It’s a scary world when you follow your dream
So last week I quit my steady job, and fortnightly pay cheque, to open a burlesque show. Now that’s a gamble at the best of times. But in 2020 it feels like a scene from James Bond when I’m putting millions of dollars, government money and nuclear weapon codes on red against a villainous poker king who’s ready to drop me into a pool of piranhas.
So why make the bet in the first place? Well, I’m not the only one making a vocational volte-face. Despite this being a year of enormous economic uncertainty, research from the United Kingdom finds 40 per cent of finance workers are currently considering moving jobs, in Sweden 70 per cent of IT workers are the same, and in the US 60 per cent of job seekers were looking at complete career changes.
And while the rationale covers everything from being forced to leave, to not liking how your employer treated you during Covid, the most popular one cited for young professionals is wanting more meaningful work.
It’s not just that we’ve all realised we should follow our dreams. (We know that, we were raised repeating it.) What’s happened is that Covid has posed a more complex challenge to that ideology. And now we’re finally working out whether we believe it or not.
Millennials throw around ideological frisbees like ‘‘work-life balance’’ and ‘‘purpose over pay’’ with the irritating enthusiasm of 7-year-olds on sports day. But our absolute favourite has always been, ‘‘Follow your passion!’’ It’s the rose-gold bullet to a purposeful life.
The problem is that, up until now, it’s always been a real pig to wrestle with. As soon as you accept that you should chase your passion, you’re struck by the realisation that you don’t know what you’re passionate about.
How can you be certain that being a florist actually is your dream?
What about your dream of owning a house? Which dream is more important? God, do you actually have a dream – or do you just think you do because you’ve read Eat, Pray, Love too many times?
Often what happens is that we get dream paralysis. We spend years frozen in indecision over what to chase. We spend a decade waking up at 1am, clammy, sweating and gasping under the fear that we’ve got it all wrong . . . whatever ‘‘it’’ is.
But then Covid came along. And the abundance of alone time makes us question what we’ve been told. Do we want to follow a dream? How much do we want it?
Personally, it turns out I want it a lot. I’m one of the ones who have been struck by the realisation that life is too brittle and uncertain to waste not chasing something I love. And that I’d rather burn up in passion for it and fail spectacularly than not try at all.
Do you actually have a dream – or do you just think you do because you’ve read Eat, Pray, Love too many times?
It also revealed what I care about, by showing me what I’m prepared to fight for. It was only when I risked losing the performing world that I realised how much I wanted it. But likewise, I know a lot of people who are living their ‘‘dream job’’. And now Covid has asked them whether living it is worth it. What if you get paid peanuts? Is that more important than financial security?
What if the secret to your happiness is not found in your career, but just in your family time? Or in far less glamorous but very valid places like stability?
What Covid has done is forced us to examine our generation’s defining idea. And we’ve got to make decisions on it, because we’ve had a sharp reminder that we don’t have unlimited time.
That’s why I did. And honestly, at the start of the week, in that fit of romantic idealism that always follows grand gestures, I was sure I was James Bond in the poker scene.
Now, a week into it, I’m worried I may actually be the faceless extra who gets dunked, stripped to the bones and regurgitated as mince on toast as a warning to Bond . . .
But I’m still glad I made the bet.