My first year of college I was an engineer. I was not very happy in class. Though there were some aspects I liked about my classes, mostly I felt like a little ginger robot memorizing all this crap so my mind could work like a computer. I’d just come from a year off working as a democratic organizer in Ohio and Donald Trump was now president and the world, including my hometown in California, was on fire. I envisioned the rest of my life as a mechanical engineer. It was pretty depressing. More and more I felt like I couldn’t spend the rest of my life doing math and physics, even though I loved physics and solving puzzles and tinkering. I don’t mean to say that I felt the fate of the world rested on me alone, I don’t, and am not so arrogant to entertain that.
Perhaps then my theory of job and work (though I prefer to think of it as highly and individual) is one of envisioning life from above and weighing its meaning not by some outside metric, but internally. Money is obviously the single most important wheel in our society, and with it comes huge power, both for good and bad. Thats why I understand why so many of my classmates wish for those jobs. But I wonder too if we don’t all deep-down believe that every job, from janitor to wall st. executive deserve equal pay. What more value does one bring over the other, in the end? Well, got pretty far off there…Oops.