My wife did something similar and is happy with her work.

I chose my career (scientific research) by looking around, when I was 20 years old or so, at what various guys in their 50s whom I knew were doing. My impression was that the guys doing scientific research were happy with their jobs, even into their 50s and 60s, but people in other jobs weren’t so happy. Just about all the researchers–including those who weren’t doing interesting work–seemed to like their jobs. To me, at the age of 20, a business-type job seemed more glamorous, but I thought it would make more sense to do work that, statistically speaking, would be likely to leave me happy in 30 or 40 years.

Nothing to do with helping students, but I was just wondering if you’d seen this?

http://ethesis.blogspot.com/2008/01/now-she-has-life-chosen-for-her-by-high.html

obviously heavily influenced by the links I included.

Like they say, you can paint a turd gold…put lipstick on a pig…etc.

I have always hated the word ‘career’ and still do - I’m 34, now. A career means you’ve sold out - you’ve stopped caring about the world and have bought into the 9-to-5 and a mid-level management position and an occasional lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. Forget that.

People don’t hate their jobs because they are ‘not a good personality fit’ for them. People hate their jobs because people are not automatons. Adam Smith said division of labor led to productivity gains, but he also said it made people “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”. He goes on to say that governments needed to prevent this from happening - well, if we would want to consider ourselves an ‘improved and civilized’ society, that is.

Other economists went much further - decrying wage labor because it deprives us of our humanity.

I think i’d agree with these other economists. I’m sure most Americans do, too.

The solution, then, is not to help children to decide which position they would best be able to withstand this mental, physical, moral, and emotional dumbing down with - the solution is to help children escape this awful world we’ve created for them by restructuring society so that they don’t have to perform mind-numbing work just to have access to health care - just to have a roof over their heads - just to be considered ‘respectable’.

At a minimum, we need to be honest with them about the world they are going to enter - they will rent themselves to some corporation for 40+ hours a week, push paper, take orders, attend meetings, and other assorted meaningless tasks. And when they’re sufficiently brain-dead and have learned to not challenge authority, they’ll be promoted. Then they’ll buy more stuff and repeat the process. They’ll be miserable, so they’ll have kids, and those 20 years will slide by with some sense of purpose, and then they’re back in the crapper - visiting websites on anti-depressants, wondering if they can just end it all without hurting too many people they care about.

We need radical democratic reforms at the lowest levels of society - in the home, in the workplace, etc. Don’t try to tell kids that they’re supposed to fit into some godforsaken ‘career’ - it’s not fair.

Tell them the truth - “We messed up really bad. It’s unforgivable, but that’s the truth. You will probably never be happy renting yourself to some corporation - an immortal person - a god, if you will - so you need to think about ways you can stay alive without submitting yourself completely to this way of life. Here are some ideas. Oh yeah - now _you_ have a responsibility to help us change things for kids behind you.”