on earning and purpose
i had a conversation with someone in my last semester about the relative merits of remaining with my current job, earning a state employee’s wage (which this person equated to a sort of voluntary carrboro hippie stoicism) versus pursuing the financial and material perks that come from earning a corporate RTP premium (which this person probably equated with real normal adult life).
money is very definitely the primary “reason” that most people work. either to pay bills from month to month, to pursue material wealth for show, status, and comfort (read: being a good american), or to move up in the salary hierarchy compared to neighbors and coworkers. none of these are wrong per se, and most everyone feels one or all of those things at one point or another.
but it bothers me that i might inadvertently fall into one of these states, that i don’t really have any plan (yet) to work towards or measure my progress.
dude we’re making a feckin’ difference!
i agree, but i did not consciously decide i want to make a difference and went out in search of a job doing internation health and population work. it just sort of fell in my lap.
which leaves me kind of generally wondering: “what am i doin?”
nice new design
thanks… it’s the new “information overload” version.
i just gotta figure out how to fix the neatlinks archive. listing all of them out is pretty useless and viewing them a month at a time is also pointless.
what it needs is a search feature. just simple free text search, either the word exists or it don’t… hmmm.
I think also, that for me at least, I work because I owe it to myself. A lot of people did a lot for me with no expectation of return and I need to pass that on. What a bloody waste of all those resources if I can’t make them useful to society. Much as we hate Hayley Joel Osment and the pay it forward concept, there is an element of truth to Aunt Mae’s statement that with great power comes great responsibility. Since education and knowledge are the greatest powers there are, those of us privileged enough to have pricey educations need to work out a way where the money put into us benefits more than ourselves directly. Benefit should always exceed cost.
Two commetns, one other concept to consider is stability – with two sub-concepts: (a) will the organization you are working for be around for a long time, and (b) will the subject area have earning potential. For example, the government of North Carolina ain’t goin’ no which where fulfills (a) above. Conversely some industries have suffered tremendous losses over the past years because the market has changed, such as the steel industry in the NorthEast, which deals with (b) above. However, I feel that Information Science will not be in that dire straight.
Second, I’m very impressed with Katie’s comment above – very well written and expressive.
Shit, it just occurred to me that y’all think I am the katie that is linked out of justin’s page. I am actually a friend from undergraduate linguistics. Sorry to confuse.