Member-only story
The Dream Job Is Dead
It’s time to look elsewhere for the fulfillment we hoped to get through our careers
Over 15 years ago, before the financial crisis of 2008, I started working at my dream job. I was among that fortunate cohort of university graduates in the early 2000s who entered a workforce in which it still seemed possible that we could do anything if we worked hard and believed in ourselves.
For me, this meant working in book publishing: I’d always loved reading, I had a degree in English Literature, and I had a vision of myself sitting at a desk in fashionable (?) tweed, reading the first page of a manuscript and crying out, “I’ve found the next Margaret Atwood!”
And yes, when I told people my job title, they thought it sounded cool and glamorous. But the reality fell short of what I’d imagined. I spent my days filing piles of paper in cabinets and incurring my boss’s wrath when I got her lunch order wrong. Two years in, as my boss was firing me for screwing up some photocopying, she remarked, “I think this could be a nice job for someone.”
She wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it was not a nice job for me. It was, however, a valuable early lesson about trying to achieve happiness through capitalism.
