ranking jobs I wanted to have at some point

theater technician

My most recent previous aspiration. This is only not my job now because it’s not a particularly good job on normal metrics. It is difficult to get health insurance or consistent employment, it is geographically constrained, and working very long days and strange hours is the standard. But I feel like this job at least demonstrated to me what it could feel like to really love doing something: I’m not really distressed by the idea of it taking over my life and was fully prepared to let it do so, I just got an inkling that it wasn’t the only job I could possibly feel that way about, and if I could, it might be good to feel that way about something that made a little more money or was a little better for the world. This was also the first place I encountered the saying “if you could imagine doing anything else, do it”, which people seem to say about every field of employment. This strikes me as a marker of how bad most people are at imagining things rather than any sign about what job people should do.

teacher

Ages 8-10, maybe? This was an idea I had based around the fact that English was my best subject and I liked reading, which at least for a child’s understanding of what jobs exist doesn’t leave you with very many career options. At the time, I don’t think I really thought I would like it. I was a very shy and quiet child who could not conceive of itself as an authority figure, nor of any knowledge I had that others might want. My teachers weren’t objectionable in any way, but I was scared of them and found them to be such quintessentially adult figures that it was impossible to imagine myself as one. Being 10 years old, I was also limited in the age range I could imagine teaching, and really didn’t like interacting with little kids. As an adult, I still have a number of objections: it’s a relatively low-paid job that requires a lot of interacting with administration and people stuck somewhere against their will. I still don’t feel very enthusiastic about working with young children, and even less enthusiastic about working with parents. It’s very easy to do a bad job and doing so is often heavily incentivized. I have an internet presence and general lifestyle that would not be acceptable for a teacher and little interest in changing that. But I’ve now also had a lot of really good teachers, and being a teacher doesn’t sound like the worst job in the world to me. I like interacting with people, and by late middle/early high school children are basically regular people and you can make a big difference in their lives by treating them like they matter and have independently valuable thoughts.

veterinarian

Elementary school age, when this is the only job you can have if you like animals (with option for “marine biologist” if they happen to be sea animals). This is, I guess, closest to my current career aspirations, but it’s missing most of the components that I like about normal medicine. For one, there are no people, and I really don’t like animals enough to find this enjoyable. The vast majority of your patients are uninsured and you will have to euthanize a good deal of them. You also have to interact with pet owners all the time, many of whom are not capable of or do not care enough to really make the life of their animal good. These problems exist in human medicine, but in human medicine at least a large portion of your patients are making a conscious decision to make whatever health decisions they’re making. I don’t think I’d like working with most people who become vets, either. This is only ranked as high as it is because it’s a job I think I would be capable of, I just would dislike it most of the time.

writer

Another aspiration from a time when all I knew about myself was that I liked books. Not only do I not like writing enough to justify doing it as a job, I am also at best “okay” at it, and more pressingly, it isn’t really a real job. In the intervening decade+, I’ve found that some things I dislike are: anything where you set your own schedule, anything where you primarily work alone, and anything that involves forcing creative output when you don’t really want to, all of which are pretty big barriers to being a writer. I also just don’t think I’m good enough at having ideas, especially the kind of ideas that could be extended into “plots”. I like writing as a hobby, and there are often individual scenes that I feel compelled to put into writing, words being my primary and most natural mode of self-expression, but the things I make are id-driven fanfiction style stuff. At some point, I’d like to try my hand at writing something extremely formulaic, YA/Tikok-style slop, but I can’t imagine doing that for a living.

“something with computers”

This shares a lot of objections with writer but ranks below it because I at least know how to write. I have no idea how to do anything with computers that anyone would conceivably want to pay me for. This was also an idea formed before it became clear to me and the rest of the world that computers were not going to continue to be a job for anyone but a very small sector of people who possessed skills and interests that I do not have. I do wish other industries shared the tech industry’s tolerance for “alternative” appearances, but I will happily dress in normal clothes if it means I do not have to do something with computers.

child model, actor, kidz bop kid

There was a period of time in my childhood when a woman stood on a street corner near our apartment building and handed out business cards for a children’s modeling agency to parents who passed by. I was friends with someone who modeled for them and had a shelf full of photobooks of herself in various outfits from various shoots. I was originally very jealous but my interest waned upon learning that you weren’t allowed to keep the clothes, and hearing her describe the experience as being one primarily of boredom and sitting very still for long stretches of time under hot lights. I went through a similar experience upon finding out that it was actually really difficult to become a kidz bop kid and that being a child actor was a lot of work. Not trying to do any of these was definitely the right decision. No one told me at the time how bad being a child in the entertainment industry is, but I think it would have been especially bad for me given the emphasis on gender conformity and conventional attractiveness. I also later dated someone who had been a child actor, who impressed upon me how much their job was essentially being their parent’s property and how inaccessible all of the money they had made working was. I rank this job low not only for me but for everybody in the world.

princess

Like many children I formed an idea around age 5, from Disney movies and Star Wars, that being a princess involved mostly wearing beautiful ornate clothing and boys being in love with you. I was both not born a princess and the real job seems to involve a lot of stuff other than that, so I would rather just do those things but as a normal person.

youtuber

When you are a child, and see people on Youtube, they look like they are having a lot of fun, and they are doing stuff that seems fun and entertaining to a child, so it follows that this would be a really fun and good job. It seems that some people really do feel this way even as adults, but pretty quickly if you are a normal person it is obvious that this job sucks. It has all the downsides of being any kind of celebrity, with the additional downside that it is the least classy type of celebrity and you have to think a lot about trends and engagement metrics. You have to have a really specific type of brain to enjoy being your own brand, and to be willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time thinking about and making Content. It is hard for me to think of a job I would hate more.