There's a spectre haunting the subconsciousness of my generation. It has crawled from parent to child, it's ugly, grotesque form masqueraded by cultural traditions, public education and universal morality, squirming through decade and century. You know it when it rears it's loathsome head because you can hear it in the way your parents described their days; they were never exciting or worthwhile tales, rather they were nothing more than mundane and banal descriptions of busiwork, coupled with the infamous conclusion: "...and I get to do it all again tomorrow." Does one ever look up to that life? It might have been hard, honest work or provided plenty of revenue for the household but did the parents ever appear happy? Or had the idea of comparing and contrasting happiness and monetary fortune long disappeared from their heads and from their childrens' heads? Has neo-liberal psuedo-optimism pushed the residents of these past few centuries into self-imposed slavery? What makes us eternally toil for and under a proxy of our collective willing?


If you're asking me (and I assume you are, you've read thus far), it's career-destiny.






Career-destiny is the current presumption that every human being brought into this world has employment at the tippy-top of his bucket list. Sure, the statement sounds inane and rather outlandish, but how many times were we asked what we wanted to "be" when we were younger? How many times have we altered the course of our schooling, our relationships and our lifestyles based upon a "future career" that may or may not even exist? Birth, childhood, the teenage years and then adulthood. More often than not, "adulthood" has become synonymous with "career." The career-destiny is the centuries old indoctrination that stands in sharp contrasts to existentialism's "existence before essence" and Sartre's critique of "bad faith." It is the driving force behind the virtual-suicide of billions of people each day as they foreclose on past dreams, write-off love affairs and hand the pink slip to fantasies that glimmered on the event horizon, only asking passion and wild-eyed abandon of prosaic ways from their follower. But what are they making that trade for?


I'm never one to devote names to the little facets of our existence. I tend to avoid that sort of structuralism like the plague. However, I felt the need to lasso the career-destiny so I could know my enemy. As you should know, I am at the ripe age of nineteen and the pressure to find that one special career and start a snug relationship with it is on. Like every other member of this capitalist system, I have the career-destiny wandering around my subconsciousness, but I lack the will to act on it. My skills at this point lack marketability: I have an unwarranted interest in philosophy and old poetmen, less than desireable skills of music composure and a writing style that's been maimed by months of hard liquor and bong rips. Where interests meet profit, I'm not a very well shaped fit. In fact, it's probably safe to claim that there isn't much of a fit at all.


"You want to go to school for philosophy? What the fuck are you going to be, a philosopher? Do they even get paid?"


As much as I can wish repeatedly that I never, ever hear that as a response to my vocalization of pursuing philosophy, it's a very, very, very regular occurence. For the longest time, I just side-stepped their comments, assumed they were just confused on the path one could take. Of course, after awhile, I realized I was the one doing the bullshitting, not them. Thanks to a consumption driven economy (not to mention the dimunitive lust for knowledge in our culture, no doubt shrunken by social networking and "16 & Pregnant" programming), philosophy has become an archaic boogeyman, an artform performed by obscure old men in obscure parts of Eastern Europe. Career-destiny makes studying philosophy appear to be nothing but a grand waste of tuition and production. Hell, even those who have made a career out of philosophizing are pigeonholed into such a small category that they are inaccessible to most people. If you handed the average twenty-something, whether they were in college or not, a copy of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation," it would be lost on them. Even at this point in my own life, most of it's lost on me, but I appreciate what I can grasp from the text.


I'm getting sidetracked. My point is: thanks to the omnipotence of career-destiny, there's an incessant storm of anxiety brewing over the seas of my brain and my ship is expected to dock somewhere. When the dreaded question still comes to me, "What are you planning to have a career in?," my only choice will be to either stick to my guns and claim my interest in philosophy or stammer incoherently until I foam at the mouth.


Come to think of it, the latter might prevent the question from being asked again...