No one needs a career

Girl I think you're good.

*This post started as a response to Makayla Wamboldt’s post I Don’t Know How to Have A Career

I am slightly older than you are and I also do not know how to have a career. I have never been on Linked In, had a 401k (or whatever corporate carrot people offer you to put up with office politics) and even in my creative life I have been driving in so many lanes that even the bees would be jealous of my lines.

But but more importantly I (and I believe you) have had one exciting life.

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.” - CS Lewis

I once read an interview with an old woman who was quoted saying to young people, “I hear a lot of you talking about your lives being in transition, but when you get to be my age, you realize that life is always in transition.”

We are always in flight. Always changing, always becoming, always trying to open the next door to the next horizon. Life presents itself to us as a series of problems to be solved and the only people without problems are dead.

When I go hiking on the mountains if you get high enough you can see the way the land is really just ripples of earth evolving at a speed that we perceive as solid and unmoving. The tectonic plates shift, and year by year the mountains grow or shrink, but to us it always appears the same. Our lives are a lot like that. And the idea of a solid career is just a misplaced allegiance many of us were taught to have to a snapshot in time.

But I have got great news though. If your biggest problem is that you’re still “figuring it out" that only applies if there is somewhere else to be. Some magical end point that the self-help section industry and podcast gurus love to sell us.

I’m reminded of the story of the fisherman who is approached by a businessman while relaxing on the beach:

‘Why aren’t you out fishing?’

‘Because I have caught enough fish for the day,’

‘What would I do with them?’

‘You could earn more money. Then you could have two boats… maybe even a fleet of boats. Then you would be rich like me.’

‘What would I do then?’

‘Then you could sit back and enjoy life.’

‘What do you think I am doing right now?’

It would be like if someone came up and suggested you should really start hustling to figure out your career/life/purpose, then you would really be living. And you replied, ‘What do you think I am doing right now?’

Yet we have this internal dialogue with ourselves all the time. We bully ourselves for lives that are brilliantly our own because they do not look like someone else’s. So here’s another fish story:

Life is in the side quests. Joy is in the side quests. Love is in the side quests. Meaning is in the side quests.

So here is to them. To the weird little hobbies and classes you take once because that’s all you needed to realize you love eating sushi more than making it. Here’s to my collection of lock-sport tools, my watercolor set and latest obsession with being a beekeeper for a day. Here’s to helping friends move, to taking the long way home, to meeting strangers and sharing evenings with people who were not part of the original plan, and to leaving the question of who you are open like a mystery novel you are intent on never finishing.

I remember sitting on my therapists couch after hashing all these existential and career problems to her and running headlong into the brick wall that my life would never be without its own set of problems to solve, I might never have the stable career identity I wanted, but also that I didn’t really need it to live the life confronting me minute by minute. She asked me simply: Now that you’ve thought about all this, what would you be doing with your time? Would you live your life any differently? And my answer shocked and embarrassed me.

“I think I would be doing the same things I am doing now, I would just feel less anxious about it.”

May your side quests be many.

And may your road, your table, and heart be forever full.

Stay tender love bugs,

Dakota