Congratulations to Christine on her new job...
Reading her post (as well as Matt Kinsi's comment) got me to thinking...
I'm in my 50s, and to be honest, always tended to measure jobs by how close I thought they could get me to the goal of 'changing the world.'
So I chose journalism, first in the newspaper business and then, when I opted for self-employment 16 years ago, went to the less-lucrative side of freelance journalism rather than more lucrative means of employing my craft (such as marketing, advertising, PR and related areas).
But in retrospect, I'm not sure that always made the most sense. I wonder sometimes if I would have been better off doing something that paid better and at the same time left me more free to pursue interests in activism.
No way of knowing for sure, and I'm not lying awake at night questioning the route I took. But the one thing I realize now that I didn't then is that the choices are nowhere near as black-and-white as I saw them 15 and 30 years ago...
3 hours ago
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To expand a little here - I went through a major freakout a couple of years ago over how my job/career wasn't living up to what I thought it should. As in - I was tutoring rich kids to help them get into a good college, I was working for a corporation and not a nonprofit. I kept wondering "who am I? The person I was in college is nothing like this person" and started referring to my college-hyper-activit-all-corporations-evil phase as a past life. I've more or less gotten over it for now, but it was a several month long freakout.
ReplyDeleteI hear ya... I suspect if I'd done something different than I had done I'd have gone through something similar... And there were times even when working in daily papers that I could rag on myself for "selling out by being a lackey for the corporate media..."
ReplyDeleteThank you! :D
ReplyDeleteIt went alright. I think it'll keep me in graduate school ;)