Is “What do you like to do?” an important question when choosing a career path? Do you need to choose a career path?
What I mean is, career paths are all well and good because people can trade goods and services efficiently that way in an era when each field is too complicated for anyone to learn more than one or two…
What do I like to do? Play games? Run races? Read books, watch movies? Listen to music? Talk to people?
As we all pretty much know by considering it for a second, all these can be reduced to ego and pattern seeking.
Training and practicing to win games or athletic competitions is done in the hope of winning, and therefore being the ‘winner,’ and then experiencing the good feeling that follows.
Doing jobs with a large social element feeds the ego as well, albeit with different chemicals in the brain being involved (or so I assume anyhow).
When we can connect patterns accurately, our brains reward us chemically as well, which is how we can experience ‘chills’ from music and sometimes poetry.
So my point is, how we feel while doing a job ought not to be the primary consideration. If it is, then we end up choosing our jobs based on what entertains us. Each generation gets accustomed to more entertainment until it ends up owning us. Marriage, family, religions, careers, and everything else get chosen based on “What I want in my life” and not according to what must be done.
So the first question that needs to be asked is just that: What must be done? What role requires me in order to be filled?
I wrote a little about that a few weeks ago because it came up in a discussion I was a part of. It basically boils down to protecting and serving first your family, then your larger ethnic group.
How can I be so sure of this? Because every tendency we have, moral and otherwise, can be traced back to fighting for our genetic interests.
If you see someone trapped underneath a car, and you are needed in order to save that person’s life, most of us wouldn’t stop to consider whether we would be enjoying ourselves. If we do that in determining our career paths, or our friends, or what we buy or how we spend our time, isn’t it equally as absurd?
Maybe a significant amount of your time needs to be spent relaxing…well ok. Then relaxing serves the wider purpose of recharging your body and spirit and allowing you to be more effective when it’s time to get back to work. I sense that there’s often an inverse relationship between cultures that desire excess entertainment and those who actually take a step back and relax…or maybe I’m imagining things.
But things get tricky because sometimes, or even all the time, even our deepest inner-compass can turn us away from what’s important…
Ah well, what must be done right now is several essays which I’ll get back to. I’ll try and enjoy myself…
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