Job Paradise Is Nonexistent

The concept of a "dream" job is foreign to me, and I've never had one. An analytical and creative lady who vacillates between the two. A lady on the spectrum who barely survived workplace culture and the incessant politicking. Perhaps I could leave my imprint and maybe even make some money, but I was never truly comfortable in an office setting.

Maybe it's because a place of business is obviously not a residence. You can’t carry the widgets you construct and the trinkets acquired by assembling those trinkets to the hereafter. Jane Goodall reportedly commented, “My next great adventure at 90 is dying.” Because who wouldn’t want to investigate what’s next once the body dies and all the baubles and toys are left behind? Denis Johnson’s final book was a very introspective look at his life, wondering what he’d missed and all the ways in which he could’ve loved more, done more, and explored more.

Your coworkers are not family—they're the other spokes on the wheel that can be easily jettisoned should profits fall.

On my last days in the offices where I toiled, I wept not only for what was lost—the blueberry oatmeal on Fifth Avenue, coworkers that didn’t incite rage, the piles of free books, and my proximity to them—but also for the relief that came from abandoning feelings of crippling self-doubt and abject terror. Baggage borne from working with a narcissistic psychopath.

I’ve had jobs where I’ve sobbed and others where I’ve flourished. But no one endeavored to support me or make me feel whole. Rather, I viewed my employment as one facet of my existence, and the true effort was finding how they harmonized with the other aspects of me.

Bear with me while I fling you, headlong, into a gigantic metaphor—

Think of your life as a home filled with rooms that symbolize various facets of that life—work, friendship, love, family, self, society, health, etc., etc.—and each room performs a function and has a purpose. The corridors and staircases represent the breaths between those rooms, how you move around the locations you occupy over the course of a day, a life. The roof, walls, floors, and doors serve as protection and a barrier; it informs people this is me. This is my residence. Now look at the decorations, wallpaper, furniture, fixtures, portraits, and finery that make the box in which you live distinct.

Many houses exist, yet no house is similar to yours.

Sometimes, your house is filled with enchantment or craziness. Over the years, pieces of it will fall into ruin. But here’s one truth: a single room can’t maintain the whole, but it does have the capacity to ruin everything. The leaking ceiling in the bathroom and the mildew and damage it produces. Pipes exploding in the kitchen, soaking the floors, and turning off the electricity. And takeout pizza is cute, possibly downright adorable for a few days, but after a few weeks when the contractors are forever late and the estimates keep climbing, and other expenses skyrocket, and all the rage blackouts ensue and midday howling into pillows becomes the norm, all you want to do is to boil pasta on the stove.

A room can’t rescue you, but it may demolish the joint.

For most of my life, I set up shop in one room—career—and the rest of my house degraded into Grey Gardens. Ivy winding through open windows and plants springing up through the flooring. A family of raccoons sitting in the restroom. A rickety house that could’ve been nicer than what it ended up being if only I had tended to it. But I was a myopic fool who wanted to be a novelist! an entrepreneur! an industry executive! Even if the obsessive pursuit of each of these jobs was like the kitchen that messed over the rest of the home.

Maybe I’m elderly, exhausted, and more susceptible to weird-shaped root vegetables, but passion never served my house; it simply damaged it. I bought into the huge illusion that a dream job generates a dream life. And there it goes, going down the production line until you’re Lucille Ball stuffing chocolates in your mouth and down your shirt.

It took me about forty-five years to discover that it wasn’t my work that had to bolt me out of my bed; it was the totality of my existence. I couldn’t sit in one place when I had a house to care for. During the garbage fire that was the decade otherwise known as 2020, I conducted a conference call with myself and asked what I wanted from this life. What would make me feel fulfilled? When I’m a slab on a gurney, could I have shivered that last air out thinking, You did good, kid? How do I want to spend my days? What persons or things occupy them? Time is spent or squandered; therefore, with whom do I wish to pass the time?

If you’re a marketer, this is the strategy, and the life aspects are the methods that bring that plan to life. But if you’re just a person, it’s just contemplating how each area can operate symbiotically so the home can exist for as long as it can. Because one day it will crumble. It was to be dismantled and the site cleared for new dwellings and new life to fill them. While you’ve got this house, this property, how do you keep it? Ensuring that no one room is better or more significant than the rest.

Every room plays a part, and throughout the course of your life, certain rooms will take up more of you than others, but the homes that stand the highest and longest realize that the room that has its shine will have to step out of the light so the rest of the rooms may experience its sheen. Otherwise, you become blind. Or Icarus with his burned wings because he soared too quickly and fast to the sun.

Forget wasting your life in quest of that one ideal job, the magical salve, the solitary solution—it doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s transitory. You’re not settling or failing if you choose the good-enough job because maybe it gives space for your house to grow. Maybe you could hang on to your beloved's one minute longer. Or time to trek through the woods. Or maybe you simply need time to be a bit wild, a little free.