Midlife is as good a time as any to rationalize the decisions made twenty years prior. I came of age in the 2000s, when the American Dream was well on its way to mutating into the Reality TV version of itself. The most studious people I knew choosing greed with careers like engineering or law which, at that point, none of us adolescents could really understand outside the outsized salaries and stories being talked about.
Those not won over by greed either came from it (i.e., rich kids) or became negatively obsessed with it, turning away and condemning it at any opportunity, calling those who embraced American greed culture as sell-outs, sheep, or spiritually corrupt. So it goes for 2000s America; with few changes one could probably describe this social landscape taking shape in many places, in many generations.
I recall sharply my own distaste for the ambitions of my classmates that seemed centered not on meaning but on material. Partially, this came from laziness: it's easy to 'win' a race by not running. I was clever enough to hang with some of these top students who would go on to indebt their fellow citizens in the courtroom or hospital bed, or to steal their data via digital playgrounds. But I suppose I was guilty or soulful enough to think this short-sighted in an existential sense. I am sure, on a handful of occasions, I clashed with friends over what constituted effective long-term planning: should one think of their immediate satisfaction, their later career, their deathbed regrets? Were we put on the earth to squeeze it, or embrace it? How would we know the difference when we felt it?
If I can make a special point about America in the 2000s, it's that the greediest people won by a large measure and only time and its obsolescing powers make the memory not hurt for me. What I mean is: the lazy anarchic students who disdained ugly ambition in the 2000s were overwhelmingly correct. To win in a corrupt system is simply to lose oneself.
Winning on a boat in the ocean
This victory is merely moral; I can't be proud of saying I'm not a medical doctor simply because the medical profession in the US is rife with corruption, fraud, predatory practice, and cultures of addiction. In fact, I don't find I can feel any sort of pride at all. I wouldn't have been a good medical doctor, to start with. It's not my skillet. And if I had forced myself through it, like so many children of the ambitious or simply greedy and delusional, I might today be a doctor in a system roundly and rightfully hated for its open abuse of patients and regular abuse by regulators and free-market ideologues. To be a good person in a bad system is not an easy load to bear.
Likewise with law, or perhaps more so. While medical doctors make a great deal of sense as society's healers, lawyers are harder to find useful. They are society's conflict facilitators. It isn't that they solve conflict, mind you, but facilitate its process in ways mostly acceptable to democratic norms. They remove resources from angry people. This is an odd job to describe to a child. It's no wonder that 'justice' is touted as a near-holy and near-exclusive goal of lawyers and judges, etc., since the actual content of their work is mostly deciding who of two parties gets a worse punishment. The process of law itself being a punishment overall, of course.
Engineers, finally, could have been quite a delightful career in strange bursts. Who doesn't enjoy the technical minded, the keyboard freaks, the late-night chair dwellers? But this profession perhaps had the furthest to fall starting in the 2000s, being younger and more naive than either medicine or law. Engineers believed they were changing the world to be more democratic. What they were doing was manufacturing a democratic dream world that still very effectively distracts and diverts the civic energies of citizens away from genuine politics. People still think posts online have political impact and content. This is the great triumph of engineers, in a way, that they could make like Disneyland a world so convincing in its promise that people would spend a great deal of time and money away from reality to populate and enrich it with their creativity.
So it ends for career decisions; I chose lecturing and research. I chose talking, which wouldn't surprise my adolescent self who was never far from a phone call or long drive with a friend more exciting by the talking than by the getting somewhere in a car. One can travel so much further in conversation, after all.
But my path shares with these others paths a basic fact: we are all of us 'winning' in the sense of making material gain and stability in weird corrupt systems while a broader ocean of human suffering and alienation surrounds us. Doctors wave goodbye to patients who are probably going to be shot or addicted again. Lawyers wave goodbye to clients they actually hope do the same again. And engineers wave to nobody, but instead silently surveil the millions of tiny perverse infractions bubbling across cyberspace as humans dip into the internet for tiny needed escapes from the ocean. So we have boats, us careerists, but we are would-be victims observing constant shark attacks.