I often daydream about how society would be if we were not forced by society to pigeon hole ourselves into a specialized career for maximizing the profits of capitalists, and sell most of our time for it.
The idea of creating an entire identity for you around your “career” and only specializing in one thing would be ridiculous in another universe. Humans have so much natural potential for breadth, but that is just not compatible with capitalism.
This is evident with how most people develop “hobbies” outside of work, like wood working, gardening, electronics, music, etc. This idea of separating “hobbies” and the thing we do most of our lives (work) is ridiculous.
Here’s how my world could be different if I owned my time and dedicated it to the benefit of my own and my community instead of capitalists:
- more reading, learning and excusing knowledge with others.
- learn more handy work, like plumbing and wood working. I love customizing my own home!
- more gardening
- participate in the transportation system (picking up shifts to drive a bus for example)
- become a tour guide for my city
- cook and bake for my neighbors
- academic research
- open source software (and non-software) contributions
- pick up shifts at a café and make coffee, tea and smoothies for people
- pick up shifts to clean up public spaces, such as parks or my own neighborhood
- participate in more than one “professions”. I studied one type of engineering but work in a completely different engineering. This already proves I can do both, so why not do both and others?
Humans do not like the same thing over and over every day. It’s unnatural. But somehow we revolve our whole livelihood around if.
Basic research. I left basic research because research in academia is a lost cause, killed by lack of funding, hyper toxic environment, rat race to the bottom, mafias and corruption.
It is so bad that I feel a much more morally cleaner environment working in finance.
I would go back doing what I used to do, but without the baggage that forced most of us to leave
I’m trying to change careers into medical science research…
I did a bit in big pharma… But it was 90% paper work unfortunately.
Probably a smaller firm would have been better, but I was tired of lack of job security and I went for safe bets.
I am now in fintech. We still struggle with corporate mindset, particularly IT, we are highly regulated as pharma, but at least we are not stuck in the 90s as I was when working with SAS in pharma. And salaries are slightly higher.
At the end you don’t need much to be successful outside academia. In academia it is literally a scammy lottery. Outside, you just need to be a bit pro active. Standards are pretty low. The biggest difficult is to convince hr that you are good fit without industry experience. HR people unfortunately do not think as reasonable beings. They wouldn’t do hr if they were reasonable. But once you manage to start, even the most “complex” job in industry is pretty trivial, you’ll be more than enough doing the bare minimum. If you put a bit of effort (even not much), you’ll be very successful
I appreciate the advice
