Career Choices

Lately I’ve found myself running into a lot of people that I went to high school with – mostly while they’re working.

It’s weird to see people that you knew in their awkward teenage years holding down serious, grown up jobs. To see that the guy who always wanted to be a pilot now flies commercial airliners. That the weird and artsy girl is exhibiting her paintings in a well known gallery. That the class valedictorian has become a lawyer.

To find that the quiet girl who always sat at the back of the room is the person sticking a needle in my arm to take my blood. When that happens, you find yourself hoping to hell that the person with the sharp implement aimed at your veins was someone you were nice to, and not one of the people who became bitter and twisted about their high school experiences (like me).


I guess I feel kind of weird about seeing some of those people with full-on careers. Mainly because when we were at school, I was one of 10 students out of a couple of hundred that got high enough scores on their final exams to do anything they wanted. I could have studied anything I wanted at pretty much any university in Australia - only I never knew what I wanted to do. I’m 28 years old and I still have no idea. So I feel weird when I see these people because it feels like that freedom to do anything was wasted on me.


I like my job – I like that I get to do a wide variety of things – but when I see my sister graduate as a qualified physiotherapist and start working in a hospital, or my brother as head of a web development firm, I feel as though maybe I’m missing something by not having that same certainty in my life as they did when choosing a career.

That’s not to say that I didn’t explore a whole lot of options. I started three different university courses – but I never finished any of them. All I got out of it was a bunch of tuition bills that took me ages to pay off.

I started working while I studied, and found that I enjoyed work more than school. So that’s what I did. I sort of just fell into this job and stayed there. It pays the bills, and it’s not too bad – and with no idea what else I’d rather be doing, there’s been no incentive to think about doing anything else.


But sometimes I think of ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ and wonder - if I was one of the Golgafrinchans, would they have shipped me off with the hairdressers, phone sanitisers and insurance salesmen? Maybe I should have attempted to do something a bit more worthwhile. Or challenging. Or something. I don’t know.

And I guess that’s the problem really. I don’t really know what I should be doing. Or if I want to be doing anything at all.

Life was a hell of a lot easier when I’d only just left high school and was still attempting to find out what I wanted to do – back then the only classmates you’d run into were the ones who had to quit uni and get a job because they were pregnant.

Now they’re all lawyers and doctors and TV personalities. Being 28 is crap. Bring on my 40’s when statistically at least half of them should be divorced and miserable because their high power careers have eaten up all their time.


Did I mention I’m bitter and twisted?