Generation X: Career Uncertainty?
By Melanie Joy Douglas, Monster.ca 
Last night I had a long conversation with an old friend. She’s planning to move back to her hometown in Ontario from out west. Her career as a TV journalist just isn’t cutting it. She had always thought that being on TV – having millions of people see her and listen to her would be her dream career – she’d worked so hard toward that goal. But a year into having reached a certain level of success, somehow it still doesn’t feel right.
How can a career you’ve dreamed about and worked toward the better part of your life – at least your adult life – not feel as right as it should? My friend said that for a while she was in denial, thinking to herself – what’s wrong with me? This is my dream. This is supposed to feel right. I’ve always wanted to be on TV – now I am. I can’t be feeling this way. But then, she started accepting that her dream career maybe wasn’t her dream after all.
The conversation got me thinking about my friends and their careers. I’ve always thought of them as being one of a few career groups:
Group one: the friends who are good at just about anything. One fell into the insurance industry, knows he doesn’t belong, but isn’t sure what job he could take that he could do for the rest of his life without getting bored - lawyer, nutritionist, pilot, salesman – nothing fits just right. Another stumbled into communications and translation work because she’s bilingual, but thinks maybe she should get into a skilled trade or event planning or travel and tourism or dentistry. Quizzes like “20 Questions to find your dream career” don’t work on these people because there are never many repetitions in theme.
Group two: the friends with creative (and lofty) ambitions. They want to be writers, actors, TV anchors, musicians. Their paths are never completely clear – they’re full of ups and downs, and often they start sounding like group number one – ridden with unknowns and creeping thoughts of safety nets and back-up jobs. Most, if not all of them have day jobs that don’t represent who they are or what they want to be. While they have a vision of who they want to be at the end of the tunnel, their journeys feel very similar to that of group one.
Group three: the friends who’ve always known what they want, have clear paths to their goal, reach their goal, and are loving it. One always dreamed of being a teacher. She worked hard, got her B.A., went to teacher’s college, and walked into her dream job. She goes to work very happy every day. Her path was always clear and she never faltered.
But, as twenty-somethings become thirty-somethings, a new breed has emerged – group four: the dream-achievers who’ve changed their minds. They have had the vision, worked ridiculously hard to get to the goal – and on paths that are not necessarily cookie-cutter or even clear – and then, they finally arrive, only to realize it’s not what they want.
I can’t help but wonder how we all embark on these unique career paths, pursuing different professional passions, and then one day a good number of us wake up in the same place - uncertainty. Someone can’t figure out what she should do with her life. Another one chooses a career that has no set path and is so difficult to attain, and ends up questioning whether or not all this hardship is really worth it. And another reaches her goal – what should be the attainment and fulfillment of a dream - and it feels empty. What is going on with us? Are we over-thinking our careers?
Perhaps it’s not so much over-thinking our careers as it is trying to find the work-life balance that we, as Gen X-ers, crave.
But all this brings me to another question. Why do we care so much? Why do we stay up all night obsessed with our dream careers and our career path. When did our careers start mattering so much? Yes, you should like your job, but why the obsession with how it defines you as an entire person? Our parents didn’t have this mentality. Is Generation X going overboard in its quest for the perfect career? Why do we care so much? Colleen Clarke, Monster’s career advisor, says that society has set it up this way. “Now more than ever we all have to get serious about our careers and salaries as governments require more from us than ever before.”
I suppose that we don’t have the obligations and responsibilities that our parents had. We have so many more opportunities, and with these opportunities comes a new burden of choice. Careers are no longer born so much out of necessity as they are out of interest. Our parents didn’t have the luxury of living at home, pondering their professional options.
So then, how much should our career define us? “Our careers should define us in the sense of making us happy, getting us out of bed in the morning, making a contribution to our sense of accomplishment or doing a service to humanity or the community,” says Clarke.
“Your career should define you as much as you want it to, but it is not who you are. It is merely a tool for where we go or what actions we take that allow us to express some of our competencies. It defines what we are good at, what we like to do, and it might even feed our soul, but it should not define who we are.”
What can be done to ease the uncertainty? Not much. It’s in our generation’s nature to question everything. Maybe time and tested waters are the only ways to shake off the uncertainty, but it’s bound to stay until we can separate who we want to be (our dream person) from what we want to do (our dream career).