In the last several years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that there’s no one “dream job” that everyone could take and find satisfaction in. A friend of mine trades energy for a living; I could never do that, though he loves it and it gives him plenty of opportunities to do the things that he wants to do. I also have friends who are working whatever jobs they could find, and their definition of ideal work differs considerably. The “dream job” in America revolves around getting paid to do what one loves doing, whatever that is. For some, it’s practicing medicine. For others, it’s playing in a band that finds an audience and can sustain itself. Some people want to cook seriously. Others want to develop advertising and outperform their competition.
But the important thing is that it’s something that the doer truly loves doing, which is becoming something less and less people have access to; there’s been a marked shift in culture in which young people have increasingly assumed that “dream jobs,” particularly in the arts, are inaccessible, necessitating that they instead pursue jobs that offer the most possible money with the greatest possible amount of free time, giving them opportunities to work on projects such as music, fiction or nonfiction writing, visual art, or simply to socialize with friends and family. For many young people, the ideal career is the one that interferes with their personal life as minimally as possible while still allowing them to sustain their lifestyle, as the crumbling economy has all but destroyed many people’s once very serious interest in work and careers. The fact that jobs are so hard to come by isn’t helping things, either; so many people are spending so much time unemployed that anything that pays is now closer to a dream than unemployment. If you’re one of them, take a look at the Top 50 Job Hunting Blogs.
My dream job would allow me to live comfortably writing about food and music, the two things about which I’m trying to learn the most (or about which I feel most knowledgeable). I’d like to be able to get paid to write on those two topics, allowing me to conduct interviews with forward-thinking people in both fields, eat at some of the better restaurants in America (and the world) without bankrupting myself on extremely expensive tasting menus, and learn far more about both of those two things than I know now. I’d like to better understand cooking down to its essential science, to be able to completely comprehend food production, and to be able to communicate those things clearly to others in a manner that would be as educational for a reader as it would be for me writing it.
I’d like the opportunity to discover and celebrate things that might otherwise go unnoticed, and to be able to clearly communicate why, exactly, those things are worth celebrating, to an audience as specific or as general as I might need to, depending on whom, exactly, I’d be writing for. I’d like to understand the world of publishing (both in the business of words and the business of music) into the 2010s, where it seems increasingly chaotic, amorphous, sprawling, and unprofitable for all but a handful of people who’ve found ways to innovate within it.
I’m fairly certain that such a job is currently impossible. While jobs like it may exist, they’re difficult to come by, as positions are almost entirely occupied and very few people are involved in them full-time, with most (especially music-related ones) serving solely as labors of love for those who care a lot about those topics as every possible paid outlet ceases to exist.
About the Author:
Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for An Apple a Day and a writer on becoming a medical transcriptionist for Guide to Healthcare Schools.
Further Reading:
- 5 Tips for Finding a Job This Year
- Five of the Scariest Jobs Around
- 10 Steps to A Successful Career Change
- 3 Biggest Obstacles in Getting the Speaking Jobs You Want
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