The right job

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work1 the wonderful Alain de Botton investigates the strangely hidden and unexamined world of work, celebrating and bemoaning its diverse, peculiar character. The first six chapters (Cargo Ship Spotting thru Painting) are astonishingly well written* - unfortunately things start to slip a little in chapter seven (Transmission Engineering) and he loses his way in chapters eight thru ten (Accountancy, Entrepreneurship, Aviation). Perhaps he found himself the victim of an inflexible word count. In the quotes below de Botton talks about finding the 'right job for you'.

the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [a careers counsellor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited - long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling'.

. . .

The evidence suggested that the forming of an individual in its early years was
as sensitive and important a task as the correct casting of a skyscraper's
foundations . . . . the weight accorded to ideas of nurture and to the
development of self-esteem in theories of modern education no longer seemed like
a sign that our societies had gone mad or soft. On the contrary, this emphasis
was as finely attuned to the demands of contemporary working life as instruction
in stoicism and physical bravey had been to the exigencies of ancient times.

. . .

I left Symons's company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled
within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness
through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable
of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an
exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of
seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like
particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error
in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective
consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and
condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having
stubbornly failed to become who we are.

* A reviewer, Geoff Dyer, writes: "Without losing any of his trademark clarity and lightness of touch, Alain de Botton here achieves a deeper sympathetic hilarity and a higher level of wan brilliance." Amen to that.


1 A de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009) - quotes from p113, 122 & 127-28.