bombs in bottles
I was attaching hardware cloth to the chicken run this morning, and I thought "this isn't half bad; I wouldn't mind a job that involved building wildlife or farm cages."
And then I heard my parents' and teachers' voices in my head, in chorus: "oh, but that doesn't pay very well."
...And then I had to put the cordless drill down for a second, because Reader: Why was my parents' generation so utterly obsessed with whether a job "paid well"?
My parents are Boomers. Neither of them has ever wanted for a job that paid a living wage. Sometimes the margin was slim, but they always made ends meet - and by "ends meet" I mean "had shelter, food, utilities, transportation, and medical care covered at the same time." They owned two houses outright before they turned 35. Today, they're multimillionaires, and if they split up, they'd each still be a multimillionaire. And my dad didn't even work full-time for years! (He worked part-time and spent the rest doing unpaid field research, which is where I learned things like how to detach a tick and where to find endangered orchids and turtle species.)
These were people who freely admitted - moaned, even - that their job(s) did not "pay well," yet they had a secure middle-class life on one income.
They were giving me this "sage advice" during a time when it didn't matter if a job "paid well" or not - chances were good you were still going to be okay. Poverty still existed, and the Reagan administration did its damndest to make sure as many of us experienced it as possible (a game they are winning to this day). But a lot fewer people were suffering from it. The gray area between "doesn't pay well" and "won't keep you alive" was far broader than it is today.
Yet here were my parents, my teachers, and nearly every other adult in my life, shooting down every single career that interested me with "that doesn't pay well." Even when all or nearly all of those career ideas paid plenty for one person to live on. (I'll grant that "astronaut ballerina" was unlikely to pay off.)
I genuinely do not understand the Boomer obsession with work that "paid well" over work that made one happy, or served others, or contributed something useful to the world. This was the generation that experienced *less* want than any generation before or since. Was it the collective mental illness of greed talking? Or something else?
My dad, he of the "work as little as possible so you can do what you really want" persuasion, was the one exception. He gave me one piece of career advice, repeatedly, so stridently that even now I hear it in my head in all caps: "GET A JOB YOU LIKE."
I ended up taking both his spoken and his lived advice: "do just enough work to subsist, then turn on (your life), tune in (to your actual passions) and drop out (of the rat race)." These days it feels almost unethical to do otherwise.
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