Definition By Career (continued)

In reference to my previous post; Definition By Careerhere are two more thoughts on the subject. First is an advertisement for a company soliciting services for “career development” and resume writing. The second is what Emerson had to say on the subject.

“Why would anyone want to spend their days doing something they did not excel at and didn't really enjoy? Click the underlined text below and your computer will waft you off to a ________ Institute web page that tells you about our programs and services for people who do not want to spend their life as a career zombie, stuck in a boring, lifeless job where each day you wish you were somewhere else. If you are not sure what sort of job you are looking for, you will most likely wind up in something that turns out to be just a "job." In a "job" you exchange your life for money. It is possible to choose a career that will fit you so well that you do it because you like to go to work. At ________ Institute we offer career counseling, coaching and testing programs for people committed to choosing a new career direction for a lifetime of satisfaction and success. Our services, available worldwide and consistently commended for excellence since 1981, are for people who realize that choosing the best possible career direction is one of the most important decisions they will ever make.”

You see here, they too have recognized the pressure society puts on its citizens to develop a “career” as opposed to a “job,” the difference of course being ultimate fulfillment and joy, and have marketed a product/service to capitalize on this fear of so-called failure. It’s just one more case to prove my point that society has instilled this feeling in us. Again I do not deny that it is possible to find work which is more enjoyable than some. I simply maintain that it’s not necessary to levy a lifetime of searching or remorse for failing to find that “career fulfillment.” I further state that it is unfair, and unrealistic, for every man to be held to this “standard” for “career placement.”

The following is one more case to enforce my point that one can, and should, take pride in any job they perform if it accomplishes their goals and requirements for their life. As opposed to allowing society to splinter us into feeling like the lowest common denominator of laborers.

Excerpted from The American Scholar, an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.

“It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, -present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, -a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.”