Top 5 Career Choices

The difference between a job and a career is sort of like the difference between weather and climate. Weather, like a job, is what happens at a specific point in time. A career is more like climate, which represents the long-term conditions of an area. A career is something you do for a very long time. If I have a choice, I want to make sure I pursue a career that I won’t get tired of and can imagine myself enjoying every day.

To facilitate this choice, I created a list of careers I believe I would enjoy without question. In a half rip-off of David Letterman, I narrowed the list down to the Top Five Career Choices for Me.

At number five is a career few people could take seriously, but I would love. To be a Crypto-zoologist, a person who studies secret or mythological animals, would be a great way to earn a living. Who doesn’t want to travel the Earth searching for the Loch Ness Monster and Sasquatch droppings?

Number four is a similar occupation. It would be great to be a paranormal investigator. Instead of looking for secret animals, I would spend my time running around crop circles with a Geiger counter, or asking people who live in big, scary houses if they mind me looking for ghosts. Crypto-zoologist and paranormal investigator would both be wonderful careers, though I worry it would be a bit dishonest to pursue them. I’m not sure if I really believe in Bigfoot or ghosts.

Number three on my list of careers is, relatively, a bit more serious. I think it would be fun to be a professional philosopher. Then again, it might be more difficult than I imagine. There must be more to it than sitting under a tree and talking at people until they pay you to keep talking, or they pay you to stop.

My number two career choice is to be a symbologist. It would be an interesting occupation, to extrapolate great pieces of information and expose conspiracies using nothing more than the pictures on the back of a dollar bill and a knack for connecting the dots. I am sure Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, had the same idea. He wanted to be a symbologist, but realized it was not a real thing, so he wrote a best-selling book about a symbologist instead.

Which brings me to my number one career choice. The previous four careers listed would all be great, but appear to be so impossible to obtain and make a living at they might as well exist only in the realm of fiction. That is why, if I have a choice, I want to be a writer. I may not be able to be a crypto-zoologist, paranormal investigator, professional philosopher, or symbologist. As an writer, though, I can write stories about people who are. At the very least, I can write columns about aliens and mythology.

Of course, all of this revolves around the idea that I have a choice in the matter. While I will usually champion the concept of free will, as I conclude this column about what I will do in the future, I am reminded of the old saying, “Life is what happens while you were making other plans.”