“Do what you love” (continued)

Last updated on: January 25, 2014 at 11:42 am by Jane the Actuary

“Do what you love” (continued) 2014-01-25T11:42:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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After having previously written about the Slate article on this notion, and, last night, on the changes in work more broadly, I was thinking about this as I was shoveling this morning. Now, we only got 2 inches or so, so my thoughts aren’t very well-formed, as as much for a “wish list” of things I’d like to know, as anything else.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.”

Who said that? According to the Internet, Confucius — but, of course, that doesn’t really make sense. See this “Straight Dope” board for some sensible observations, not least of which is that the concept of choosing your job is a very modern one.

So that’s the first thing on the “wish list” — who said this? According to a contributor to this board, it’s alternately attributed to a Harvey MacKay, a motivational author and speaker who’s been publishing since 1988. And this makes a lot more sense, though a cursory google search doesn’t turn up an exact reference to the source of the quote. And perhaps this was something that MacKay himself attributed to Confucius to give it more credibility.

This leave me wondering when we, as a society, latched onto the idea of “Do what you love.” I want a research assistant to tell me when we first became so wealthy as a country to take it for granted that “the money will follow,” as the alternate version of the quote counsels.

On the other hand, there’s the alternate proverb, “Bloom where you’re planted.” This one apparently does have historic roots, according to one of my first internet hits, a Catholic forum, which quotes St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622): “Truly charity has no limit; for the love of God has been poured into our heart by His Spirit dwelling in each one of us, calling us to a life of devotion and inviting us to bloom in the garden where He has planted and directing us to radiate the beauty and spread the fragrance of His Providence.”
It was much more recently transformed into a proverb gracing counted cross-stitch and calendar pages by Mary Engelbreit, though I can’t tell whether she was directly inspired by the St. Francis quote or came to this separately.

So how much of the Ostalgie* that young people are feeling is a matter of trying to follow the former rather than the latter advice? Certainly, most of the people I know follow the latter rather than the former path. Has there been an increase in the number of people pursuing liberal arts and Mickey-Mouse type social science/”studies” majors, and can this be quantifiably tied to the seemingly poor future ahead of recent graduates? Or is a “gender studies” major today, just the philosophy major of a couple decades ago, with no real total shift from “vocational”-type majors?

(“Ostalgie = something that I wrote up in a comment on Megan McArdle’s blog about the “guaranteed jobs” article; the longing of some young people for a job to be handed to them paralleling, it seems to me, the nostalgia many East Germans felt towards the DDR and it’s guaranteed employment.)

But beyond this is the bigger issue of the seeming hollowing out of the job market, with growth in high and low skill jobs but declines in the workaday midlevel jobs. And to the extent that this has happened, no mockery of Ph.D. students in sociology is going to move us forward.

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