On Not Having a Career

I think more people should not have careers. If you don’t have a career, you will likely be able to widen your interests and not specialize in one thing. You can become a well-rounded human being or even a jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none.

I could never settle on a career. First and foremost I want to be a human being. I don’t want to have my existence channeled into a career.

At varying points, I’ve entertained career notions: cartoonist, poet, psychologist, truck driver. I’ve never achieved the status of having a career, though. Instead I’ve had a series of jobs: dishwasher, movie theater projectionist and concessionist, produce boy at an upscale grocery store, Pizza Hut employee. Some of my jobs have approached respectability: crisis phone counselor, environmental restorationist, small business owner. But none are really careers.

The Privilege of Having a Career

I am going to suggest that, in our society, people with careers are generally more resepected than people without careers. Why should this be? Just because someone has decided to make a living by specializing in one thing, why should they be privileged above those of us who do not, whether by choice or by societal limitations?

Now a common response to this question may be that a person who specializes gains an amount of earned privilege because he or she is directing her energy towards a noble goal: cancer research, perhaps, or the corporate bottom dollar.

I think the notion that career specialization = special person is flawed. The career privilege argument may ultimately come to rest on the financial lucrativeness of having a carrer vs. working a job; that is, at the very least, the fact that career-oriented people tend to be privileged over job-oriented people is somehow related to the amount of money that each pulls in.

Starting Over Each Time

Because I don’t have a career and am both capable of and interested in working in a wide variety of fields–from social work to food service–my work lacks the linear progress of someone pursuing a career. I do feel that I am progressing in the field of work–it’s just that my field of work is large, wild, and hazily defined. Yet I have substantially less to show for my years of work than someone who pursues a career. Rather than an advanced degree or a series of promotions, I have a motely resume of experiences that seem rather disconnected to each other. They’re not disconnected really, because these experiences are my life, but they certainly don’t add up to a curiculuum vitae or a well-tailored resume for any one industry.

Why This is a Social Problem

Our society privileges careers over jobs. This is a problem because careers tend to be more available to those who are already privileged in terms of class, race, and education. Jobs that do not require specialization, on the other hand, are more equally available to everyone regardless of those same factors of class, race, and education.

On the one hand, it seems sensible and just that people who are invested in a specific type of work become promoted and valuable within that field.

On the other hand, wage labor is demoralizing and dehumaninzing in that, when you punch a clock, you are visibly trading your time and your labor for money. The means of production are controlled by someone else, and you are part of the means of production. You become, in some sense, for the time period that you are working, a human machine.

Human Machines and Human Beings

If I am a human machine when I am working at my wage job, that reduces the amount of time I have to be a human being. Sure, I can be a human being while I am a human machine, but my primary function at the job is to be a human machine, and m