I have a dream. It seems to me that this epoch-making statement, immortalised by Abba (and some civil rights guy), applies to fewer of us than you might think, especially when it comes to careers. I really don’t know that many people who feel they are following a calling. Most of us don’t have the jobs we told our school career advisors we wanted – and, moreover, we act as though we don’t really want those jobs any more. We’ve grown up; we’re realists now. Expecting one’s daily toil to be meaningful and fun is a piece of childhood naivety.
This disparity between childhood aspiration and adult reality is not necessarily a bad thing. When I was a child, all the boys I knew wanted to be astronauts or soldiers, and all the girls wanted to be nurses. Picture a world full of soldiers fighting nurses while everyone else is in space, looking down in horror, and you’ll appreciate that sober realism has its plusses.
Incidentally, I told my career guidance counsellor I wanted to be a Bodhissatva. That is, I wanted to selflessly defer my entrance to nirvana until all sentient beings had been liberated from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. (Perhaps you went through the same phase.) My counsellor, a canny woman, told me that ‘all sentient beings’ would probably prefer me to vanish into nirvana as soon as possible, where I wouldn’t require them to fund my wiggy new-age lifestyle with their taxes.
Of course, some children who say they want to be astronauts do end up being astronauts. For all I know, some children who say they want to be bank proof operators end up being astronauts. But listen, all of us who bother to get up and work every day to pay taxes to maintain the army of Neighbours-watching dole-scrounging would-be Boddhisatvas deserve more than just a pay cheque (or BACS payment) for our toils. We deserve a big slab of happiness, delivered daily, with a side order of fun and some dips of meaningfulness and maybe an After Eight before we go home to watch Neighbours, which we’ve videoed.
That is why I, the most junior member of HTS , a boutique (read: small) IT recruitment company , decided to hoodwink talk my boss into letting me be the company blogger. I did it because I wanted to open up a forum in which people – especially people in recruitment – could discuss how we can make life better for those of us who work hard most days of our lives. And because I wanted to be able to say to people that I am a blogger, rather than an admin clerk.
So you are witnessing the realisation of a small dream. I am aware that when I tell people I’m a blogger, they will assume that I mean I am unemployed. But so what? The child I once was, had he known what ‘blogging’ meant, would have dropped that stupid Bodhissatva aspiration like a hot rock and cried, ‘That’s what I want to do!’
Of course, if I’d known about blogging in 1985, I could theoretically have invented the internet myself. And you, my friend, would be living in a very different world.
It may not be feasible for you and me to undo years of ‘realism’ overnight and decide to follow our childhood dreams. That path may leave us unemployed and living on the streets eating mice. But we can surely make what we’re doing now a little dreamier, can we not?
