[quote]I understand him. People make a big deal about doing something fulfilling with their life. But very few of us get the chance to do anything that isn’t pure boredom and tedium. It’s depressing and I think we should talk about it more.
Agreed, R52. Most people romanticize the importance and fulfilment of their jobs. It's self-delusion on a massive scale to think that the work most people do amounts to personal fulfilment and a sense of purpose: restockers of shelves, creators of actuarial reports, waiters, writers of box copy for packaging, front desk services, tourism information bureaus, event planners, lab techs, medical records administration, dubbing TV series in another language, tax registration, zoo keepers, space planning architects, landscape workers, historians, journalists, film editors, makers of everyday items featuring Frida Kahlo motifs, tour guides, driving instructors, police officers, teachers, dentists, art restorers, city planners, hospital administrators, HR vice presidents, CEOs, CFOs, VPs of Sales, stock brokers, accountants, project managers, writers of weekly and monthly reports on some process and its progress, administrators of pension plans, prison guards, factory machine repairers, assembly line workers, hotel chain branding execs, massage therapists, nail technicians, airline pilots, city council members....
You think they were all Chief Archaeologists making the major discoveries in Egypt in the 19th and 20th Centuries, the writers of books that shook peoples souls, the directors of films that changed the way we view the world. They are not. Most work, even most work for people with great job titles is by its nature mundane and repetitive, yet listen to Americans talking loudly and proudly about their job titles to strangers on an airplane: you would think that generating the weekly expense report summaries of the Sales Team were pivotal to the rotation of the earth, that if they were to take two consecutive weeks off the company would go straight down the shitter and the earth would stop spinning. It's just not true for any but a tiny percentage of workers, and even those may well look more exciting from a distance than from an inside view.
Finding pleasure in one's work and a measure of pride is great, but itś alarming how many people can talk up their work big time yet go all mousey if the subject turns to personal interests or what pleasure that find in life.
Yes, John Corbett sounds like an asshole for fucking saying how fucking uncreative his fucking career has fucking turned out to fucking be, but I'm fucking guessing that he's greatly fucking overestimated his fucking undeveloped potential for 'creative process.' He had one especially good role and a lot of mediocre acting and was rewarded well, married well, and granted a lot of reverence and deference along the way. If he said he regretted not trying to develop some more creative aspect of his work, fine, but he said as much in so irritable a fashion that he just sounds like a miserable old cunt.
I've known big CEOs and important scientists and renowned artists and historians and archaeologists and curators and inventors and creative people and accountants and many others across a huge range of jobs and those that were genuinely interesting people were interesting because they were filled with curiosity about many things, not just their profession of their day job. We put a huge emphasis on work as though it's the only thing that defines us, but it (hopefully) isn't.