Of Occupational Choice

Americans make a great deal of the word "choice," be it the "choices" society allows, or the "choices" an individual makes. They tend to be less eager to acknowledge that as a practical matter one's range of choice often does not extend beyond their bank account, with that range very limited indeed for most. Certainly this is the case when we speak of the world of work. Unless one is independently wealthy one's range of choice is not likely to include their not devoting their adult lives into old age to some form of labor as the price of physical survival, with this underlined by those choices that are not available to you once the fact of having to work has been accepted. If you hope to have freedom, in the sense of not being subordinate to another person and enjoying control of the hours of your life; if you want security in your condition; if you want a low-stress existence where you can go at your own pace; if you want time and opportunity to enjoy culture and pursue other passions; if you want to work to live rather than live to work--all very plausible, natural, things for people to desire--you will have a very hard time finding a position that offers any of these, let alone all of them. The best you are going to get (contrary to, for example, the stupid myth of the Frasier Crane-like "cultured doctor" the media flogs) is a job that offers none of these things, just somewhat more prestige and pay, a chance to acquire some more material things, than another line of work would provide. Indeed, our educations are substantially oriented to crushing the hope of any other kind of life, reconciling them to being a mere "animated instrument" performing the alienated labor the Great God Market requires, with anyone so much as confessing a desire to be anything else apt to bring on ironic sneers and sarcasm, if not outraged reactions, from one's nearest and dearest.

Meanwhile even where the particular form of that labor is concerned there are, again, definite limits. They must choose from according to the range of their talents, or rather, what society is prepared to recognize as the range of their personal talents for which an employer is prepared to pay anything at all. (No matter how talented one is as a novelist, for example, there just aren't many paying opportunities here--because "society" doesn't value that--while even if you are brilliant at something society will pay for, well, you have to prove it, and if you don't test well . . .) And then even after that the question of what resources of time and money available to them to gain the needed credentials will be relevant, the more in as you have to get them far in advance of any hope of employment, with all the risk involved that. (Survive the Fury Road that is the path to graduating from medical school, and you will find that there isn't a Residency out there for everyone. As to the lucky ones who do land a Residency . . . hey, ever read Samuel Shem's House of God? Or checked out what med school graduates bear in the way of student loans in the wake of such expenses burgeoning far beyond anything Shem's generation saw in their day? One ought not to forget that that has to be set against the money they hope to make in the "good job.")

All this, of course, makes it no surprise that those who do go along can be so harsh with those who haven't (they sacrificed everything on the altar of "work"), be it as professionals treating the general public high-handedly and exploitatively, or the bitter old householder growling that he shouldn't have to pay taxes to feed poor children; and that so many look for any alternative they can, like betting it all on a "fantasy career," or pursuing the dream of overnight riches in that way already central to the American character and the American scene going back at least to the Hawkinses in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, and which have successively made day trading, house flipping, and the mining of crypto all so popular in our time. It also reminds the clear-seeing and clear-thinking that so much of what people in this society conventionally celebrate as "choice" is in fact a matter of "dilemmas," as genuinely meaningful choice is a thing enjoyed solely by the truly privileged, those who don't have to worry about money.