Your “Dream Job” is a Lie
Work can be crappy at times. And that’s okay.
“I was doing 300 shows a year before this. I hated going to dinners with the promoters I didn’t like, I hated all the travel to get there. I love the shows, but everything else is kind of awful.”
That’s a quote from a New York Times interview with DJ Thomas Welsey, more commonly known by his stage name — Diplo. It’s a pretty damning statement to the music industry, but the man chose his stage name from his favorite dinosaur. Unbridled honesty is his only gear.
Diplo has his own Sirius radio channel and an estimated net worth of $26 million. People are hiring him to play private quarantine parties on Zoom. He lives the life musicians dream of.
Still, though, other than the hour or two he spends doing a show, “everything else is kind of awful?”
What gives?
At one point, I think we all knew “dream jobs” didn’t exist.
You went to work, did the thing and then it was over. No giant expectations. Your identity didn’t hang on how successful you were from hour to hour or day to day.
Now, that concept has faded. Our expectations for a phenomenal work-life show up in our conversations, online posts, and of course, television.
“For the first time in my life, I’m doing work that I love to do every single day,” says character Ben Wyatt in the final season of Parks and Recreation.
If you’re anything like me, you don’t watch that and think “Wow, what a nice career stage this Ben Wyatt fellow has found.”
No, since characters are a reflection of self, you think “Hmmm. Why don’t I love my job every single day? Did I miss the boat somehow? All my friends seem pretty happy with what they do. Maybe I should start browsing through LinkedIn to see what else is out there. Am I too old? Too young? Too stupid?”
If you’re feeling really desperate, you might even think: “What does this character do? Maybe I should do that as well.”
Since fiction stories hack our brains, even the most intelligent person can forget: it’s all fake. Every single line of dialog is made up to drive fake stories of fake people. In this case, Ben offers the “I love what I do every day” line to encourage another character — April — who is looking for hope in her own career.
It’s total fantasy. A line written to serve the purpose of entertainment.
This becomes obvious two episodes later when Ben does NOT love his job. He spends an entire day attempting to get two signatures on a document. He claims, in his final request to the signing parties:
“Not that it matters. I’m definitely going to wake up tomorrow morning with the same forms for you to sign. Because I’ve died somehow and now I’m a ghost living in purgatory.”
A long fall from “I’m doing work that I love,” isn’t it?
In a wonderful, thoughtful article about the odd mindset of this generation, Sophie Gilbert writes:
“[Millennials] have an understanding that an adult existence is an optimized one.”
This is in reference to a couple who are having their home reorganized by Marie Kondo, queen of efficiency, but it applies to our work as well. We should be CRUSHING IT, always. We should have a thriving business, a million followers. We should have a big network and a bigger net worth. We should be on television. They should write movies about us.
Where, exactly does this impression come from?
Is it the endless parade of self-help articles? The rampant FOMO accompanying a flood of other people’s life highlights? Is it that certain groups have turned a global pandemic into a productivity contest?
Probably, it’s a combination of all those and more. The sum of these parts lead us to a vague impression that somewhere, a dream job exists.
Which is ludicrous because dream jobs don’t exist.
The problem here is not our jobs, necessarily, but how we perceive them. A job that annoys you for a moment or hours or even days at a time can still be a good and fulfilling job. Musicians manage constant touring. Actors wait hours before a scene is shot. Side-hustlers discover that a failure of success can be more painful than any other kind of failure. Office employees still use staplers and tape sometimes.
It’s a law of nature: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every work benefit has an equal and opposite disappointment. Maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be. The difficulties of work-life are what makes the reward so sweet.
If there is such a thing as a “dream job,” it’s one where the fruits of your labor are worth the labor itself. After all, Diplo’s willingness to put up with pushy promoters, sleepless schedules, and dull dinners is what made him Diplo.
Work can be crappy at times. And that’s okay.
So long as what you’re moving toward justifies the fight.
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