THURSDAY, 11 NOVEMBER 2004
Dear 18 to 35-year-old reader, your options as a working adult are as follows:
1. Find a job that provides you with a sufficient income.
2. Find a job that provides you with sufficient income and that you enjoy doing.
3. Find a job that provides you with sufficient income, and that gives you a sense of fulfilling a valuable role in the broader community (not only in the workplace where you earn your income).
4. Find an opportunity that provides you with sufficient income and that is consistent with your critical self-perception – developed after confronting your Given Self and defining your Chosen Self.
(Number four is more complicated. Professional work, or any work from which you earn money, must be chosen, and is sometimes needed long before the person has a more sophisticated idea of who he or she is other than “My name is John or Mary; I was born in Town A or City B; I like this or that; this or that bores me; this or that makes me angry; my father and mother and siblings are A and B and C and D and my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends are these and those; I want to live in a three or four or ten bedroom house or apartment in Country X or City Y; I want to drive a Porsche or donkey cart or truck, and I want to get married and have one or two or seven children.”)
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