Yum & Yuk: Work and/or Life

Loving Your Day Job Is A Privilege. This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. I went into law primarily because I wanted to have a career, not just a day job - a career that I believed in and that I was intellectually challenged by. Only now am I truly realizing how privileged I would be to have such a job. And that I may not have it. In my ignorance I somehow lost track of the fact that most people work because it pays the bills, and they do what they can to make the best of it. All three of my parents have different jobs and different levels of satisfaction with them - my mom is an occupational therapist, my father is a employment law and labor lawyer, and my stepdad is a laborer. These three different fields have challenged them all in various ways, offered different rewards and disappointments, and provided a good life for us.

Facing my graduation from law school, my job search, and a struggling economy, it is only now that I am honestly asking myself - what do I want from a career and what can I reasonably expect? Ideally everyone should have a job that fulfils them. But is that even true? There are plenty of jobs and parts of jobs that aren't going to fulfill people, but need to be done. So how and why did we get so focused on jobs as the way to happiness? This is, obviously, a conversation I think I will be having with myself and others for a very long time...

I think my generation is pretty spoiled. I think a lot of us - at least amongst my well-educated, middle class friends - expected not only to have jobs we loved, but also to strike a work-life balance. I don't know how possible this is. I also don't know that we should be looking for work to be the center of a happy life. I don't think everyone should give up - of course you don't want to spend 8-10 hours a day doing something you don't enjoy or believe in. But I also don't want to have those 8-10 hours define the rest of the hours left in my day. Anyways, all of this is still jumbled in my head right now. Luckily for me, there are a lot of other people thinking about the same issues, starting with....