A couple weeks ago, I had a conversation with a young man who was very intent on becoming an HVAC technician. He told me his plans: in a couple months, he would enroll in a local AC company’s apprenticeship program. Precisely a year later, he would graduate and start his own AC service company. Four years after that, he would get married and start having children. He had not stopped there, though. Eighteen-odd years after that, his children would go to work.
Their careers? Perhaps unsurprisingly, HVAC technicians.
His meticulously planned ambitions left me uneasy. Economically, all the more power to him. But, outside of that, it seemed that he had tried to plan randomly occurring events with such a degree of precision as to take all the joy out of those events actually occurring.
It seemed that he had reduced the scope of his life to something mechanistically flat.
When hearing this story in particular, I think it’s easy to come to this conclusion, perhaps because his aspirations are relatively mundane.
What if, though, he had used the same set of goals to say he wanted to become a brain surgeon? Or an investment banker, a corporate lawyer?
I think we’d view him a little differently. Perhaps we’d describe him as aspirational, as driven.
Why, though? Simply because those kinds of jobs are higher paid?
Because they require more education? This is one possibility, as education can help us expand our boundaries; here, we can explore things that aren’t necessarily related to our career ambitions.
But I think the implication when people make career-obsessed statements is that they will not make use of these opportunities. Instead, they will only focus on the opportunities to maximize their economic potential. ‘Why am I learning this? I’ll never use it in my job,’ is something that I think all of us have heard, and probably many of us have thought.
This thinking is reflected in the courses we choose to take. You can count on about one hand the number of mainstream electives on campus.
That’s not due to a lack of courses available to us. There’s plenty of classes we could take, it’s just that nobody signs up for them. When was the last time most of us considered putting speech, creative writing, or comprehensive law on our course request forms? That’s just to name a few.
Of course, academics has something to do with this. If these had been AP classes, would people take them? I think so.
But it’s also undeniable that many people feel that these types of classes are, to put it bluntly, useless.
Let’s do a thought experiment. For the sake of argument, you want to become the lead trinket engineer at a large corporation. To achieve this, you seek out all the trinket engineering courses in high school, devote all your spare time to trinket extracurriculars, and eventually attend college to major in Applied Trinkets. Deep down, you think that all this will pay off, that making seven figures at that corporation will make you happy.
What if, though, in the blind pursuit of trinketry, you had completely missed something else that would have made you equally, if not more, happy and fulfilled? Would you, with very narrow (albeit very good) knowledge of trinkets, be a good citizen, a good voter in our republic? Would you have a firm grasp of the issues in our society, or even of your own preferences and interests?
Or would you have totally shaped your life into the mold Big Trinket wanted you to? In effect, would you have just become a very elaborate trinket-designing robot?
It’s no stretch of the imagination to see how this pattern could apply to virtually any career imaginable.
It’s extremely easy to quantify success, to group ourselves based on numbers.
It’s even easier to avoid anything that could possibly detract from our number, whether that’s a salary or a GPA.
There’s so much more to life than numbers, though. By devoting ourselves to chasing the highest number, I think we’re robbing ourselves of something more meaningful.
If there’s a class that interests you but doesn’t necessarily fit your career goals, I challenge you to take it. That’s what it’s there for, and you don’t get many other chances to explore your interests.
Don’t just take the easy way out.