question for the parents

ccguy · July 24, 2007, 5:35am

this might seem like an odd question to ask, perhaps a question in which the answers may be swayed towards one direction… considering the atmosphere college confidential is…

but would you say that you career defines you, or that you define your career? this is a vague question with broad answers, i’m just throwing out the idea. and to those parents that answer this question, i’m requesting that you take an honest asessment of your life.

i ask this question to the parents because you are the ones who have established yourselves, who have held down (a) career(s) for years, who have obviously gone through the experience of raising at least 1 child to put through college, etc. you’ve lived a lot longer and have experienced so much more compared to students who aren’t even in college yet (by the way, i’m a 2nd year college student). i assume that your answers would bear more credibility.

to elaborate a bit more on this vague question/idea… i think it’s funny how students here are so obsessed with their college and eventually career as if their CAREER DEFINES THEM. as if their career is the one thing that will define their life from the moment they graduate (excluding a family). i’m not saying it is incorrect to think that way, especially since i’m the one asking you parents… rather, that train of thought is so popular on CC, and so it has made me reconsider what i really want to make of my future.

there’s plenty of arguments based on how your career should be tailored (a common argument on CC is money/power/prestige vs passion/interest/ideals), but regardless of where you stand on those sorts of issues, you are still putting your career on the pedestal. now i’m no psychology/culture/anthropology/philosophy/religion/economics/whatever expert. i don’t know if it’s our capitalist society, if it’s our conditioned way of thinking, or if the history of civilized mankind as far as we know have always followed this way of thought… but it seems the majority of people, by a large margin, believe we need to be “accomplished.” and by accomplished, i mean via our career.

i’m not even 20 and thus i am naive compared to you parents, but i also realize we dedicate a good amount of the hours of our day to our career and we also have to pay bills and support our kids. i think there is no denying what a huge chunk of our lives those tasks constitute. on just those few reasons alone, the idea that our career really defines us is such a powerful argument, especially when it helps raise kids (which i assume to be another goal in life). on top of that, i’m well aware that our career does not have to have an inverse relationship to all else in our lives. if, for example, it is my goal to help people, then there are plenty of careers that will help me achieve that while still putting food on the table and putting my kids through college. however, even those type of examples bring us back to our need to feel accomplished.

obviously this question applies to a lot of subjects… like addressing how society makes us think, or perhaps dabbling in philosophical views on how to live our lives. so i guess what i’m really asking is for those who have gone through the experience to asess their life and give me your 2 cents. once you have more than enough money to sustain your lifestyle, and once you have ensured the happiness of your kids - what else can be left of you? is your career really all that remains? are you left to keep working until you feel accomplished and you can happily retire? what are your feelings on the issue?

i find it ironic how a typical CC mentality is to work hard now to retire early and live the good life. what exactly are they accomplishing with their lives in the end? it seems to me that subconsciously, they just want to ENJOY it, but are somehow bound to the idea that one’s career controls how much they can enjoy life… or that they cannot enjoy their life until they feel they have accomplished something with their careers.

i’m the son of an overworked doctor who at times seems miserable and whose only joy seems to be the happiness of her children, and the son of a well-accomplished father who believes your life is only worth it if you go all out with your career - he respects, and is in fact all for my lack of interest in materialism or prestige, but that doesn’t stop him from insisting i do “great things” in life. as for me, i’m not sure where i stand, and at 19 years of age, i guess i am in no position to say much just yet.

i know i went all over the place and apologize if this was too long/confusing. but i’m interested in hearing your opinions. i think this question is of great importance because i think it’s good to break away from conventional ways of thinking at times… and making sense of our lives is important to all of us. there’s a lot more i could still say but i’ll leave it at that for now. thanks.

geomom · July 24, 2007, 8:57am

Great post, kiddo. You’re only 19? That was a wonderful question
that was definitely not too long or confusing, and will elicit some
interesting answers. I wish I could invite you to my next dinner party.

I’m going to give you a short answer, and then write a longer more
thoughful answer. The short answer is that personally I was trained
as a scientist and was moderately but not dazzlingly successful, and
traded that in to become a suburban mom. Don’t immediately make
assumptions about how I value career/vs personal life, though, you
will probably be wrong.

Also, I would expand your thinking to not just include career vs family
vs personal pleasure as legitimate goals. I would also include influence
on the greater society and spiritual growth as important areas to consider.

I recommend you read this book “Your Money or Your Life”. It is a bit quirky,
and a good summer read.

I’m off to write the long answer.

pjp1116 · July 24, 2007, 9:11am

Whats a career? I had a career once. Nowadays, it seems like I have a job. (thankful for it too).

My job, nor my career ever defined me.

I trade time for money, money helps me to do and provide things for my family.

I find that THAT is what defines me. My family.

Good question, and I’m sure will make an interesting topic.

geomom · July 24, 2007, 9:48am

Look at the big picture:
We are here to learn to love each other. That’s not very useful in a
practical sense. Perhaps it is fairly obvious when applied to family,
although even there I find it a great challenge to figure out how to
best love my children.

The connection between learning to love each other and a
career lies in recognizing that we are entirely interdependent.
If we stripped away everything that other people do for you
(your parents, farmers, oil companies, police and government
functions, all manufacturing, etc.) you’d be dead by next month.
So you can think of the whole structure of society – making
money, careers, capitalism – as one complicated solution to a
very simple question: How can we take care of each other?

Put this way, a career doesn’t seem like such a bad thing
to throw yourself into, does it? Unfortunately it’s not that
simple. You, individually, are made a certain way with relative
strengths and weaknesses, and careers have particular
requirements, and there are some careers that may work for
you, and others that will make you miserable. In some careers
you will be incredibly productive, benefiting everyone
around you, and in a badly chosen career you may be miserable,
and find no satisfaction or meaning, and perhaps even be negatively
productive (think of a teacher who hates teaching and makes
her students miserable). I applaud the effort the CC students take
in trying to find out which career to choose and preparing for it.
It’s not the only decision in life, but it is incredibly important,
both for the individual and their potential contribution to all of
the rest of us.

Beyond simply taking care of others (which provides some intrinsic
satisfaction and motivation) if you are lucky and choose well, a career
with provide you with a transcendent kind of satisfaction. That is, you
may have the opportunity to get the feeling that “I was made for this.”
Your job or your craft may exercise and develop strengths that are
uniquely yours. Think of an artist, an author, perhaps even a social
worker. In this case, doing your job will not only benefit others, but
will give you a sense of fulfilling a personal mission, of expressing and
celebrating your individuality.

Can we ask even more of a career? We can. In certain circumstances,
we not only get a sense of personal fulfillment from our contribution,
and the match between our skills and the job’s requirements, but the
job requires teamwork. Think of modern surgery, or a live stage
performance, or a bunch of highly trained scientists tossing around ideas
and feeling a glimmer of truth appearing. In these cases it’s not only
our training, but the training of our peers that allows us to contribute
and to do our work. Our colleagues enable us to be better and
more than we could be on our own. It’s thrilling stuff.

Got to go, (to work, haha!) and I still haven’t connected this to my
above statement about becoming a suburban mom, but that at
least gives you a few things to chew on.

fendrock · July 24, 2007, 10:09am

Most thoughtful people (and you obviously belong in this category) want to find some meaning in life, which could also be defined as justifying one’s existence on this planet.

Different people do this in different ways. Some people find meaning in religion (ie, someone upstairs has put you in existence; it’s also a relief to believe that life continues after death). Others need the recognition of others, which may lead them to crave celebrity or work to gain the admiration of their peers (which may lead to an ambitious career, perhaps as a surgeon or trial lawyer).

Another angle is the need to be needed. There is the (probably apocryphal) story of the emergency annoucement on the day of a blizzard, “stay home unless absolutely necessary.” Employees poured into work even under dangerous conditions because they felt their work was mission critical.

Consider also personality. Some people need the stimulation of a demanding career, others are lower key and prefer to do their own thing at home.

As for me – I floundered a bit in college and grad school, considering the ministry and becoming a professor. I used my liberal arts education to work in the software industry in the areas of tech support, tech writing and marketing. I did not have the drive and ambition to continue working after my children were born and became of school age. I preferred to stay home (and was fortunate to have that as an option), as it was less stressful for all concerned and as we would have needed to hire help to keep up the homefront.

I suppose in my case that life sort of happened; other people know what they want and pursue it single mindedly. In my view, the way you are brought up as well as your personality play a large role in terms of how you end up valuing work and family.

VeryHappy · July 24, 2007, 1:03pm

I am certainly not my career; my career is one small part of me. But I’m a woman, and that may be more typical because of that.

The most important thing in the world to me is my children. while I think I’m a pretty good mama, and while I think I’ve raised them well, I would still do almost anything to make them happy, comfortable, rich. For example, it is extremely important to me that I leave them some inheritance, so they can live their lives without worrying about evey nickel. (That – the lack of worry – is the “real” inheritiance i want to leave them, not the money itself.)

That said, my career is still important to me. However, it’s important purely from a financial standpoint. The self-actualization that I get through working is gravy. My situation is somewhat unusual, however, in that my husband hasn’t worked at a “real” job in – oh, maybe 10 years, so the responsibility of earning a real income has fallen to me. I don’t like it, but there it is.

Sometimes I resent the fact that I’ve had to work for income. Other times I’m pleased that I’ve had to work, becuase I’m a much better, stronger person.

There is an expression in Judaism, “Tikkum Olam,” which means, “Improve the world.” The philosophy is that we should leave the world a better place than it was when we came into it. For some people, that means working in a homeless shelter or being a social worker or a teacher. For other people, it might mean becoming an engineer so you can create prosthetic devices to help amputees. For still others, maybe it means a life of improving the environment, or helping abandoned animals. Some people might even interpret it to mean being an accountant or working for a hedge fund.

As an-almost-20-year-old, you’re considering what to major in and what to “be when you grow up.” The reality is that every field has different jobs that require different skills.

For example, a nurse might need to understand the science of the job, and some nurses prefer to focus on that aspect. But other nurses will drift into the social services aspects. Other nurses will become nursing administrators. Others will become educators. Others will work one-on-one with patients to help train them, say, in proper nutition and diabetes management. Lots of people get out of college planning to be a nurse and then follow a narrower path from that large trail.

Every job has “left-brain” and “right-brain” activities. I work in HR, but I’m not a people person: I prefer employee benefits, where I deal with numbers and finances and laws and computer systems.

My point is that you’ll start down one path that seems interesting to you and that has certain stereotypes about it, but the jobs you wind up doing may only be tangentially related and may call on different skills.

Life’s a journey. You can set a direction, but you can’t determine your final destination.

ccguy · July 24, 2007, 3:12pm

thank you very much for the responses so far. it’s really interesting how your responses differ from what many “young adults” seek in life.

geomom you raise a good point on our interdependence… i don’t know if anyone’s read “the futile pursuit of happiness,” i’ve only read an excerpt, but one of the points it makes is that we humans generally lack the ability to predict what will really make us happy in the future (which is why i have turned to you parents), but it did quickly mention, as an example - making connections and strong friendships with people was one thing that REALLY DID provide happiness. i’m not sure how that applies in a historical or cultural context but i would think that humans have always been led to believe in such things as unity, cooperation, philanthropy, the collective human spirit, etc. call it social evolution, God’s design… i don’t know, but it seems that’s what holds us humans together and strengthens us. veryhappy you also mentioned the Jewish saying in “improving the world,” and i too see that as more evidence of man’s goal to help humans as a whole.

a very frustrating question i hear is “i don’t know what to do with my life” as if their career after college defines them… and to those that DO know, they want to be “successful” in what they do. but i feel as if people emphasize that too much as if that’s their only goal in life, or at least the top of their priority list.

i wrote down a list of my dreams one night, and except for maybe raising a healthy family, not one of them really had anything to do with a career. granted, there were certainly thousands of careers out there to supplement what i want out of my life (as many of you have explained a career can do)… but i also felt that even if i didn’t achieve much greatness in my career it shouldn’t matter, that it should only be a perk and or an ideal - simply because i feel, once again, the career shouldn’t define you.

in fact i even feel that some people were simply not cut out for how our society likes to define “greatness” or a “big accomplishment.” i lack the leadership and charisma to become president nor the savvy business skills to achieve money and power that i need to finance a great cause nor the intellect to cure diseases. i’m sure the same goes for many others (just maybe not on CC, haha). i might find that may change one day because i’m a rapidly changing person at this point in my life and i’m sure many people change vastly throughout college, but even then, i feel we can direct our life in a different manner to cater to our strengths and goals without having to meet society’s expectations of what it means to have lived a meaningful life.

some have mentioned spiritual goals, art and expression, helping others, etc. hell i’d even like to include playing baseball for some people’s lists. i just feel that these type of passions are highly overlooked, at least with CC-mentality kids or any driven and responsible college student. i’m relieved how some of you have mentioned how your career now is simply for financial reasons, or shall we put it into economics terms, exchanging our time and labor for money. ultimately i think far too much importance is placed on what we do in that “time”… what we do with our “labor…” i think we can make much meaning in our lives within the hours that do NOT fall between 9 and 5 (or 6 and 12…). now those hours are a big part of our life, i’m all for being a productive member of society, and there is no denying that your career can take you very far in terms of anything really, but i feel like our society emphasizes it too much. my evidence is 90% of the topics on CC and all the “lost” students i have met in college. is it naive to think that?

VeryHappy · July 24, 2007, 3:43pm

Well, you know, that is what most people come here to discuss. Maybe you want to find a website called – oh, I don’t know, “Self-Fulfillment R Us”??

mathmom · July 24, 2007, 3:53pm

My career certainly doesn’t define me and like many women I’ve had some time off from it and also many years of working part time. My friends in college never seemed particularly career minded except the pre-meds. The rest of us seemed to stumble into careers by pursuing things we loved. I liked art and math and during a gap year in France got introduced to architecture. I realized early on that the kind of drive required to become a well known architect wasn’t in me. I’ve always liked too many different things. I spent several years spending more time selling my art than doing architecture. When my kids were in elementary school the work I did at school took up a lot of time. Not Jewish, but my belief too, is that it’s our ethical responsibility to leave the world a better place.

My husband is more consumed by his career, mostly by necessity. Research scientists spend half their life chasing grants. It’s a good thing he loves what he does and he can certainly feel good about it (breast cancer research), but I’m glad I have a job that I can put down from time to time.

cheers · July 24, 2007, 3:56pm

I chose my work after I attended a university program in another field and realized as a 16 year old–Whoa! I cannot live on the edge of that abyss. I chose the next best thing–and it happened to be a profession.

A profession is a wonderful thing. A person can move all over the world and practice a profession. A profession tends to provide a steady income.

My tie to my work ebbs and flows with the decades. In my teens to late twenties, I was voracious and absorbed in my work. In my late twenties and thirties and forties, I still pursued work at a high level–but for 46 weeks a year and 35 hours a week. I did the Mom Thing in the other weeks and the other hours.

Now, as an empty nester, I find I am returning to my voracious work habits–and my profession is there to greet me–something I didn’t expect at all. I am sitting on top of a rocket apparently–with little rhyme or reason-- let me tell you. I’ve made some radical radical lifestyle choices. I thought those choices would have tanked my chances at a rocket launch–but instead they increased my chances. Go figure.

I don’t look forward to retiring early. In my profession, the older you are the better you are. that’s been true for me–in spades.

Anyways, buying stuff bores me. I seem to get plenty of travel in–so I’m happy to pedal along as it were.

ps Neither of my sons is aiming at a profession–yet. the younger one is already set as an entreprenuer. The older seems to be pursuing a passion–which he can do becuase his professional parents are behind him. I don’t have a vested interest in seeing them become professionals. I would like them to choose work they can do happily until they die. Life without any work looks absolutely dreadful to me.

Hope that helps.

fendrock · July 24, 2007, 4:19pm

Another thing to consider – how much are you defined by what others think of you?

The scenario for this is the proverbial cocktail party where the stranger’s first question will be – “so, what do you do?”

Some answers to that question will be more (socially) acceptable and invoke enthusiastic responses. Some listening to your response might go so far as to indicate you are a loser because of what you do (or don’t do).

geomom · July 24, 2007, 4:25pm

ccguy,

You seem frustrated with the lack of value placed on pursuits
outside of career. Even though my last post seemed to strongly
support the value of a career, and the satisfaction that can be gained,
I agree with you. One problem is that people come to feel that
rather than freely contributing to society through their career,
that a career is expected, required, even demanded by parents,
society, whomever. You need to shake this feeling. It’s your career,
contribution, and life. You get to say what success is, and how
much effort to put in. Your contribution is not owned by anyone
else. It really is up to you.

To be realistic, though, to some people, your career will define you.
That’s just how they see the world.

To continue my thoughts about putting aside my career and becoming
a suburban mom: At one point I would have said I was about equally
defined by both my career and my sport. Life progressed and I decided to
raise a family. Raising a healthy family, it turns out, is a huge satisfaction.
Also, I am contributing economically, more than I would have thought
possible before I quit doing research. Our lifestyle is roughly
the same as families with twice the income, mostly due to my efforts.
That is, some people work to earn money to buy the things they want;
I create the things we want directly. Best of all, at this point, I get to
choose my own mission in life. If I had to define this mission in
just a few words I would say it is “creating community”.

Your mission will be different. You wrote “i wrote down a list of my
dreams one night…” What a great place to start!

paying3tuitions · July 24, 2007, 4:44pm

Food for thought:

When I retrained at teachers’ college for my second career, they taught us this: Don’t tell kids they’ll only have one career, as was normal in the 20th century. In the 21st century, with longer life expectancies and shifting global economies, they should expect three distinctly different sequential careers over the course of a long lifetime.

My H is often with people in the last days of their lives. Never has he heard anyone say, “I wish I had spent more time at my job/career” but often they say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family.”

I was the only one by the bedside of my grandfather during what turned out to be the last week of his life. (Family asked me to do this in my early 20’s so the rest could attend a cousin’s college graduation, so they wanted relief from his bedside.) It wasn’t a “career” the way you’d think of it today, but for his day it was: he ran his own small shop his entire working life. I thought that with all the energy one puts into work over a lifetime, in the very end the only people who will gather around for you are family (unless you’ve made close friends, which also requires cultivation and care). Who would we have asked to hold his ancient hand from among his former employees, the neighboring shop salesmen, and so on? It’s a big deal if they come to visit once.
But call upon a granddaughter, best friend or even cousin and they WILL be there in your hourS of need. It’s possible to spend “too much” time on a career, but impossible to spend too much time developing family and deep friends. If you consider this a test of what matters (how you spend your last days), then it’s clear what matters: family and friends. In the mind of the person on the bed, however, it could be of equal significance because the career brings such inner satisfaction. Try to have it all: career, family, friends.

I had to move often for my spouse’s career, which made it very hard to pursue my own. Now in our late 50’s he has all the community status and my identity depends on his. I didn’t set out for that to happen. However, we have the best family imaginable, and I’ve done good work in 2 short-term careers (12 years each), even if not one great career.

Think wide (not big): If you listen to small children (often silly, more often wise) they’ll say they want to be “a fisherman, ballerina, doctor and a Dad.”

swkmom · July 24, 2007, 5:01pm

I dont really think you are naïve to think that our society over-emphasizes careers not only on CC, but in the media, too. It also seems to me that it is more common in this country for men than for women to identify with their careers, which is, in my opinion, to their detriment. This stereotype is, however, changing.

You first asked an either/or question & I just want to make a quick comment about that neither is completely accurate. Your career doesnt define you, though it does mold you & influence you; nor do you completely define your career you make choices that move you in a particular direction. It is my belief that circumstance, serendipity, chance, etc., often lead you to unforeseen paths that fork off of your chosen or current path.

As for my husbands & my experiences - I am a woman who has had less of a career than a pursuit of employment that will pay me to do some type of work that I enjoy (or that appeals to me in some way). Being a full-time mom & school volunteer for a number of years, however, has been my favorite career, so far. While I have high standards for the work that I do, WHAT I do has changed many, many times over the years (and has included a lot of voluntary, unpaid work). My sense of worthiness has been tied more to how well I contributed to the needs of the community in which I worked/volunteered than to the specific activity or work that I was doing. My husband, on the other hand, used to believe that his worth was tied to how successful he was in his career. He thought that because he was so good in math & sciences, becoming an electrical/telecommunications engineer was an obvious career match for him. Yet, after many years in that field, he learned that he wasnt happy just pursuing a career that happened to fit his most marketable skills & talents. He quit & has tried numerous things (both voluntary & paid) for the past 7 years. He now believes that he wants to pursue work with elderly people; he gets along really well with them and enjoys doing work that he believes will make the world a better place.

We both make it a point to tell our son (who will be going to Rice next year) that he should try out lots of different classes and not get too caught up in trying to figure out what he wants to do work-wise, because he will evolve over the years and more likely than not, his interests will change. We emphasize to him that who he is, as a person, is more important than what he does.

I think you are already on the right track just to ask the question and I wish you well!

VeryHappy · July 24, 2007, 8:40pm

I’ve often been envious of people who knew when they were 14 what they wanted to do and spent their HS and college years taking the exact courses to get there. Then, by the time they’re 30, they’ve got their careers down pat and they’re on their way to riches and satisfaction.

Then there’s the rest of us who are still bumbling around at age 30 or 40 or 50, trying to figure out what we want to be when we grow up . . . . I think that’s most of us, frankly. It’s not that we’re not successful, or that we haven’t done anything worthwhile; it’s just that we change, and our interests change, and One Thing Leads to Another. If we can go with the flow, instead of being tightly tied to one definition of success (“I must be a doctor! I must get into Yale Medical School!”), we will have a much more interesting life. And we’ll be much more robust people as a result.

brooklynmom · July 24, 2007, 8:54pm

On my 4th “career” and loving every moment of it. 
I think it is important to be able to re-invent oneself. Life has its many twists and turns, Except for working at McDonald’s as a HS student too many years ago, I looked at all my subsequent “real” jobs as careers. Did they define me? They did in some respects. But they didn’t imprison me. 
Now, there is a further distinction between career and vocation. 
Some people find their vocation very early in life -such as those who devote their entire lives to a particular field.
Others of us, work through job, career (or several of each) amd finally wind up at vocation.
You are a very wise young person to be thinking of the difference at this point in your life.
The key is, in my humble opinion, to never stop learning. Every experience you have helps you to reach the next. Keep your mind open and I think you might be pleasantly surprised where life may lead you.

latetoschool · July 24, 2007, 9:01pm

Hmmm…I would have to say I define my career, in that, I work to rid legitimate chains of commerce of very, very bad people, and groups of bad people, am obsessed with stopping or at least slowing down some of - the bad guys. I think of little else 24/7, even when I am doing something fun. I am almost certain the obsession comes from a childhood marked with the sudden loss of both parents, followed by supporting myself by committing petty crimes, until I was old enough to get my first actual legitimate, paying job. I am unable to go back in time and, for example, repay the grocery store for the food I stole from age 14-15, etc., but, I can repeatedly - on a daily basis - work tirelessly to do the things that people pay me to do so that bad guys cannot quite as easily leverage trade, finance, transportation, and other critical legitimate economic systems to further criminal activities. So in an indirect sense, it gives me some satisfaction to at least try to believe that I am paying back what I took, so long ago, but more importantly, I sense that I am correcting some great, great injustice that was done so long ago. Of course, that’s probably all mitigated by the issue that I’m ridiculously good at what I do AND I do it obsessively - sometimes 18 hour days, for days on end (because I enjoy it so much???) and therefore I make tons of money. But the money doesn’t really matter - most of the time lately, I don’t even know what’s in the bank - all I know is there’s more than enough, I cannot even think of anything else to buy, and that there will be plenty of money for a very long time.

Does my career also define me? It’s possible it could some day - in that, if a person looks at evil consistently enough, it is possible to go a little bit insane and believe one is seeing evidence of dishonesty, fraud, corruption, etc. in places where it does not exist. I saw a little bit of that when I bought my house from the chief of police, over ten years ago. He was close to retirement after 30 years on the force, and so you can imagine the total amount of crime he witnessed over those years. The house is in an upper middle-class neighborhood, very safe, no break-ins in a very long time, if ever. Yet he had the most expensive locks commercially available on every single door, and in some cases two and three locks per door. I had most of the locks removed because they were simply ridiculous - potential fire traps in some cases, and for the first three or four years we lived there, we didn’t even bother to lock the front door most of the time - that’s how safe the area is. But the chief of police’s threat assessment viewpoint was shaped by 30 years of direct experience with crime. He saw threats everywhere and therefore the obsession with locks. He was incapable of seeing the world any other way. These days, I just carefully try to make sure that I do not become like the chief of police, in terms of how I view my world - and I do it by surrounding myself with fun, happy, silly and even beautiful things during my down-time. I also worry that we become what we think about - and I am a firm believer that negative thinking is very destructive to physical and mental health, so, I try to find ways to make sure that my career does not consume me.

As to other people, most people in general do not know what I do, so, my career doesn’t really impact how others view me. If asked by people I do not know very well, I’ll say I’m a consultant, or perhaps a clerk, or office assistant - something really benign and boring, tossed into conversation specifically selected to bore the listener to death so that they do not ask any more questions. I care what people think about what I do in terms that I hope they don’t think about it at all. My neighbors probably think I’m unemployed. :)

If I had a do-over, I would do the exact same thing, except that I would get started sooner. I gave the first 18 years of my “career” to working for other people - worthwhile, as I learned a lot, but, I could have sliced it down to 10 or even five, probably. I do not think, though, I would be in the same place, if my childhood had been “normal”, because I do not think I would have the passion to use as fuel - or - maybe I still would - it’s hard to say. I would also spend more time socializing, and less time working. I could have worked 20% less the past five years at least, and socialized more, and then I would have a wider circle of friends. As it is, I have been neglecting some of my best friends for a very long time, and it’s going to cost me, I know.

For the OP, or for anyone in college or about to start, lame as this sounds, I have to default to “follow your passion”. The ultimate endgame is to be happy, while simultaneously being (legally) financially independent and responsible, so, my recommendation is don’t choose a career, but rather choose a quality education, followed by choosing quality people and organizations to align yourself with, and execute your craft with ethics and integrity, and out of that mix, a satisfying career will evolve. Oh, and don’t neglect your family and important personal relationships - a career can always be repaired, or resurrected - family and personal relationships are much, much harder if not impossible to replace.

question for the parents

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