Careers

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

More than once in Agatha Christie’s novels, I came across a phrase that used to puzzle me: “I/she disapprove/s of marriage as a career for women.”

Being a thoroughly post-modern Millie, who came of age in the early eighties, that just didn’t scan. A marriage was not a career. It was something you did for love, or, increasingly, didn’t do at all in Europe at least. Because who needs a paper, if you’re in love after all?

Later, when I was a young mother, mired in diapers kid spit up and the older kid being just smart and accomplished enough to magnify the mess. (Not that he was a terribly bad kid, but he did things like eat the cat food, or attempt to help in very strange ways.) I came across an article in some magazine (I don’t remember which, and if I’d bought a housekeeping or women’s magazine it would be for a recipe or a craft thing. But I’d have read it anyway) where some woman tried to be cutesy and compare being a mother to a corporate career. Where she — and I at the time — were mired was the factory floor, in our coveralls, and we couldn’t keep clean or do anything but just barely manage the brutal work. She talked about ome day being like her mom, who — with kids out of the house — could have lunch meetings with her peers, and keep her hair and clothes beautiful.

At the time I kind of chuckled, and it gave me hope of a time when my entire house didn’t smell of sour milk.

….. Since then I’ve both come to believe that yes, indeed, marriage is a career and that the progression is more or less what that woman had outlined in jest.

Look, careers are a slippery thing. Most people, when they envision careers see themselves in business attire and progressing till they’re the VIP of some company. That — even for college graduates, even for those with graduate degrees — describes may 1 to 2% of careers.

Most people not only don’t have that star studded path, but they don’t really have anything resembling a “career.” What they do have is “jobs.” Meaning they go in, they work a day, they get laid off, get another job. In my lifetime (husband and I entered the market in the mid to late eighties) even jobs have no security whatsoever, and because of changes in tech and economy, you’re likely to have two or three different fields of jobs over the years you’re employed. It might be even in the same general “field” but the subfields will be wildly different, or how the job is accomplished will be completely different.

Although we sell every young person the bright dream of the “career” it is unlikely their job will have any coherence or much satisfaction.

In fact, let me add, for most normal, functional human beings, it was always like that. Your job is something you have and do so that you can fulfill your life’s plan and purpose and find satisfaction elsewhere.

Yes, some of us are broken and not in any way shape or form functional human beings, and do find quite a bit of satisfaction in what we do for money. (Glares. Stop the smirking please.) In my case, that is writing. But my husband derives as much satisfaction from programing and head-breaking mathematical puzzles (which are sometimes the same.)

Even then, there’s a difference between your art or craft that you do and enjoy and your job or career. No matter ho much you enjoy your work, particularly these days (because there’s some fundamental breakages in how things are done) but probably always, honestly, there’s always vexations, bad bosses, parts of the job you don’t enjoy at all.

As much I love writing, there were times I would have turned in my writing career — willingly — for a glass of water, then poured the water out on the ground. Except that…. well, baby needed shoes, and expensive college books, and did they really outgrow those pants again? And oh, yeah, we probably should have the money to go see my parents, because they’re getting on in years. So I stayed on, even when writing was a pain and a source of stress.

BUT I did have that other career, the one writing supported. And there I did progress from the spit up years to the middle manager years, where I was mediating their education to, eventually, the executive suite, where my job was to figure out how to network and help them if I could. And–

Because the only satisfying career most of us will have is our personal life: Marriage, sure, or family, or just our friends and our social connections. (I will point out a lot of the women who disapproved of marriage as a career for women were spinsters, so their career was …. looking after the broader family and working for the village in various ways.)

But that’s most likely to always and still be our most important career and the mark we live in the world.

Having people preferentially chase “careers” has created an unreasonable expectation that your jobs will be wildly satisfying and lead to “careers.”

And then we wonder why people are upset.

Business is business. It’s what you do to live, not your life.

Find your satisfaction and purpose in something else, or you’ll be unhappy your whole life.

75 thoughts on “Careers”

  2. I have a saying I use when describing yur choice of a job.

    There are three things about your choice – do you like it, are you good at it, and will somebody pay you to do it? If you have found a job that has a ‘yes’ to all three of those, stop right there, it’s as good as you’ll ever get in a job.

    It took me more than a few decades, but sometime when my kids were in their school years, I realized what I am is a “father”. All the other stuff I do supports that. It isn’t something thrust upon me, or even something I chose to be, it’s really who and what I am, deep down in my soul.

    I’m good with that.

    Liked by 6 people

    1. I got lucky on those three questions. Not so lucky in working too long as an underpaid employee of an exploitative organization, but it did pay enough…just barely, sometimes not quite, but we scraped by somehow…to let my wife stay home and make raising the kids her career in a town where she and the kids were happy. A few years ago, I managed to escape to a place that pays double my previous salary and generally treats its people well, so it’s all good in the end, I guess.

      It’s a job that isn’t prone to technological disruption either, which is very nice on the security front. Might be changing soon, now that AI can “write,” but I figure I can ride that out one way or another.

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    3. I realized – rather late in the game, after 20 years in the military, and another ten of working the corporate world as a full-time and temp admin (or executive secretary, which is what I called it when I wanted to impress) that I was a writer – and all of that was just to support writing and story telling.

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      1. One sociologist, going under cover at a fast-food place, discovered that her co-workers managed by locating the most important aspect of their lives outside their jobs. As a father, for instance.

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  4. LOL! Timely post since WordPress had as their daily prompt yesterday, “What are your principles?” I remember working with one woman years ago who had raised her kids and then gone back to work. I asked her about that and whether she felt she had missed out. She answered that instead she felt lucky, like she got the best of both worlds.

    I originally wanted to call my work biography The Accidental Professional, but decided that was too trite and went with A Geek’s Progress instead. Part of my pitch for it is, “If you’re a future high risk/high rewards entrepreneur, this book is not for you. It’s for the rest of us little people who just want to have a good life.”

    A couple of years ago, a fellow author described what she called the female equivalent of the hero’s journey as three stages, warrior woman, mother, wise woman. She actually said crone for the last, but I changed it because of its negative connotations.

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    1. I’ve read a heroine’s journey. It was a hero’s journey. The spurious claim that the heroine started out in a hero’s journey and had to escape it was just trying to relabel things; it followed the hero’s journey beat by beat, and calling the ordinary life “the hero’s journey” was simply the first.

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      1. Hmm, I’d never heard of that book before, and sounds like I should be grateful that I hadn’t. I don’t think the author I mentioned had heard of it either.

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      2. I read a very good article lo these many years ago that detailed the heroine’s journey. The title had something to do with the Handless Maiden ur-story, and detailed how essential parts of the journey including having your agency forcibly taken away by someone else, surviving despite that, regaining your agency through a deep act of trust, and—crucially—ending up in a different place than you started. It pointed out that the Hero’s Journey ends with a triumphant return, in contrast.

        It makes sense that it’s deeply and essentially different, as the woman’s journey worldwide has tended to do with leaving one’s family of birth to end up in a new place.

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      3. Uh oh. I’m signed up for Tuscon 52 and just realized that the author of that book is one of the pro guests. You can tell the wacky ones pretty easily now it seems. They all advertise their Bluesky handles. :)

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  5. I realized this when our son was born. I was lucky to stay home with him for six months before needing to look for work.

    OTOH learned to try and balance work and life between hubby and I to minimize having our child in daycare too long during the day. Was also very picky (which we got lucky with) on the daycare chosen.

    We both had to work. Too often when one of us was unemployed, at least the other was working. Our careers started with us both getting unemployed at the same time. Once I changed career type, that was suppose to change. Didn’t quite. Had one scare that an incident was going to unemploy both of us at the same time. His was rescinded. OTOH did get caught in a trap where he couldn’t quit in place of a transfer when I wasn’t working. We hated him being gone during the week, but we survived.

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      1. Before I forget.

        Taking off for a few days. Will be within cell range but phone and WP don’t get along. Last time I posted from phone it took one comment and posted 5x. WTH?

        So if you don’t hear from me until Sunday, if then (we have to be at the airport to get home at OMG hour. Same Wednesday AM. Provided we actually get to fly out then home. We’re checked in with boarding passes for going) I’m still on earth (and presumably not under it). Both directions it is “hurry up and wait, roller coaster”, the joys of flying out and into Eugene.

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          1. Will do.

            A group of 8 are traveling from Oregon to Florida. Not all together given our geographic spread from Vancouver down to Medford. Three of us are flying out of Eugene, but only two back (me & mom), as the third is staying longer.

            Should be fun.

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        2. Waitamminit, if the government is shut down, does that mean the TSA isn’t treating travelers like a cross between cattle and convicts? 😛

          That’s one more government department Trump should eliminate.
          ———————————
          Terrorists and wacko nut jobs can’t threaten our way of life, or change who we are. Only we can do that. If we surrender to fear, if we give up our freedom for an illusion of safety, we do to ourselves what all the wackos and terrorists in the world can only dream of doing to us.

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  6. I guess I’ve been fortunate.

    I’ve had a career (2 yr Tech College AAS electronics) for over fifty years now. Just a dozen different jobs within that field. Most electronics related, some not (security guard, drafting, O’BamaCare call center (shudder), a couple of others).

    It was enough to support home, family, and children. And that’s all I ever asked for. Anything above that was a bonus.

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  7. Purpose? I have but little. Simple things, mostly. Protect those placed in my care. Look out for them, teach them well, pick them up when they fall down. Be an example worth following. Impart what little wisdom I have, from my own mistakes made and those I’ve observed. Keep my word when given. Leave a place a little nicer when I’m gone.

    Satisfaction comes from effort and toil, in proportion to the work put in and the skill, more or less. Houses that still stand. Engines that still run with quiet, reliable efficiency. More esoteric things, like processes implemented that reduce stress and promote smoother operation. Quiet contentment shared when things work out as they should.

    I find joy in the sunrise. In keeping the fuzzies entertained and healthy. In reading, and writing stories. In nature, when nature’s not being an ass about it. In history and old things. In good food and music. In an elegant woman’s smile. In a child’s laughter and infectious fun. It’s not hard to find the good things in life. They rarely demand your attention, but are easily found when one’s of a mind to look.

    Still and all, not a bad life being around the edges. Attention and fame are poor substitutes for the honest appreciation of life’s little mysteries. Some may bemoan their lot. In not finding the right partner, or dissatisfaction with their means of employment, or their own bodies, or how other people treat them, or their lack of money, or of their lack of attention. That sounds like a rather depressing way to live.

    I could go months or years without hearing another human voice, if it were not for my immediate family’s health issues and my job. This is not a complaint, mind. I quite like the quiet. When it is quiet, that is. Thunderstorms, catterus complainius, the neighborhood crazies, the music from the local bar when it gets too noisy, the arguments that drunks get into whilst stumbling their way home… Quiet moments are precious.

    Even out in the sticks, there’s birdsong, bear grunts, wild dogs howling, and the sound of the wind through the branches this time of year. The walk uphill to clean the old graveyard is steep, but worth it. During high summer, the sea of green stretches through the whole valley and up to the next ridge. On a good fall day, the leaves are awash with flame in orange, red, and yellow. Red oaks, maples of various flavours, beechwood, hemlock, sycamore, walnut, the rare replanted chestnut since the blight, and so on.

    But purpose in the grand sense? Ah, that’s too large an ask for me. To make things less onerous for those around me. To reduce suffering. To make the world a bit less dark in this small patch of grass. That’s task enough, I think.

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      1. One little, two little, three little fu zi. And one massive floofmonster that thinks he’s a shoulder accessory. Without them life would be quite a bit different. But let’s not get too far down that road.

        Neighborcat follows me to the truck every day. The only reason he doesn’t hop in is he hates vehicles and the only reason he doesn’t chase the truck is who would protect his dominion from the predations of the RLF, if so?

        Doofus is a furry limpet mine that sticks to you. He cries for the chicken pot, but accepts the lesser noms daily, whilst looking longingly at his beloved pot. He’d sleep inside it if I kept it out of the cupboard. He comments on all the things that happened while you were gone, even if it was for five minutes, just so you know you haven’t missed the fly in the kitchen or the evil outdoors lurking just over there.

        Nastycat has been seeking more cuddles of late. He’s too skinny, according to Doofus, but then everybody but Othercat is, according to the same. He brings his pink dino to bed, carries it to breakfast, and sets it to watch the window as he sleeps. For sticks, most likely.

        Neighborcat, slayer of all that is small, discovered a new hobby of late. He’s watching the wee little yellowcat across the field hunt. Looking to talk shop (murderizing the RLF), or critiquing her technique, couldn’t say. He comes in to sniff the insides, ensuring that no rogue elements have passed his notice, usually once in the morning, once at night.

        The three wee fu zi continue apace. Othercat fell off his perch onto the power cord just a bit ago, forcing me to restart this report of ze fuz. Neighborcat knows and has never wavered or doubted his purpose in life. Stalwart hunter, samurai of the house, ever since his first mouse. Othercat is just a big kitten at times. Plays with everybody, hunts with joy, and sleeps the sleep of the utterly content. He’s got his lady love, his buds, life is good. Purrs like a little generator on the shoulder. Doofus is the devourer of chickens everywhere and his purpose is to remind you all of the ebuls of all that is outdoors, and the saintly virtues of everything that is inside.

        And nastycat? His purpose is stick-fu, pink dino dad, and detective of the dump behind the restaurant. He got himself another bath today, looking like one of those poor birds they used to show that was covered in crude oil, save he smells like french fries and zero regrets- at least until bathtime.

        Even fu zis have purpose. Thus, so should we all. Even if that purpose is merely to disappoint and anger a shrieking scold today. A blue haired ninny tried to tell me of the virtues of vegan cat food the other day. Explaining that cats are obligate carnivores seemed to be information she had never before been informed of, thus was utterly irrelevant.

        Be like Othercat, if so. Other people’s problems with the way you live your life are just that- their problems. Go find a shoulder to purr on, a lovebird to snuggle with, and sleep the sleep of the utterly unbothered- wherever it happens you comanap, I shall not judge.

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  8. I did 23 years in banking then 19 years in government examining banking. Poachers make the best gamekeepers after all. Now I’m going to do some options trading and maybe some commentary on substack. All good things

    the wife didn’t work outside the home after we bought our first house when number one son was a baby. A career, f-ck yeah! I couldn’t have done it

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      3. Gotta add my firm agreement right now.

        I’ve mismanaged a project at work, and have gotten myself a bit of a crunch mode bind.

        I’m about to return to a hopefully isolated busy, and I am sure if I do not speak now I will forget it during the whirl.

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  9. I had a good career, then quit to take care of my parents. Haven’t had a “real” job since. I’ve deliberately chosen a minimalist lifestyle, so I don’t need much. House is paid off, money in the bank for house taxes, so I focus on my writing and my garden.

    I do landrace breeding with animals and plants, developing varieties that will actually thrive with no inputs. Very satisfying, if not a money maker.

    And I write. I love both.

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  10. Folks need to remember that for most people the usual “career” for twenty thousand years was to be the serf/slave/peon/helot/food of someone else.

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  11. ”In fact, let me add, for most normal, functional human beings, it was always like that.”

    There was a time and at certain companies where they hired non-factory-floor folks young, developed and trained and promoted internally to progressively higher positions, sometimes transferring across the country for new positions and paying to move the family, with a mutual expectation of loyalty that flowed both ways – the employee would not jump jobs taking with them their company-provided training, and the company would keep them employed for an entire “career”. IBM used to do this, as did the big three automakers.

    But that bargain was broken by the corporations after the 70’s or so. They still carried an expectation of loyalty from their employees, but offered nothing but the next paycheck in return.

    Since Silicon Valley was largely built as this bargain receded into the past, almost all of the tech jobs operated under these new rules. As a result the smart employees jumped jobs whenever it was not a down cycle to get better pay and job title progress that beat out the dufusses like me who stayed … and at the downturns they all were layed off, but the job jumpers had more impressive pay track records and responsibilities for when the next upturn someone hired them again .

    The echoes of the old way were still there by the 80’s in the way interactions with management were run, but employees-as-interchangable-widget management, probably from the rise of the MBAs, was the rule.

    This “career bargain” could have been an aberration due to the expansive growth of industry and the resulting white collar shortages after WWII, but the 1970s return to “a job is just a job” has been sustained ever since.

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    1. Hubby’s career track ran into this.

      The pension issue wasn’t the companies fault. Rules were changed for what was “funded” for single company pensions, favoring the larger unions that multiple companies drew from. Until the pension was “funded”. They didn’t lose the pension, but benefit did not keep up with inflation (better than no pension).

      Other “benefits” went away. When we started we were informed the odds of being forced transferred around, especially first 10 – 15 years, were high. They’d try not to because they’d have to transfer, at least initially, both of us (OTOH one household transfer cost for two). That changed thanks to an owl and mountain blowing up. Hubby did get transferred which the company paid to move the household (1 1/2 *moving trucks). What they did not pay was the cost of selling the house. Fast forward to the second transfer. One reason hubby “moved” but the household didn’t (not the only reason, not the biggest reason) was that “benefit” had been axed. The 3rd transfer was a “voluntary” transfer (i.e. back home) so the paid household move wouldn’t have applied. (FYI “transfers” were essentially I-5 corridor, Oregon or Washington coast and some east side. Job does not exist outside of PNW and Alaska. Not even at it’s largest distribution, which isn’t now.)

      (*) I do not even want to think of how many containers it would take now.

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    2. But that bargain was broken by the corporations after the 70’s or so.

      Baby boom.

      You have a lot of folks looking for work, the older folks are not dying, so the only way to advance is to move to the side– so you hire folks other people trained.

      And training becomes a waste of time that nobody does.

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      1. The boomer generation boundaries are so large that when I got my first semiconductor job my boss, titled as a director, was a draft dodging hippie boomer. When he started working after his deferment three masters degrees and a PhD ABD ran out the clock on the Vietnam War draft, companies still hired to keep and trained to promote internally. By the time I started that was mostly gone, and I saw the absolute end of it as H1B hiring really ramped up.

        So yes, that cohort did break a lot of things, but it was also just easier to do disposable widget HR management than to run your own internal farm team with an eye to the future, and the new generation of MBA-holder managers had no interest in any of that extraneous spending.

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        1. I left out that Sarah and I share a birthday year so I am technically in that boomer date range, though I have not very much in common with people who were 17 the year I was born.

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        2. This isn’t, “boomers bad,” this is, “the reason it’s even possible is that there were a whole lot of folks born, and even more folks not dying.”

          The ‘disposable widget HR management’ is only POSSIBLE when you have an existing pool of mostly trained people–and that seed corn us just about eaten up.

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          1. I didn’t think it was – it just gave me a chance to gripe about with an illustration how stupidly long the duration that cohort actually is.

            I guess the resulting question is, as the labor pool shrinks down from the boomers retiring, do those practices come back, or does AI eat that lunch too?

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  12. “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outside world. . . . I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. . . .”

    —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 785

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      1. Sad to say, Galt’s Gulch was in a hidden valley in Colorado, the freeest state in the continental United States until it was destroyed by looters. . . .

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  13. career?

    im a tradesman, a highly skilled tradesman at that, more specifically a finish carpenter. But am also a woodworker and cabinet maker and dabble in leather work, custom boots and upholstery,

    i always have work

    a career? Its what i love, and no, i have rarely stayed in one place for very long because there has always been someone else willing to pay me more, or i tire of their BS and walk, its been interesting, very few really good tradesman have i come across lately

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    1. i think my favorite thing is all the “career” this or that with their snotty attitudes who look down their nose at guys like me, buncha azzhats

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  14. I spent 27 years as an electrical engineer, now 22 years as “retired mini-rancher”, and now my latest (short term, I hope) job is “patient”. Arthroscopic surgery, but the big unknown is how bad the knee really is. Total knee replacement is in the future, unknown how soon.

    $SPOUSE is alone with Kat-them-dog. Old neighbors would watch over, but they forgot and are doing a trip. I got the job to call the new neighbors–I know them slightly, $SPOUSE not at all. Seem to be good people, thank God.

    Lots of prayers going on. “Puppy prayers” is a thing. I’m doing mine, as best I can.

    I’m at the hospital at 6:30AM, I’m hoping first in line.

    Here’s hoping.

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    3. Surgery is done, I’m back with my first dose of happy-fun painkillers in me. Brunch is on the table. Doc didn’t have time to give an AAR, but so far, so good.

      Eat, then rest.

      Thank you, Lord.

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      1. I got the report. More damage to the meniscus than I expected, but repairable. So far, it looks good for keeping the OEM parts of the knee in place.

        Doing a lot of reading in bed with the knee above my heart. Time Enough for Love is getting a reread. It’s been a long time.

        The preop nurse carried on a good tradition. Pretty, friendly, competent and pregnant. I don’t think the last is required, but it’s incredibly common. Had to smile.

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  15. I tend to think my career has more to do with careen, as in tip a ship on its side to work on the hull, or wander back and forth seemingly aimlessly. Nothing I planned to do has turned out the way I intended, and I ended up a storyteller, sometimes with footnotes.

    After this? Who knows, most certainly not me!

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  16. I realized back when I was about 25 that I was never going to have the C-level desk in any job unless I started my own business, and I’m not driven in an entrepreneurial way. So, I stuck to finding the available jobs that paid well and that I could do well in. They’re not careers, they’re jobs to pay for living, so I can feed, cloth, house, and educate my family, afford to save up for retirement, and to do things that I really like to do along the way.

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  17. “Refuse to Choose” by Barbara Sher specifically talks about “finding your honey”, ie the thing that makes you happy/fulfilled in life (even if it’s multiple things), and then getting a job that pays the bills so that you have enough money so you can pursue your “honey”. It’s about being a Renaissance person (there are several different kinds she outlines) and still surviving in the world and feeling that you are making a difference at least in your own sphere of influence.

    It’s really helped me to understand what I look for in hobbies, and which ones I can turn into jobs, or even careers. (I personally am a “Serial Master”/”Sybil”)

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  18. The Reader’s original career ambitions got overcome by events when he and better half learned they were raising a severely physically disabled child (cerebral palsy – but with no mental impairment in son’s case). He spent the next 37 years with providing that son with as many opportunities to participate / excel as he could manage, with job always coming second. He and better half even planned our retirement move to be ‘reasonably’ close to him to provide support if necessary. What we didn’t plan on was our son passing before us. At 72, the Reader is now trying to find a purpose and keep the black dog at bay.

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      1. The Reader would but what we did was so at odds with conventional wisdom in the ‘disability community’ that he doubts anyone would listen. He probably should write it down.

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        1. I try to turn my own adversities into helping the next person avoid the landmines that draw my tap-dance. It just makes a feelgood where I otherwise see only darkness.

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  19. Life is your career, the choices you have made are your jury, Executioner, with Karma as the judge. Yes, you are screwed so you might as well keep making bad decisions and hoping you can keep the Reaper at bay. Anon.

    Okay it was me but I probably saw it in a meme somewhere, I am really not that profound.

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