“Especially early in your career, a lot of people find that if they change jobs, they get promotions and raises much faster,” Melissa said. And when they finally enter the workforce as adults, the career they’ve planned their whole life for may not be what they thought it would be. “Some people just don’t fit with what they’re doing,” Melissa said. “It’s someone else’s dream job. It’s something other people are excited about, and it looks cool on a resume.” People get excited about your LinkedIn updates, but the reality is that every day you wake up feeling like you’re in the wrong job, Melissa said. It reminded me of something Jhumpa Bhattacharya said to me about the current social climate. It unearthed an opportunity for some of us to challenge everything we’ve been led to believe, namely, that “work equals personality.” Granting a right to work manifests in many ways, from blaming people for “not working hard enough” for not needing social services or any kind of assistance, to interpreting anything that isn’t grand as boring. As work takes up a larger proportion of our waking hours, it increasingly monopolizes our identity, and job changes, unemployment, and financial hardship often compound the identity crisis.
And honestly, it feels antiquated to define yourself by your job anymore. As if a job title is a status symbol and a dream job doesn’t cause its own confusion. What if everyone else knows their dream job, calling, purpose and you don’t? What if you don’t get a job in your chosen field or you get your dream job and realize it’s not at all what you wanted? When these concepts are encouraged in young people, it feels like it undermines more realistic expectations of what work is and what it feels like. Perhaps if so many of us weren’t so focused on defining ourselves by our dream job, we would be freed to rethink our meaning, purpose and what is important to us in other aspects of life. What if we started having those conversations earlier, unravelling the exaggerated version of “being successful” that comes with “achieving our dreams” and giving little room to the fact that dreams and goals can change based on realities like circumstances, economic situation or simple changes in personal preferences that happen as we grow up. After all, even passion can feel exhausting and frustrating.
The metaphor of a “dream job” is directly linked to working “for the experience.” Do you really wonder if you should be paid, or even paid more, when you’re grateful just to be in the room? “The passion principle thus seems to help neutralize these career aspirants’ criticisms of capitalist labor structures. These criticisms might, in different circumstances, fuel collective demands for fewer work hours, more leisure, or better work-life balance,” says Dr. Erin A. Cech, who studies what she calls the “passion principle” in which self-expression guides career decisions. “Pursuing passion” or realizing dreams through work has never been realistic for everyone. And it’s worth questioning why work should be the place that houses so much of our self-esteem, meaning, and identity. “Since the 1950s, the cultural value of self-expression has risen dramatically, and with it, the expectation that individuals should have institutionalized opportunities to make autonomous choices about their life direction and character,” Cech’s study states.
