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.
