An interview

Pangloss, sorry I have been so long in posting a response. You see, I was out of town. I had a job interview. For a real job.

It was a crazy experience -- the company paid for my flight to their location, paid for my stay at a (nice) hotel, bought dinner, breakfast and lunch, and picked up every taxi bill as well. My first thought, as soon as I arrived at the hotel, was how bizarre it seemed that a company would be so interested in me. After all, six months before any given day this week, I was probably drunk on Spring Break. I thought, if these people only knew me well enough, they'd realize how silly it is to hire me. But then, that's how a lot of people feel, I bet.

Of course, this company is a real company with huge revenue numbers. They're capitalist to the bone. They're expanding rapidly. They're the opposite of what I thought I would do when I graduated. And now that I'm in the running for a real job with real pay and real benefits, it unsettles me that I am so excited at the possibility of abandoning the hopes I had when I was in college for a life that eschewed conventionality in favor of vibrancy. What does this mean for me?

For starters, I haven't completely abandoned my ethics. The company is incredibly gracious and very concerned about doing the right thing. It's not Google, but they're motto is not very different from Google's "Don't be evil" mantra. So I've either a) found the shining example of responsible profit-motive or b) been seduced. Either way, though, I've let something slip since college. Taking this job, if I'm offered it, doesn't mean that I'm entirely selling out, but it does mean that already, in the three months since graduation, I've become something of that person I used to disparage. You know, the college-age liberal who was not quite so willing to forgo the luxuries provided him in the safe environment of the university when he was on his own. "Fight for world peace, until you find that you might have to go without HBO!"

It also means that I have to abandon, at least for a few years, my plan to go international. It once was incredibly formalized and had since devolved into little more than foreign vagrancy, but it still holds a dear place in my heart. Deny that? For a job? Where is my gusto? In six months, I might only be able to find it in my locker at the country club.

The company, though, really was great. I'd love to work for them, at any age, which is part of what makes this process so frustrating. If I had already gone into the great big world to have my adventure, then this is exactly where I'd like to work when I came home. The company really seems perfect, save one thing. While they may have arranged all flights and accomodations, I did still have to pay for parking at the airport.

Do I want a "real job"?

"Real jobs," as Martin has described them are a source of peculiar and confused emotions for me. Although I am actively pursuing one, I am deep into questioning why I am doing so and for what end I am pursuing this avenue.

Most "real jobs" today do not entail what I like to do. That is, sitting inside on a beautiful day, staring at LCD screens, talking to people on the phone, filling out forms, having meetings. In fact, those are perhaps my least favorite activities on the face of the earth. I would much rather be outside, doing something active, or contributing something worthwhile to human existence. However, those jobs usually either don't pay you enough to live on, are few and far between, require lots of qualifications, or don't exist. So if I want to have my root canals at least marginably affordable and to hope to have a chance of maybe owning a small house one day, I have to seek a "real job."

But why? I have no desire to pursue a conventional career. That means investing in something I don't value and don't like, sort of like Social Security. Which means I'm condemned to either working a non-career job or being perpetually stuck at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

The fact that motivated, ambitious, intelligent people in this world have almost no choice but to participate in this system of alienated existence is insane. In order to simply live, one must further the very thing which makes them dislike life. They cannot live simply and pursue honest, though less glorious, jobs for that is not what our civilization values. Progress, growth, wealth creation, consumption -- this is life as we define it now. We worship those idols so fervently that we are blind to the fact that there, for centuries, was another path.

I would prefer that we were a world of farmers and ranchers, artists and craftsmen, where life was slower and more valued, where life was measured in seasons and eras, not in quarterly profit projections. Where life was a spiritual and philosophical journey, not a struggle to ensure the triumph of consumption. That is how much of humanity has existed across its history. Of course, there is no going back now, not without changes that no modern person would ever tolerate, and certainly not with the chronological snobbery we wallow in.

Plenty of you corporate types will laugh and berate me for my "old-fashioned" or "obsolete" yearnings. He doesn't understand how great affluence, technology, and leisure has made human life! they'll say. What a rube, wishing for days he'll never see! That's fine, perhaps you are happy and proud of what you've done. But no man can count himself truly humble unless he can look at what he has created and somewhere in his mind wonder if there is not a terrible, unseen cost, questioning whether what was old has truly been replaced by something better. I contend that is has not.