Career success doesn’t make you happy

If one read the autoethnographic posts in this blog from the time I began blogging, which was back in 2001 ... ok, you can't--I deleted them all in one stroke in 2007.  I then took a break, and restarted the blog in 2008.  If one read the autoethnographic posts since then, there is a good chance that a reader can put together a composite picture of who I am and what I value most and what I couldn't care for.  

Ever since my young adult years, I have been consciously making decisions in order to lead a life that makes meaning to me.  Meaning that cannot be measured in material terms.

While some might say I had no drive and am a failure, this blog itself is more than evidence that I am trying as much as I can to follow that old sage's advice not to lead a life that is not examined.

Thus, I was immensely pleased when I came across words that somebody else had crafted, which I could then make mine as well: "I'm in the twilight of a mediocre career."  I have been largely at peace with that because I have never intentionally and mindfully worked on progressing in a career anyway.

A career does not make a person.  It is irrelevant to who the human is.  Of the people I have quoted in this context in this blog, my favorite is Bill Watterson, whose creations always make me smile and think.  Watterson said:

having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

David Brooks, who is a couple of years older than me but has always sounded way, way older (!) has yet another book coming out.  In one of those pre-release interviews:

“I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered.

Sooner or later, most--if not all--of us realize that a successful career is not by itself the source of happiness.  Happiness is one of those strange things that comes from within.  A blue sky with puffy white clouds makes us happy. The giggle of a four year old makes us happy.  A dog chasing his tail makes us happy.  A good time with friends makes us happy.  What the hell has a career got to do with all these, right?

In his latest column, Brooks projects his book against the upcoming end of the academic year ritual: the commencement:

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?

Even that is unnecessarily complicated.  I way prefer the Bill Watterson bottom-line: go about inventing your own life's meaning as the route to your happiness; "you'll be happier for the trouble."   As simple as that.

Money cannot buy you happiness. But a career in teaching can.

I critique education.
A lot.
I often blog, even scathingly and sarcastically, about teachers, especially in higher education.

But, through all that, I am sure readers--yes, I am referring to you--did not go away with a feeling that I hate education and teachers.  I am pretty confident that I managed to get across that there is nothing else but teaching that I would do, and that there is no other activity but the education part that I want to be involved with.

So why critique then?

Simple. I cherish teaching and education that much.
I want things to be even better than they are now, and every criticism is nothing but yet another pointer to how we could improve on the current conditions.

I used to say that teaching is a calling.  But then a few years ago when an uber-religious faculty colleague said that, I realized how much misleading it could be to refer to what I do as a "calling."  I suppose that by using the word "calling" I wanted to convey an idea that, at a fundamental level, while teaching is a profession, most of us are drawn to it not because of the economic incentives.  As I noted before, "the salary is almost a bonus, which I cannot live without."  It was a pleasure, thus, to read the following sentences in an otherwise controversial piece:

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. Students are even weirder economic animals: Most of them would rather do something else with their time than sit in a room and learn algebra, even though the investment is well documented to pay off.

Those who want to earn truckloads of money know that the economic rewards are immensely greater when schooling for a Wall Street job, or a healthcare job, or a ... well, there are plenty of those types.

Society knows that too.  Which is why we in the teaching profession are respected way more than most of those in high income earning professions can even dream of.

From 1977 to 2009, the percent who thought teaching was a profession with “very great prestige” has gone from 29% to 51%. The graph below shows this percentages for teachers, and for comparison, athletes, bankers, and priests.

As you can see teachers have done relatively well. In fact, no other occupation in the survey has seen such an improvement in their public perception over this time-period. The next closest are engineer and business executive, which only have 36% and 23% reporting “very great prestige”, respectively, and have both only gone up 5% over time.
In addition to have prestige in the public’s eye, the evidence shows that teachers have an even higher public perception of their trustworthiness. As of 2013, a Gallup poll found “grade school teachers” were ranked third in terms of the percent of respondents who rated their honesty and ethical standards very high or high.  An impressive 70% of respondents rated teachers very high on this measure, which placed them under only nurses and pharmacists. Similarly, as of 2011, this Gallup poll showed “high school teachers” had 62% by the same measure. In contrast, clergy had 47%, police officers 54%, and the lowly journalist had 24%.

Many of my colleagues--I mean in the large context and not merely those who work at the same place I do--however overlook this exclusive club in which we belong.  To my horror, they complain forever that they are underpaid.  Of course it might seem like it is slave labor.  That has almost always been the case throughout history in most cultures.  But, it is also equally a consistent theme throughout history that teachers have been respected and revered.

Those responding to the "calling"--the clergy--are our real competitors for the respect ;)  In the pursuit of money and power, do we really want to compete, and slide down, to the ranks of athletes or Wall Street bankers?  Or, gasp, Congress?

The whiner teachers aside, at the end of day, most in the teaching profession are happy with their careers and lives:

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Princeton economist Angus Deaton have found that happiness does not increase with annual income after reaching the $75,000 mark. Unfortunately, most young people today don’t seem to understand this. When asked why they want to go to college, an all-time high of nearly 75% of incoming freshmen in 2012 said “to be able to make more money,” according to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.
A career in teaching may not rank high in the minds of most college students, especially those seeking big salaries. But all that may soon change if young people realize the real secret to a good life.
Teachers beat out investment bankers, consultants, accountants, engineers, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs on how they rate their lives overall.

So, a brief pause before I return to criticizing higher education and unprofessional colleagues ;)

"Statistics" not "plastics"

In 1967, the career advice to The Graduate (Benjamin) was:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.

Now, forty years later, apparently it is "statistics". The article notes that "Computing and numerical skills, experts say, matter far more than degrees." I will add this to my ongoing critique of college education as we have it now.

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.

Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.

Easiest job in the world?

The Wizard speaketh:


That is the caricature. The reality? Far from this. But, a funny cartoon, no doubt :-)

Recession watch: Grad Schools are Pyramid Schemes

"Brazen Careerist", Penelope Trunk, has great advice on why it is a bad idea to think of grad school as a way to escape the recession. I particularly liked:

Applications to the military increase in a bad economy in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do. For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.

Another gem in that piece: "PhD programs are pyramid schemes". Awesome :-)

The most lucrative college majors?

According to Forbes, the top ten are:

1. Computer Engineering
2. Economics
3. Electrical Engineering
4. Computer Science
5. Mechanical Engineering
6. Finance
7. Mathematics
8. Civil Engineering
9. Political Science
10. Marketing

I am guessing there were not many geography graduates to even qualify for the survey :-)

At the university where I teach, criminal justice and psychology are huge magnets for students. Those students might be shocked at the report in Forbes:
The reality is that few psychology majors move on to graduate school--and the career path for the rest of the group: not so rich. Psychology majors during their first few years out of school typically make around $35,000; those with 10 to 20 years' experience are pulling in $54,000. Those are the second-lowest incomes in both cases in our study of the most lucrative college majors. Only criminal justice majors fare worse.