EDITOR'S NOTE: As a result of my career crisis, I've become more emotional and introspective than usual, resulting in this way-too-long blog/movie review. If I kept a journal, this entry would be in it, as I wrote it for myself, but I don't have a journal, so it is here. Don't read it just so you can comment on how long it is (this entry, not my penis).
In recent weeks, during the course of my career crisis, I've engaged in a number of conversations, both in this blog and in the outside world, regarding the ever increasing levels of acceptance people develop when dissatisfied with something. The advice regarding my problems with the futility of my job range from "oh well, what are you gonna do?" to "just wait it out" to "stop bitching". Such advice has useful elements, although I've always been struck by the quickness with which people will simply accept their unhappiness with something. As if waiting and doing nothing can somehow create change. Perhaps people simply believe that leaving stability for a fruitless search for happiness in career or life in general is irresponsible. Perhaps they are secretly guilty they aren't looking themselves. Perhaps they are afraid of failure. Perhaps they believe something better doesn't exist. I do know, however, when I quit my job the first time to travel, in 2000, i was hearing the exact same bits of advice as now. Had I listened, I would have missed out on one of the most defining experiences of my life.
Every time I run into someone who actually enjoys what they do, or found success, I am not surprised to discover that at some point, they had the balls to break away from common convention, ignore the masses, and actually try their own "irrational" ideas. They had the faith in themselves most people don't.
I've noticed that when you are surrounded by a community of people who think a certain way, in an attempt to be accepted, you will eventually start thinking like them. We've all done this at some point in our lives. When I was an english major, I learned to love Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Graham Greene. When I was learning IT at age 22, I learned to love protocols and security algorithms. When in ad school, I learned to love Crispin Porter and Nike commercials. I didn't actually love these things. I loved the fact that other people loved them, and I was hanging out with those people a lot.
The primary pitfall of this reality is when you allow the desire to fit in to overwhelm the very idea of who you are. This sounds obvious enough, but it becomes so obvious you don't realize it when it is happening. I'm in advertising. I bitch about global warming, and yet I worked on a national ad campaign for a new SUV that gets 18 mpg. Somehow, I never even made the connection. When it came to work, my moral system didn't matter. Only doing a good job did. My current agency has Phillip-Morris. They've never asked me to work on it, but would I say no if they did? Would I advertise cigarettes? If I was in a room filled with my peers, all of whom had no problem with it, it'd be damn hard to say no. I want everyone in a room, especially my bosses, to like me. So I'd rationalize that yes, I was advertising cigarettes, but, more importantly, I was advancing my career. The reasoning is inherently self-interested. And when you get a whole group of self-interested people, the general community gets fucked.
I've always thought this is essentially what happened during the recent wave of corporate scandals. The corporate world, particularly in a capitalist system, obeys nothing other than profit. Make money, and increase profits at all costs. This is why companies, like Enron, will go to the lengths they do to make that happen. It is easy to peg them as corrupt -- totally different from you. Just like it is easy for me to say i'd never advertise cigarettes. The corporate world, however, seems to embrace the idea that the idealistic and moralistic people are fools. What we call sins, or crimes, they call smart business. You get enough people together who think the same, and you can easily see why all of this happens. Doing the right thing doesn't hold a candle to doing the profitable thing. When everyone around you thinks this way, so will you. Soon, you'd find yourself fixing accounting books, because all the people around you tell you it is the right thing to do. You might think you are above that, but ask yourself if everything you've done in your career was beneficial to the world at large.
Principles are easy to have until they are tested.
This is the premise of one of the best movies I've seen in some time: Michael Clayton. It isolates the life of a man stuck in the middle. It focuses on two questions I think we all face at some point or another: Just how far will you go when it comes to bringing yourself success and money? And what do you do when you realize something you've done has harmed other people? The road to corruption starts small, with a single decision. Someone asks you to defend a company or person you know is in the wrong. Maybe the company made a product that killed thousands of people. Maybe they fucked consumers out of millions of dollars. But it is your job, so you do it. Eventually, you forget there is anything wrong with what you do at all. You separate what you do for a living with what you do think about life. I remember once reading a quote: men have principles until their paycheck depends upon them not having those same principles.
Michael Clayton gets to the heart of this dilemma. It is a perfect moral barometer for our country. We all claim to be good people, yet bad things happen every day. Someone is responsible. Lots of someones. And as the movie so accurately asks: If you're aren't one of the people who does wrong, are you one of the people who does right?
The community I'm part of doesn't ask this question, which is partly why I feel the need to be part of a new community.