An important person must be someone who produces a lot of economic value. Your career is everything, it determines whether you have a roof over your head, whether you have access to medical care, and whether you have opportunities to advance your station in life. In America, we hold our jobs to reverence, it is our entire identity. However, what happens when we can no longer work at our jobs due to a decline in health or that we had simply gotten too old for our jobs? The inability to have an identity outside of our respective jobs can be incredibly devastating to individuals who have invested all of their time and energy into careers that will dispose of them the moment they are no longer of economic value. Everyone wants to think that they will never get old, sick, or poor — but the universe does not play favorites and every individual will have to confront the problem “what did I do all of this for?”. It is worth questioning right now, as a young adult, to feel our mortality and ask what cause we are serving when we put a huge chunk of our youth and time into this supposed model that will secure our financial position in life. Plus to address this agonizing question, why isn’t there more out there outside of work?
It’s fairly important to note that not everyone has that bleak of a relationship to work. It is hard to imagine someone like J.R.R Tolkein or Elon Musk having such a transactional relationship to their work- as their careers had arguably benefited and inspired so many future fantasy writers and engineers. The working relationship that Musk has is something we’d like to strive for. Plus there is an appeal to leaving behind a positive legacy that lasts long after we are gone. But becoming the next Elon Musk or Tolkein feels like winning a lottery. That level of dedication, timing, opportunities, highs, and lows of pursuing that level of excellence is hard to reach — and beyond reach for some people. There are many examples of individuals who had achieved great heights in their careers but had sacrificed the well-being of those around them and their personal life had absolutely suffered as a result of their lack of work-life balance.
The inability to distinguish an individual’s worth and what they do for a living can have some disturbing consequences. For example. J. Paul Getty, the great petrol industrialist of the 1900s was famous for this quote: “I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.”[1], when his 16-year-old grandson Paul Getty III, had been kidnapped and held for ransom. There was a complete indifference on Getty Sr. whether his grandson lived or died so long as he did not have to forfeit his hard-earned wealth. Another infamous example of an individual with a dependent relationship to their career is Amy Bishop, Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Alabama. Bishop in 2010, was denied tenure at her University had retaliated by shooting her colleagues [2]. While investigating Amy Bishop’s story, it seemed that this was a biologist who was incredibly dedicated to her work, but the denial of tenure meant that her career was over. There are the famous stories of the physicist who had contributed the three laws of thermodynamics, Ludwig Boltzmann, and as a reward for his work he hung himself as his wife and daughter were swimming- after his life works on entropy had received so much backlash from his colleagues [3]. You could argue these are isolated incidents and there may have been some mental illness involved and may not have been the direct result of their excessive devotion to work. Boltzman did suffer from bipolar disorder, Amy Bishop did exhibit antisocial behavior, and J.P Paul Getty was fairly normal by most accounts aside from his intense frugality. But occurrences that had caused people to become — suicidal, homicidal, or just exhibit low empathy apathetic behavior — are probably not as uncommon as we’d like to think. If someone like Boltzman had a more transactional relationship to work as opposed to a dependent relationship to his career, it may not have mattered to him whether or not his thermodynamics work would prevail in the field of physics. Someone like Amy Bishop may have gotten a new hobby or set on a different career path with her Ph.D. in Neuroscience. And J.P Paul Getty may have miraculously reached an epiphany that money cannot bring deceased grandchildren back in one piece if they are dismembered. But the way our relationship to our jobs could be so intertwined with our identity, that when setbacks happen -those setbacks consist of decades of time, energy, youth towards a career goal that did not work out — it could tear anyone’s soul asunder. And reactions towards those setbacks can be mild to extreme depending on the person.
Adverse effects of complete devotion to careers are not secluded to just the fields of a professorship or great petrol industries, they surprisingly apply to retired Olympic athletes. It takes an incredible amount of discipline and devotion to be an Olympian. All of that effort only seems to amount to early retirement at the age of 30 — with another 30–40 years left to figure out how to transition into a different workforce [4]. What seemed disconcerting about the lifestyle of a devoted athlete is not only the early retirement due to physical decline, but that they miss out on a lot of developmental milestones like having friends, having meaningful relationships, or having activities outside of Olympic training and school. So when setbacks appear in their later adult life, it seems that Olympic athletes can be ill-prepared to meet those challenges after the gold.
It’s not an intent to dissuade a young person from pursuing a meaningful career. Sometimes when a person who had devoted themselves to a career path that would nonchalantly throw them away if they were no longer of serviceable value, it can create resentment and a cynical attitude towards the means someone makes a living. People who work in careers that are meaningful to them can create great legacies. Those legacies will uplift the people that will come after them. But what would benefit someone going into a career is to understand readily that setbacks are normal, sometimes a thing you worked hard at will not work out. The solution isn’t to give up or settle, it’s understanding that success or failure doesn’t determine someone’s worth or passion. It’s tempting to devote yourself to a career like an Olympian, but make sure to have a life to come back to after it’s done and over. Always an identity outside of work, like having well-loved friends, family, adventures, meaningful activities- and relationships that are not dependent on economic gain. Bodily and mental health shouldn’t be compromised in the name of ambition and well-being is not incompatible with greatness, as some colleagues may destructively demonstrate. A career isn’t someone’s entire identity, it could be what they leave behind, the relationships they forge, the good that they do for their community. A career is a plea towards greatness, but it does not determine a person’s worth.
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Sources:
- Julie Miller, 12–25–2017, “All the Money in the World: The Real Story of the Getty Kidnapping,” Vanity Fair, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/all-the-money-in-the-world-getty-kidnapping
- 2. Why I, xx-xx-xxx “Amy Bishop and the Trauma of Tenure Denial,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crimes-violence/201002/amy-bishop-and-the-trau ma-tenure-denial
- 3. No Author, 2–20–1844, “Boltzmann’s Biography,” No Publication, https://depts.washington.edu/vienna/boltzmann/boltzmannbio.htm
- 4. John Florio, Ouisie Shapiro. “The Dark Side of Going for Gold.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 22 Aug. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/08/post-olympic-depression/496244/.
