{"id":647,"date":"2014-01-25T11:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-25T11:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/do-what-you-love-continued.html"},"modified":"2014-01-25T11:42:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T11:42:00","slug":"do-what-you-love-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/do-what-you-love-continued.html","title":{"rendered":"“Do what you love” (continued)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

After having previously written about the Slate articl<\/a>e on this notion, and, last night, on the changes in work more broadly<\/a>, I was thinking about this as I was shoveling this morning. \u00a0Now, we only got 2 inches or so, so my thoughts aren\u2019t very well-formed, as as much for a \u201cwish list\u201d of things I\u2019d like to know, as anything else.<\/p>\n

\u201cChoose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who said that? \u00a0According to the Internet, Confucius \u2014 but, of course, that doesn\u2019t really make sense. \u00a0See this \u201cStraight Dope\u201d board<\/a> for some sensible observations, not least of which is that the concept of choosing your job is a very modern one. <\/p>\n

So that\u2019s the first thing on the \u201cwish list\u201d \u2014 who said this? \u00a0According to a contributor to this board, it\u2019s alternately attributed to a Harvey MacKay, a motivational author and speaker who\u2019s been publishing since 1988. \u00a0And this makes a lot more sense, though a cursory google search doesn\u2019t turn up an exact reference to the source of the quote. \u00a0And perhaps this was something that MacKay himself attributed to Confucius to give it more credibility.<\/p>\n

This leave me wondering when we, as a society, latched onto the idea of \u201cDo what you love.\u201d \u00a0I want a research assistant to tell me when we first became so wealthy as a country to take it for granted that \u201cthe money will follow,\u201d as the alternate version of the quote counsels.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, there\u2019s the alternate proverb, \u201cBloom where you\u2019re planted.\u201d \u00a0This one apparently does have historic roots, according to one of my first internet hits, a Catholic forum,<\/a> which quotes St. Francis de Sales \u00a0(1567-1622): \u00a0\u201cTruly charity has no limit; for the love of God has been poured into our heart by His Spirit dwelling in each one of us, calling us to a life of devotion and inviting us to bloom in the garden where He has planted and directing us to radiate the beauty and spread the fragrance of His Providence.\u201d
It was much more recently transformed into a proverb gracing counted cross-stitch and calendar pages by Mary Engelbreit, though I can\u2019t tell whether she was directly inspired by the St. Francis quote or came to this separately. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So how much of the Ostalgie* that young people are feeling is a matter of trying to follow the former rather than the latter advice? \u00a0Certainly, most of the people I know follow the latter rather than the former path. \u00a0Has there been an increase in the number of people pursuing liberal arts and Mickey-Mouse type social science\/\u201dstudies\u201d majors, and can this be quantifiably tied to the seemingly poor future ahead of recent graduates? \u00a0Or is a \u201cgender studies\u201d major today, just the philosophy major of a couple decades ago, with no real total shift from \u201cvocational\u201d-type majors?<\/p>\n

(\u201cOstalgie = something that I wrote up in a comment on Megan McArdle\u2019s blog about the \u201cguaranteed jobs\u201d article; the longing of some young people for a job to be handed to them paralleling, it seems to me, the nostalgia many East Germans felt towards the DDR and it\u2019s guaranteed employment.)<\/p>\n

But beyond this is the bigger issue of the seeming hollowing out of the job market, with growth in high and low skill jobs but declines in the workaday midlevel jobs. \u00a0And to the extent that this has happened, no mockery of Ph.D. students in sociology is going to move us forward.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After having previously written about the Slate article on this notion, and, last night, on the changes in work more broadly, I was thinking about this as I was shoveling this morning. \u00a0Now, we only got 2 inches or so, so my thoughts aren\u2019t very well-formed, as as much for a \u201cwish list\u201d of things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n"Do what you love" (continued)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"After having previously written about the Slate article on this notion, and, last night, on the changes in work more broadly, I was thinking about this as\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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