My Monday Rant: A fallacy that is career for meaning in one's life...

Knock knock, who's there? Ke nna with another one and you guessed it right, My Monday Rant on a Monday, 19th Aug 2024.

Let's get right into it then!

There's a misconception amongst teachers, especially in high school, where they believe they can predict, with certainty, how your life will unfold in the future based on your performance in Mathematics. Maybe not just Mathematics, but largely, it is one subject that comes up the most in such scenarios. This misconception is also founded on an idea that one's life is meaningful only according to their career; which is just a fancy word for how one puts bread on the table for oneself or one's family. From my tone, you can already tell I am in agreement with neither, the illusion of the ability to predict the future nor the base on which it is founded.

I know. In the perfect world of motivational speakers, you choose your boss, you choose only jobs you like, you determine your career, you choose,? you choose, you choose... It is the reality though, that for the majority of people, even the jobs they end up in are not in anyway related to the courses they studied in tertiary schools. I know engineers who are database administrators. Well, a bit of back on that statement; when you studied B.Eng at the National University of Lesotho there wasn't any focus on databases at all, yet some people went from there to have careers in predominantly databases driven jobs. (I put this in past tense because I'm not sure if the curriculum changed in recent times). And some people never even got that courted job with their tertiary education or without it. And some people have great careers/jobs, with or without those degrees. And in both cases a lot of people have lived such meaningful lives, fulfilling lives... so why is career so much a point of emphasis in assessing meaning in one's life? Why does career have so much weight on our shoulders?

And, as far as careers go, how much of that could we really say comes down to one's own "doing"? I'm not oblivious to the fact that, yes, hard work really does pay most of the time... but then again, really, there has to be work for us to measure that "hard". Sometimes you are, ready to work hard, but there's just nothing to work on. I believe for one's career to be what it is, so many things have to align, including one's own efforts; I'm not trying to dismiss this in anyway, I'm just trying to point out that there is so much more into it than just your "hard work". I actually believe hard work does play a crucial role is shaping the progression of one's career. Progression, not initiation.

OK. Back to future, the misconception of its predictability, that is. Trying to predict the future is actually quite a common endeavour across multiple disciplines in the world, but unlike in high school, everyone else has actually taken upon themselves that this can be done using actual data, statistics and the like. And everyone else accepts that there is a degree of uncertainty with such predictions; that they are a meere likelihood. Why teachers choose to do it differently, and deliver such predictions with such mean tones is beyond me. I know people who are still scarred by such predictions, years after they left high school; some even contributed to "An open letter to my teachers who said I'd never make it." Fictious. I can go as far as saying, such predictions are just a fallacy. And, in as much as career can be so fulfilling, so much of it is out of one's control and so much of it does not come equally to everyone that it makes the idea of such being the definition of one's meaning in life, feeble.

I believe the true meaning in life is peace of mind, happiness and a sense of belonging and those can't just be attained via a career. And the measure of such, can't possibly be predicted from one's performance in academics, least of all, high school.

As I sign off...

Até proxima semana!