Career Path Implosion

Okay so on arriving home via LAX after two weeks or so in splendid Mexico, I decided to try my hand at being a consultant. I'd already tried to design a logo for all the business paraphernalia to make me look bona-fide through Harvard a man who possesses some real talent but no real time between work and existentialist books that may provide insight into how a Malaysian can pass themselves off as Japanese.

I am the first to admit though, that for all the marketing hype, the blame laid at the feet of marketers for corporate/consumer evil and such, that fundamentally it isn't how you sell the product. Eventually everything has to perform. Even Real Estate.

And I think a healthy way to be is trusting of your friends and not of yourself. I fundamentally believe in Jung and Freud's proposal that the purpose of life is to harmonise and unify our conscious and subconscious desires.

So I booked in for career councelling.

Here's the notes:

1. I feel I have a good resume.
2. I felt I both enjoyed and was good at what I did.
3. I didn't feel challenged.
4. I had savings enough to buffer me for a while.
5. I had various ideas of what I wanted to do and be.
6. I had trouble reconciling these things.
7. I wanted to 'own' my own output.
8. I wanted to take more risk.
9. I wanted more diversity on the things I work on.

Not to shit on the career counselling profession, but it has gotten a lot better since I was a tadpole in highschool.
She went straight to my Jungian psychological profile. Also known as the Myers-Briggs personality type.

I am INTP, borderline ENTP.

And when she read out the 'ideal working conditions' it seemed I knew myself well and had it all down. She merely suggested I research how to start my own business.

Something I haven't done.

On the upside writing this post has highlighted how I really do add value to my current contract...articulation. It also provides insight into why I blog.

But enough of that.

I need to square it up, particularly with how I feel. Because the best decisions at the end of the scrotum, have to be emotional.

I feel nothing, most of the time. I feel guilty about not having a 'real job' that I define narrowly as a 9 to 5 job with inbuilt routine and relatively straightforward understanding of where the demand comes from.
Namely that the value of a 'real job' requires little selling on an ongoing basis. Like accounting and so fourth.

I twinge more at feelings of guilt that I don't really have a semi-real job. Namely one of those stop gap jobs to earn pocket money, like tele-marketing, market research, busing tables, working retail etc.
I get sweaty panic attacks looking at the grown individuals working fast food jobs just to give themselves the opportunity to complete their masters in Info-sys, return to India and get a 'real-job'

For me I think its a guilt symptomatic of self doubt and the corresponding reassurance of groups.

Most people, just work real jobs. They are cogs in a huge machine that pumps resources through arteries into cities where most of human civilization takes place.

And I don't see a way around the need for that to happen.

I am confounded by my choice though, to be a cog, or be some peripheral parasite.

I can be a peripheral parasite so I assume this allowance in an efficient system of society is because I may have some latent value by slipping through the cracks.

Put simply I am struck by the notion that what I do now, has an implicit guaruntee that I produce something by it.

I get nervous that by self-indulgently or even self-righteously 'discovering my-self' I am racing against a ticking clock.

I am meant to deliver something.

Which brings me hopefully nearer to the conclusion of this post on my career path.

I now doubt even my desire to be a business consultant. My stop-gap business plan on how to build up an industry. And here my fears and aspirations correlate.

I wanted to start my own business to create a business environment to my liking. And the purpose of that was to make an environment that would attract similar minds.

I am most reassured when working with what I would describe as 'like minds'. That they find my work funny, or poigniant, or original reassures me that I am simply not delusional.

I seek a career path where I have a small reassuring group of individuals that differ from society in the same way I do. I'm just not sure where that is.

I also think in the real/semi-real/bullshit job department is fundamentally of little concern, a detail. An afterthought. I guess eventually it has to be financially viable. But one thing I really don't fear is being poor.