And then ...
... the horrorscope.
Aquarius:It may be time to think about a career move, dear Aquarius. You are incredibly creative, much more than you give yourself credit for. That needs to change. What is the point in doing a job if it is only for the pay? You have a lot to contribute to this world, and in fact have an obligation to do so. Today, start to brainstorm ways you can put your talents to better use.
And today I hit a down. I have thinking about this job and having to buy clothes for it and my dog and my living place and my (lack) of love life. Am I just dropping the basket again?
What do I really want?
Aquarius:It may be time to think about a career move, dear Aquarius. You are incredibly creative, much more than you give yourself credit for. That needs to change. What is the point in doing a job if it is only for the pay? You have a lot to contribute to this world, and in fact have an obligation to do so. Today, start to brainstorm ways you can put your talents to better use.
And today I hit a down. I have thinking about this job and having to buy clothes for it and my dog and my living place and my (lack) of love life. Am I just dropping the basket again?
What do I really want?
posted by Muss at 6:50 pm
10 Comments:
You sound guilty and doubtful. Who knows how working at the golf course will work out? (Who knows how anything will?) And you can always quit if it's not so good.
Lovelife I can only empathize with.
I feel guilty and doubtful. Why, I don't know.
Well neither do I. But I could describe to you the academic interpretation of life-change moments? If you'd like.
Will it help?
Helped me...
Okay then. I am ready.
Ok, here goes.
All human lives include existential questions: what life means, what death means, whether to have a family, whether our lives have love and sex and meaning and 'moral status'. These questions tend to crop up at moments when have decisions to make about which course our lives will take - for obvious reasons.
However, our current civilisation now makes these questions particularly hard to deal with for several reasons. Firstly, the experiences of eg life and death issues are sequestered from everyday life, and handled by experts (for instance, we do not handle death rituals, but coroners offices and cemetries and churches do, and birth and family planning is rarely an expertise centred in familes, past on from generation to generation - instead, hospitals, media specialists, alternative health specialists etc.) Secondly, our civilisation makes it clear that expertise is problematic: it generates unanticipated risks (eg go to hopsital, have drugs - but create side effects, some perhaps unknown) and science is in fact theoretically provisional and open to revision (eg foods declared safe by science then get declared dangerous, and then safe again) and often expertise contradict each other - eg Chinese medicine has completely different beliefs to Western medicine. How to know what to trust? Thirdly, the changes expert-led cultures create are massive and rapid, and generally disorientating. Expecting a life where everything is constant and change is the exception is not an option. The world is subject to constant change and transformation, and information is filtered everywhere about it, increasingly in an unstructured chaotic way. Fourthly, the fact that distant, abstract expertise systems have become authoritative means that everyday life is, to an extent, emptied of authority over itself. No longer do traditions answer the key questions of life. No longer is knowledge of how to live passed from one generation to the next - because our world is already so distant to that of our parents, because of rapid change and transformation.
Now, each human life craves some form of self-understanding. Thus part of life is the act of constructing life-stories for ourselves which cohere and shape our experience. But because we, theoretically at least, have an unlimited number of paths open to us, and much more certainly, cannot anticipate all the consequences of our decisions, the construction of life-stories is to a certain extent retrospective and somewhat fictional. Therefore, the coherence of the story we thread through our lives tends not to be available to guide us through life-change moments and their key decisions, either.
Does that make sense, even if it doesn't fit in with your experience?!
It does make sense. And I believe it is what I think too, although I have never been able to nail it quite like that.
So on a practical level it leads to at least two questions. How to care for thyself? (As knowing thyself isn't enough.) And what expertise do you wish to draw from the world and incorporate as a part of your own self? (There's a lot to choose from, which is both a bad and a good thing. But if you wish to become an expert in the things I posted about above, incidentally, then the first thing to do is read this book: Anthony Giddens, "Modernity & Self-Identity", Polity Press, published in the early 90s I think.)
Sorry if this is all cold and analytic. I like you a lot don't forget. x.
Wait!
It also means you have to actively manage what you trust or distrust, and what risks you take and don't take!
Enough already!
Post a Comment
<< Home