I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has gone though this, and maybe if you’re reading this you haven’t experienced such a wave of irony and dissatisfaction, but chances are you will feel it after reading this post so…umm…sorry?

            I have recently found myself having feelings of dissatisfaction and resentment towards the way the world works…now let me narrow that down a bit since I’m sure there’s many ways the world “doesn’t work”. What I mean is the whole goal of life society has for us. When we’re young we’re put in school until we’re 18 or so, this preps us for the ‘real world’ but what we’re really getting ready for is deciding on our career, in order to accomplish most of these career aspirations we need to go to more school (university, college, etc.) once we’re done that we make our way into the working world, trying our hardest to make all of that education we received work for us and using it to gain experience and entrance into the jobs we think we want. Once we get there we work our whole life to save money so we can retire and enjoy the last few decades before we die. Do you see my problem?

            We work our whole life towards a career that we’re often times doing just so we can make money to retire to enjoy life…so why does our society have things set up so that the only life we’re given is used to work 8 hours/day 5 days/week for the majority of our life so that we can only enjoy the last bit of it when we’re old and tired and possibly not capable of doing anything we want to do anymore?? Why are we spending the best years of our life working so hard towards something that’s just the means to an end??

            Hopefully you will excuse my ramblings here, but these realizations are really quite frustrating. This is the reason why I want to be happy in my career, because I’m going to be doing it for the majority of my life and if you get to the point where it’s not fun you’re going to be miserable for so much of it until you retire! Unfortunately, so many people are not happy with their career. In my opinion, people aren’t happy because so often they’re rushed into a career they may not like because at age 18 they have to make decisions as to what they want to do the rest of their life so they can study and prepare for it (as now it takes at least a masters to get most jobs) or they’re rushed into it because they need the money to pay for the basic necessities of living!

            So, where is this all coming from? Well, as I said before, this is the reason I want to enjoy my career, the problem here is the job I think I want requires me to be in school at least until I’m 30 (why so late you may ask? First, because I need to get a PhD for the job I want and second because I changed degrees 3 times as out of high school I had no idea what the real world was like and so no idea what I wanted to do in it). Once getting out of school it’s another thing, trying to gain experience so that I can actually work in the setting I want to and making my way up the career latter to get to the top so I can make the big bucks and retire ‘happy’…right? Well, it doesn’t end there, my other frustrations lie in the fact that the 7 + years of schooling I still need to do is taken up by things like research and studying of a vast array of topics so that I can find my niche. While I understand why this may be important to some, the fact that it’s standardized this way leaves the people who already know what area they wish to specialize in frustrated as they have to complete a large assortment of classes they don’t need in the end for the career they want which also may bring down their overall marks making it harder for them to get into the school they wish to go to. And of course most of the jobs won’t end up taking into account how much you know about any one particular subject, but instead just look at the initials at the end of your name and the letters on your transcript; because to the world, it’s not important what you think you can do or how passionate and good you are at it just as long as you have the degree.

In a way university has a tendency to kill people’s passion for the work they want to do because it’s too generalized. This is why I often regret not going to a community college as they at least specialize in certain careers and help you get on your way in only a few years. The problem with this is the career I want isn’t really part of the community college curriculum, and even if it was unfortunately people don’t seem to value a two year degree (which indecently focuses more on your degree and gives you hands on experience) over a Masters or PhD (which generalizes and worries far too much about research and book learning).

In the case of clinical psychology (my end goal) I understand the need for a large amount of knowledge on various things however there’s more to it than getting the right letter grades and universities don’t seem to take much other than that into account. All this pressure and frustration is enough sometimes to make me want to give up and forget about the PhD and just do some job that doesn’t require me to be in school for the majority of my life so that I can just start paying off my student debt, but I keep thinking if I end up doing a career that’s less satisfactory to me in the end I’ll just end up depressed and needing to seek counselling.

            Isn’t that ironic?