Career Selection, Passion or Money?

Many college students—like myself—are faced with the question of whether to pick a career of passion and enjoyment, or of fiscal responsibility. We often look to our elders for help, and as you would expect, the vast majority of them tell us to invest in a career that will allow us to live comfortably. They don’t say this to hinder our happiness, but rather to ensure that our lives aren’t filled with struggle and sadness. They have lived longer. They understand the responsibilities and hardships that life can bring. They don’t have the youthful hope and excitement that we do, though they long for it.

On the contrary, when we ask our contemporaries for advice, they say, “go for it!” They tell us that we can do anything if we put our mind to it. They will say something like, “If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then what is the point of living?” The youthful exuberance and hope is quite evident. It’s this blissful courageousness from which monumental change occurs, though not often enough. Unfortunately the mantra, “You can do anything if you put your mind to it”, is not evidentially true. If it were, there would be no unemployment, starvation, suffering, homelessness etc. I’m sure many people around the world are putting their minds to work on things that will provide them with no financial or mental satisfaction. The world is cruel and unfair. The fact of the matter is—in order to be successful—we must also be lucky.

After hearing the various pieces of advice, we will need to make one of the toughest decisions we have yet faced in our young lives. Do we go to art school and pursue our love of painting? Or do we study engineering and certainly have no problems getting a good job when we graduate. Do we study drama and pursue our dream of one day making it in a successful broadway production? Or do we go to law school and be a picturesque successful lawyer? These are the question that college age students ponder everyday. Even still, we are the lucky ones. We are the ones that have the opportunity to pursue higher learning of any sort—many others do not.

To quote the famous 20th century philosopher, Alan Watts:

“What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

Let’s suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, “we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do”. So I always ask the question, “what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?

When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually turn it — you could eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much.

That’s everybody is — somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like, in order to go on spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow in the same track.

See what we are doing, is we’re bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it’s all retch, and no vomit it never gets there.

And so, therefore, it’s so important 
to consider this question: What do I desire?”

The persuasive and elegantly stated argument from Watts resonates with me. That’s not to say that he is completely right. What he describes is tremendously difficult. The mastery of a subject isn’t something that happens too often—for if it did— it wouldn’t be so valued. I don’t see the struggle between a career of enjoyment and the career of fiscal reward as a black and white issue. It’s tremendously grey—as is life. The right decision is dependent on a multitude of factors. How long can you bear not having enough money in order to pursue a dream? What is your threshold? Do you want an comfortable life, or a life of meaning?

When I look at the decision I must make, I think I’d rather lean of the side of hope. I’d rather be blissfully ignorant to my possibility of failure. Do you ever wonder why people wish to be young again? Is it because of the feeling we are experiencing right now? Is it the reckless abandon of the “sensible decision”? Isn’t that what it means to be young? To live! I will do what I love if it takes me to the end of the earth and back—not because I find it sensible—but precisely because I find it not sensible.