Where to next?

I’ve reached a perplexing stage in life: despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have to enter the real world. This, alas, is not a ‘Real World’ sitcom with a charming adolescent co-star. Instead, it is a world in which all of the decisions that I made in earlier years, rather than coming together and saying “Do this, Claire!”, have manufactured a tension that lends itself to no job in particular, only an introspective blog post.

In essence, this tension is one that I think that most people can relate to. It’s not as simple as “Hmm, what should I be when I grow up?”, although if I could resolve it, it would likely generate an answer to that too. Rather, it is: "What do I think is important?" As I see it, there are three things that I could prioritise: intellect, belief or security.

As an intellectual-of-sorts, I can’t imagine doing something that I do not find interesting. Perhaps finding every menial task interesting is a little unrealistic, but I don’t think that it is too optimistic to hope that, on the whole, any given year should have its rewards – whether the satisfaction of having grappled with, and solved, a particularly complicated problem, or the daily satisfaction of “Shoo, I really had to think hard to write that story/piece of code/translation/contract.”

Perhaps less obvious and less clear (or just seldom prioritised) is an element of belief. I want to believe in what I do. For some, chanting the mantra of “the invisible hand will provide” is enough belief: it generates an adherence to market capitalism akin to divine devotion. For others, the devotion is equally divine, but more abstract – inspiration for priests, Mother Theresas and the like to do what they do. For me, the belief is that the world can be a better place. B thinks that, at its most simple, I’m wrong; that the world is too full of self-interested people and recipients of handouts for it to be any different than the way it is. While this debate is more appropriate for another time and place, but his opinion illustrates that, perhaps, my belief is a little naive.

Lastly, I think that goes without saying that, at a minimum, we all would like to be able to pay our bills; preferably without resorting to penny-counting. That is all that security is: train for, and take, a job that affords rent, food, drink and the odd luxury.

All this leads to a central query: how to resolve the tension. Few are likely to prioritise just one belief; rather they will try to find a balance. But there is always an opportunity cost - more money, less belief, less interesting OR less money, MUCH more interesting and no belief at all?

Some, whom I call ‘utility monsters’, derive a disproportionate amount of utility from one of the above and thus prioritise it – often to the complete exclusion of the others. For some, this is not due to a lack of opportunities to the contrary, but lack of inclination. Brazenly corrupt officials, for example, are probably utility monsters of the ‘risk averse’ variety. The priests, freedom fighters and Paul Erdos’s of the world are similarly akin to corrupt politicians, although enmeshed in different imperatives.

Unfortunately, the very poor and very uneducated epitomise the ‘anti-monster’. For many, the opportunity cost of making enough money to survive is so high that it consumes all other imperatives. For these people, the internal trade-off that I describe above is non-existent.

While I am grateful not to fall into the category of the ‘anti-monster’, I do wish that I had some deep calling in a particular direction. For me, like for so many others, I simply cannot decide how to rank these priorities.

And so, I live in limbo, and I study. And hope that one day I will know enough – or believe strongly enough – to make a decision.