A delightfully refreshing response to the question, “What’s your dream job?” But while it does a great job at contextualizing our ‘dreams’ for a ‘bright’ future in a hate-infested, soul-consuming corporate Americana in an office building out by the airport, it doesn’t actually address our desire to find the dream job.
A desire to find work and a workplace you enjoy hardly seems trivial – it’s where we spend a third of our lives.
I was just speaking with a fellow faculty member about how odd it is that we have dreams and aspirations that are really just jobs. I often wonder if at some point in time, some stodgy old adults decided to falsely glorify the work of the everyman. I mean, really, when a young man/women says, “I would LOVE to work in marketing for a large corporation,” I almost want to reply, “Really? I mean, really?” For some reason, the day-to-day work of non-stop phone calls, floods of emails, inter-office politics, outsourced HR, glass ceilings, computer meltdowns, backstabbing, difficult clients, unrealistic expectations, decreasing budgets, and the comical notion of a work-life balance is something that we dream about?
I’m not trying to sound overly cynical, I just wonder about this a lot. I think a lot of us have actually already realized our dream job/dream parameters, but because it isn’t as glitzy as we thought it was, there must be ANOTHER dream job out there somewhere. I know full well that I have already had the blessing of experiencing two of my three dreams: to design and to teach. The only part left is to write and be published by a book or magazine.
Believe me, I’m buried in the notion of dream job just as much as everyone else. I just think it’s odd, that’s all. My real dreams are for my son’s autism to disappear, for my daughter to be born healthy, for my wife to find her calling and serve it with excitement and ambition, to own a house, for my sister’s cancer to go away, for my mom to be recognized for her achievements and challenged to achieve even more, for my dad to get off the concrete floor and into an office, for my brother-in-law to get his license back, and for my sister-in-law to meet the man of her dreams. These are the real dreams I have. My dream job? Eh, it’ll happen I’m sure. A little bit of hard work, time, opportunity, and prayer should be all it’ll take.