human being improve his life choices, it would be effort well rewarded.
The organisations we work for have their considerations while contributing to our personal development.in supporting us to develop, they would want a happy and a satisfied lot to enjoy their experience at work while contributing to the growth of the organisation at best or just extract value from their investment in skills they can use to achieve their narrow ends at worst.Do even we have a moral right to expect our organisations to promote our development when they have a clearly defined charter ? Our development in the context of the organisation has to necessarily dovetail with that of the latter’s. There are glorious exceptions to this reality with some companies truly making an effort to let the employees discover their potential in rewarding pursuits outside of work so as to energise themselves but it stops there. when we believe we have lost our bearings in a setting we must exit.In a country like ours especially in the urban setting where a fierce competition is on to grab a few prized seats and the lucrative opportunities they spawn,it is not uncommon nor unreasonable for parents to want to act as benevolent dictators in influencing the paths of their wards.those who display extraordinary skills are lucky to have their way.My message is that people should pause sometime in their lives preferably when they are young to contemplate on the finiteness among other things of life to pursue fulfilling goals that can draw on their innate strengths which lie hidden within us