Potential waster

You post, as usual, brings up a unique perspective, Pangloss. I have had similar experiences, working in a dead-end job with people who have no desire to find another avenue. This happens a lot in the service industry. People are professional servers, sometimes pulling down as much as $33k a year, which isn't great money but considerably better than most and even tastier when you consider how much of that isn't getting reported with taxes. But when conversations arise over our lives, the fact that I have a college degree is an often flummoxing fact.

Why don't you get another job? You are over qualified for this, they say. And I am. And I hate it when I look at them and say to myself that while I appreciate the work and do a good job, I feel I am better than this job. I do not live based on these earnings and I will not do this the rest of my life. Serving is awful work and if I did it forever, like many of them will, then I'd consider myself a burnout.

The only thing I consider redeeming about myself when I think this is that being aware of how ruthlessly patrician it sounds perhaps means that I don't mean it as much, or at least know what kind of asshole says this stuff. Like I have the right to scorn a job. But then again, a lot of the people there have kind of burned out. Drop outs who have smoked themselves THC stupid and rednecks who are so convinced that they've got something bigger coming around the corner but won't give up "a good job." Maybe this is the end and it's all they need or want. But there are people who work there also who are on breaks from getting their degrees and will never finish, and I know they don't want this as the end. They have skidded off the track.

I don't ever know how to feel about these things. I am overqualified to be a bartender and so I am not out of bounds of saying that I want to find more challenging work. But then the people who work there who never planned on doing that forever but now have to do so. I think what I'm facing is the question of whether I can think of wasting potential as a bad thing, bad enough to reflect on the character of the person who wasted it.