I am 27 years of age. That’s 6 years older than most of you when you graduate. By 27 you might expect me to be established in my chosen profession. Maybe my own office surrounded by pictures of family and friends, possibly even a manager with a few people reporting into me. You may even expect me to be happy and to have realized some of the dreams and ambitions I had when I graduated from this University.
Well….You would be wrong. To all intents and purposes I have a great job. I work as a management consultant in the City of London focusing on the Financial Services sector with a particular emphasis on banks. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? Post credit crunch, right at the heart of where its at. I’ve been involved with the Lehman Brothers administration, and worked as part of teams assisting with major transformational change at some of the worlds largest banking institutions as mandated by high profile government legislation such as the Asset Protection Scheme.
If someone had read this to me at 21 I would have thought ‘Wow – that’s what I want. That is exactly where I want to be and what I want to do.’ Why then is it not where I want to be and what I want to do at 27?’ It is this fundamental question, or more widely ‘Why do so many people a few years post graduation find themselves deeply unhappy in their careers, bereft of the hope and idealism of those final student days (or at the very least to have adjusted their aspirational horizons to such an extent as to be unrecognizable to their pre-career selves)?
Well, it’s obvious I hear you cry! Of course we are bound to be different. The real world kicks in. We can’t all hope to be happy in our jobs, a job is a job. Everyone knows that as soon as we exit the sanctuary of our mother’s womb we get incrementally chipped at by the sculpture of cynicism until all that is left is a rancid core and the debris of our hope. Ok, maybe I went a little over the top with the metaphor but you see my point?
Perhaps this is true, but do we have to accept the tacit assumption that we must loath our work? I have recently taken to asking people the question ‘Do you enjoy your job?’ I have actually done this quite regularly over recent weeks, and even taken to compiling a record of these unsuspecting individual’s responses.
The question as to why so many of us end up doing jobs we don’t particularly like or even have respect for is most probably down to the fact that at the age of 21, or 18 when we choose our university degree, or even 16 when we choose our A levels (and thus narrowing down our potential degree options) is that we don’t have sufficient insight into ourselves to know what occupation is a best fit for our individual personalities. As I trace back how I ended up doing a job that is possibly as far removed as possible from a ‘natural fit’ to my aptitudes, I can see in retrospect that it is a direct result of decisions I took at 16, and continued to reaffirm to myself in spite of an increasing internal dissent that for myriad reasons I continued to quell. I don’t know for sure about others (yet I suspect they may have a similar tale to tell), but I pursued my ‘sensible’ career choice with little passion and much resolve.
The result? A 27 year old feeling unfulfilled and just a little resentful. This resentment has been tempered in recent weeks by the realization that had I received adequate support from teachers and careers advisors at those crucial junctures, I probably would even not have listened had they offered advice contrary to my designs at that time.
One of the tenets of contemporary CBT (or cognitive behavioural therapy) is that the individual being treated must reach the realization of the solution to the cause of their distress themselves rather than being simply told it by an experienced therapist. It is believed that coming to this realization oneself embeds the answer more deeply into the individuals consciousness, thus reducing dependence on the therapist in the longer term. I realize I have made a seemingly sudden and abstract leap but I believe that there are parallels with my arrival at the realization that the career I thought was for me at 21 is not at 27. Had someone with deep insight into my character pointed this out at 21, the realization would not be so deeply embedded as it is now.
‘Ok Andrew, I get you, we wont listen to what anyone says at 21, we will pursue what we want to do now for whatever reason is currently motivating us, and 80% of us will be unhappy on this path by the time we reach your age, great, thanks for that mate. Woopdy fucking do.’
Yes, yes I know. But there is a point to this that you can all do something about NOW. Ask yourselves honestly, ‘How well do I know myself?’ How well do I truly, truly know myself? Not the self I project onto others, or the self others project onto me, or the self my parents want me to be, the self my boyfriend/girlfriend wants me to be or even the self my dissertation wants me to be. At 21 I pursued my avenue based on my perception of how others viewed me, trying to validate that because I thought that was achievement. It is ironic that here I am at 27 contemplating a radical new direction by switching careers to journalism when I can clearly recall at 21 after my undergraduate degree contemplating such a direction. Yet I didn’t follow it through. I didn’t follow it through even though I knew deep down in my heart it was the path mapped out for me. And here I am now 6 years later feeling like groundhog day.
So this is a plea. A plea to the dreamer inside you. A plea to truth. To the truth you know about yourselves deep down inside, I said earlier in this piece that we lack sufficient insight into ourselves at 21 to know the appropriate path to take. I want to retract that. We have the insight, we just lack the confidence. The confidence that sometimes increases or dissipates with age. Your young. There is still plenty of time to change to the profession you feel is the safe option if things don’t work out on the path you truly believe is yours. So do it, follow your heart, because life’s to short, it really is. X.
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