A few weeks ago I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine. She was telling me how she has just been dissatisfied with her life. Not that things were going bad, just that she didn’t feel that her purpose on this planet was to make present value calculations. She was looking for a way to have what she does for a living really make an impact on the world. In other terms, she was going through her one-third life crisis.
I said that I am going through the same thing. Of course in my case it is more of a mid-life crisis, which is what happens when you even have the guys at The Modern Drunkard going, “Dude, you really need to take it easy every once in a while.” Still, this thought has been bouncing around my head all day and I really feel a need to write about it.
Back when I was in high school, you know, back when knowing how to use a slide rule was still a marketable skill, I read that the average person has five careers in their lifetime. I thought that five sounded like a pretty fair number to me so from then on I always stated that I was on the five career plan. The first one was electrical engineering because I figured I’d start with the fun stuff and move to the tougher subjects as I got older. Ok, not really. I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up as an electrical engineer. I really think it was because it was the toughest major at the best school for it and I wanted to see if I could be up to the challenge.
Whether I was up to the challenge or not is debatable but they did give me a degree and I ended up doing some good work over the years. At least I left knowing that I did my part in making sure that the lights stayed on in Chicago. Then I decided it was time to switch careers, go back to school, and enter the wonderful world of finance. This is where I am now and one day, when I have perspective, I’ll discuss it.
So those are my first two careers and I have no idea what three and four are going to be. Number five, on the other hand, has always been set in my mind. I am planning on ending up working for a non-profit organization or a school in any capacity that I can. I’ve always considered that I would need to complete my work career by giving back for all that the world has given me. Almost as a penance for my time spent working at money grubbing corporations.
The thing is, I’ve been wondering recently why I am waiting for the fifth career to do that. It really lessens the entire point of it. It’s like writing a check to a charity at the end of the year just so you can be sure you get your tax deduction. Sure it makes you feel better but it is really a hollow act. So now I’m wondering if maybe that will be my next step, whenever that next step might be. Maybe instead of spending my time writing about how awful the world is I should take some time to actually see if I can change something.
I don’t know of anyone who as a kid dreamt of doing present value calculations. (Ok, maybe Victor did…) But I know that there are a lot of us who have ended up in our early thirties doing exactly that and wondering why. There is still enough of an idealist in me who just wants to be sure that at the end of the day the world is a better place because I was here. It is, for all my talk about goals and five year plans, the only thing that I want to accomplish in life. I just hope that I can somehow figure out how to make it happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment