Life's A Circus: What Not to Say to a Career Advisor

It’s a Monday afternoon, an afternoon that feels more like a morning, and here I am asking a robot for life advice. 

I don’t know if anyone else is like me, but I go through existential crises like our friends in France go through holidays. Every week I can guarantee that there will be, at some point, prolific pondering about what I’m doing with my life, where am I going, what I should be doing. I’m half expecting to be on my deathbed still asking myself the same questions. 

I woke up today with that same feeling again. There is something about a rain-soaked English morning that really makes you question your own being. It’s the slow start of another week to wander aimlessly through. Another chance to scheme a sense of direction. Another avenue to nonchalantly navigate down. And here I am, probing ChatGPT to tell me what I should be doing with my life.

I remember my career guidance chat in high school. I would have been about seventeen and even more so then, the idea of a ‘career’ was far from my mind. I had recently discovered music, sex and hedonism and this type of chat was foreign to the frivolity I was filling my free time with. There I sat round a circular table with two other people from my year group in the school library. I seem to remember they had both brought notes along with them. All I had with me was a dark sense of foreboding and a longing for the hour to be over. I knew exactly how this chat was going to go down, or at least I thought I did.

“I want to be a doctor”, “I want to go to this university”, “I want to study towards my PhD” spoke the other two students as I remained silent. University was alien to my family, something other kids attended, and if I’d have mentioned a PhD, they would have assumed I was talking about a sexually transmitted disease. Because of this, I hadn’t given any thought to continuing studying after Sixth Form. For a nano-moment in time I had considered a degree in journalism, but that was only to follow my then-girlfriend, to keep the relationship alive. Suddenly, the bells tolled and it was time for me to be ‘guided’. The conversation went something like this; 

“What do you want to do for your career?”

“Honestly, I don’t know” 

“You must have at least some idea?”

“All I know is, I just want to have fun” 

The look I then received back from the career guidance lady, who I might add, appeared more like she should be guiding people out of the door of a nightclub, was as if I had declared myself an occupational outlaw. I could see the cogs turning in her machiavellian mind. I had spoken the unspeakable. She disappeared for a moment and returned with a few print-outs before turning to me,

 “Have you ever considered the Circus?”

And there, in all of its glory, was my career guidance. 

I believe this is a perfect example of how ridiculous the idea of career guidance is. How on earth is someone who only met you five minutes ago, supposed to decide what you should dedicate your life to? It leaves me thinking, is this not just glorified clairvoyance? I’d rather be told next week’s lottery numbers than what career I should follow. In what world can we be expected to make such important life-defining decisions at an age where the only questions you ask yourself are what booze or cigarettes to buy with your fake ID? 

As a society, we are too quick to judge each other based on our 'respective careers’; The number of new interactions that start with that same spine-chilling question, 'What do you do?', is tremendous. Oh, how I loathe it! How do I answer that? Do I list everything under the sky that I like to pass the time with? And why is it never “What do you like to do?” or “What do you enjoy doing?”. We have conditioned ourselves to begin conversations by defining the other person in mere minutes by the means with which they earn their money. It's exactly like the earlier question, 'What do you want to do?'. Surely, 'have fun' should be considered a perfectly acceptable response. Fun is an essential component of what makes us human. We’ve done our time hunter-gathering, we’ve earned our pocket money from the paper-round-of-survival and we have advanced enough to be able to incorporate leisure into our daily lives. The ability to enjoy our time when we’re not working is one of the greatest gifts of being human. Pleasure, after all, is an inherent part of our nature. 

I found this out on a recent holiday to visit friends in Northern Spain. After a week of being introduced to new people each night, I suddenly came to the realisation– no one had ever asked me what I did for a job, and I hadn’t asked them either. Yet, we shared a common understanding of one another as well as a lot of laughs. I asked my Spanish friend about this and she appeared shocked, “Why should anybody care how you earn your money?”. 

Society needs people in jobs to function, and people need jobs to survive, however, positioning our entire lives around our jobs will only lead people to disillusionment, and with disillusionment comes existential crises. On the other hand, perhaps these crises are a prompt to accept that we don’t have everything figured out years after that queasy career guidance chat? Maybe as a society it is time to shift the focus away from the workplace entirely, to define those around us not by what they do, but what they are passionate about? The things that get them excited, that make them feel proud, alive and present. Or, even just how they like to pass the time. 

Next time you meet someone new why not resist the banal reflex programmed into all of us? Instead of the automatic “What do you do”?, why not,”What do you like to do?”. I promise the conversation will be far more rewarding.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am off to ask ChatGPT how best to join the circus!