"Ask yourself how you can be so bored with the thing you worked so hard to get to, the “real job” in your field that used to be the thing you coveted more than any other part of your life. Wonder why you thought that this job would be more “real” than others, or what that even means. Berate yourself for thinking that an office that requires business-casual clothes and provides you your own computer to eat salads in front of makes anything more “real” than the jobs you used to work before you were an “adult.” Regret ever feeling relief at becoming one of the adults, or that tinge of judgment or pity for your friends who hadn’t yet reached that milestone."
mmmph. This is kind of the fate I hope to never have to contemplate, because I'm a scientist, but it's sort of a general statement about establishing lots of external markers of success and what these things actually mean.
I attended a dialogue in my hometown (a followup to this one) about definitions of success and how they relate to mental wellness (in the context of more than a decade of a high incidence of teen deaths by suicide). And m dialogue group sort of walked away with this idea that it's not life-giving to have these definitions of success - because, no matter what they are, they necessarily define something as failure while also burdening the success-vision with having to hold all of our needs. So, maybe, the real goal is to try to trust that we are doing good things with our lives and that this will get us to good place.
No comments:
Post a Comment