The Myth of the “Perfect” Career
What do you want to be when you grow up? We are asked when we are young. Usually, we know the answer, a police man, a firefighter, a doctor, a lawyer etc. This is a question that our entire life ends up being based around. At least 65 years of our life. So it is seen as a rather important one. The important task of finding the perfect career.
What is the perfect career? What does it mean to have a career? What is a career? We are often told that after High School and in College we must find the perfect career. That we must learn one specific trade within one specific field and that be our entire life.
We are taught that if we do not go to college than we will be stuck with the terrible jobs and the jobs that are undesirable. That college is not a experience or a right, but a means to achieve a higher social status. It is this petty-bourgeois mindset that is a poison of the Capitalist society. A poison to the working class. The poison of the “American Dream”. That wage slavery is acceptable and that if you work hard, you will be better off than your parents.
We are also taught that if you fail academically in college or in high school that there are people who are meant to “flip burgers”. These people looked down upon and mocked in society. They are seen as what you don’t want to be.
As my experience thus far in college I have learned one thing; That college is a bourgeois institution meant to endorse the status quo. Opinion is taught as objective fact, especially in economic, business, and a social science classes. When people go to college they come out thousands of dollars in debt and do not always find work, especially if students choose to graduate in not STEM related majors. Which makes me question if you are a STEM major why not just go to a tech or vocational school? The fact these jobs don’t exist though after students graduate shows direct flaws with the Capitalist system.
As time has gone on since than, I have reflected on the entire concept of a career. The best way to look at a career is to say what would you enjoy renting yourself to as a wage slave for the rest of your life? If you jump through the right hoops you can have one type of misery that is slightly better than another type of misery.
That is what work is. This is not me just being cynical, it is wage slavery. The reality of Capitalism is that no career, no matter how much you think you will enjoy it will be perfect. This is by the design of Capitalism, the fact is, you are selling yourself. Sure if your going to sell yourself you might as find a way of selling yourself you some what enjoy, yet when you think about it, how can you truly enjoy selling hours of your life away for a salary that gives you the ability to survive.
To focus on finding ones career and finding a career that one feels is perfect is just a distraction that the Capitalist Class uses to keep people from revolting. The perfect career doesn’t exist and will never exist.
How did I come to this conclusion?
I took a course my first semester as a freshman in college to decide what my major should be. The course taught us things we should think about when considering a career. Well after I took that career class my freshman year, I realized I really like Political Science and History. I decided that I would like to go into academia and get a PhD. However, I realized after sometime that I had been to focused on this dream of mine. That there might be a possibility that this doesn’t happen, which I have come to accept.
I saw being in academia giving me the possibility studying things I really care about but after reflecting on a career in Academia, I realized that in my research I’ll have to offer a solution, especially if I go into Political Science. Since academia is mainly a institution that holds up the status quo and ideology of the Bourgeois, I realized that it may become difficult to do and make this path very challenging, considering my views stray strongly against the status quo, Capitalism, and Liberalism. Yet I would like to challenge this idea. I have decided myself that I will attempt to pursue this path knowing that it will be a difficult journey with unknown end results.
One might ask the question if I see College and the University in such a negative light, why would one continue to go? Because there really is no other option for most. It is one way to slightly better ones condition and it should be looked at as a experience, to better yourself as a person. College should not be seen as commodity to advance your social class position.
However, there is one final thing that must be considered when thinking about the concept of the perfect career. The next economic Crisis and collapse. If there is another economic crisis, which leads to the economy collapsing, the likeliness of me going to graduate school would be slim. The likelihood of all the undergraduate students going on to get decent paying jobs would be extremely unlikely. The unpredictability of the market, demystifies the idea of the perfect career.
The concept of getting the perfect career, a career that you can do for the rest of your life, makes one glaring mistake. It makes the mistake of assuming that Capitalism, the foundation of the “career”, is monolithic. It is not at some point it will collapse and it will be overthrown.
The chains of the Capitalist “career” wage slavery will be and must be abolished. The problem is not finding the perfect career, the problem is that we need to find a career.
This does not mean that I am opposed to work, nor does it imply I am just against working for another person. Work can be rewarding and is important to the functioning of society. Labor will never fully disappear, nor should anyone call for “the abolition of work”. What I oppose is the end of that work. How it operates and how it functions. What I am against is a system that is driven by profit, commodity production, money, greed, senseless competition, selfish individualism, mindless consumption,private ownership and massive inequality.
