usmbguest5318
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Careers used to be a reward for good performance and loyaltyThe bigger problem is the availability of upward mobility. You can get a job. You can't get a career you can support a family on, accumulate family wealth that can be passed on, eventually retireA group of my son's friends who are on a "road trip to nowhere in particular" visited briefly this afternoon to say "hi" -- and perhaps also knowing that by doing so they'd get a good meal and libations without having to "pony up" for a posh brunch LOL -- seeing as their travels were taking them past D.C. Part of our conversation involved the matter of the equality of opportunity among the citizenry of the U.S. That part of the conversation included the following soliloquy [summarized, of course, for I didn't record the conversation so I could quote it accurately]:
The phenomenon is and isn't a matter of race. It isn't a matter of race to the extent that one observes in certain isolated communities that economic success -- reaching middle or upper middle wealth levels -- continues to escape people who have centuries long family histories of being poor, poorly educated and inaptly motivated re: innovativeness. It is a matter of race in that the U.S. has been a nation whereby because of their race, an entire segment of society was forced to be poor, poorly educated and, no matter their motivation and innovative will, denied the ability to act on it, instead having to consign themselves to innovating ways to merely not get killed, lynched or something similar. To the extent that women are disadvantaged, it's a matter of sex, which is something one can see from the quantity of women, which is something around 25 or so, who head Fortune 500 companies and in the lower pay given to women, yet women comprise about half of the population.
If one wants to live what folks like you and I would call "a hard life," that's on them. If one doesn't want to live "a hard life" and one is forced -- by law and by the custom of the dominant segment of society -- to do so, that's not on them.
Take you for example. Your ancestors came to this country with resources and parlayed them into thriving business. They used the income from that to educate their kids who in turn pursued successful business or professional careers. That cycle has continued unabated -- even after being on the losing side of the Civil War -- for over two hundred years. No, you're not living on a trust established some 200 or more years ago and even today provides for a very luxurious existence. You've still had to do something with yourself to be where you are, but you faced no limits on your doing something with yourself. But without the "leg up" you got from your ancestors, you'd have had a much harder way to go.
Where would be your situation today were you descended from people who, until comparatively recently, were denied the opportunity to even own property, to learn to read let alone go to the best schools or even typical schools, and so on? Maybe you would be among the upper middle class or upper class, but most likely you would not.
That didn't come from me, but it could have. That was one of my guests addressing another of them.
Now, like the kid the woman address, I happen to have been, in a manner of speaking, "to the manor born." I'm not ashamed of that, and I'm also not in denial about the advantages that provided me. Naturally, not everyone was born with as much a "leg up" as I, but that's not the point.
Everyone who was born with some "leg up" dissembles when they deny their advantages. The fact is that some of those advantages make a material difference and some of them don't. For instance, almost everyone who's achieved economic success (upper middle or higher wealth) did so from contemporary beginnings less well positioned. On the other hand, being born minority or female matters a lot and is essentially unalterable. and to think that was/is not a burden is to deny the reality of America. It's, IMO, reprehensible to decry efforts to correct the nature of the nation so that those two statuses are not, ASAP, no burden, no disadvantage, at all.You can't get a career
That's because nobody gives careers. A career is something workers creates for themselves. They do so by starting with one of the jobs or other opportunities they are given and building on it.
They would offer pensions, perks and vacation time in return for staying
Now they fire you at the first break in production
As long as you maintain that a career is something one is given by an employer and I maintain that a career is something one develops for oneself, there really no point to our continuing this line of discussion.
I can assure you that as I'm only the most recent person in a long line of family members, close friends and relatives who've created highly rewarding -- financially and personally -- careers for themselves, and having mentored other people in the development of their careers, I've too often seen the fruits accruing to individuals who build a career rather than wait for someone to give them one. Indeed, I've never seen anyone be given a career.
Accordingly, I'm not going to alter my position. One of my core principles is that each and every one of us must take responsibility for our lives and all we do in them. Even, say, the women of whom I wrote in the OP must do that, and forge on in spite of the inequities they face by dint of being female. Have they a harder way to go? Yes, but go they must. The disadvantage affects how far they can go and what roads they may take, not whether they must set out.
To have a career, one must say to oneself, "This is what I'm going to do with my life because it interests me to do it, and it needs or will soon need to be done. This is the contribution I am going to make to 'whatever' persons or things in the world." While that thing can be something momentous, it doesn't have to be. It does, however, have to be a thing of which the achieving it is something of which one never tires, something one would sooner do even if one weren't being paid to do it.
After determining what it is one will do, one sets about doing it, thereby creating a career, which, done effectively, consists of a series of goals and accomplishments, and, as new opportunities appear, new goals and new accomplishments, all focused around the central thing one initially determined one would do with one's life. In short, to have a career is to have taken ownership of one's life for a career is something that provides not only money in the pocket, but also a host of personal things not the least of which are self-confidence and the satisfaction that comes from achieving that which one set out to achieve. (If all one gets from one's work is money, well, that's just a job.)
The exact opposite is the case. The final paragraph of my post makes clear the difference in very simple terms, for those who don't comprehend the key difference of a job being something one receives from others and a career being something one creates for oneself.You are still not differentiating a career from a job