life is very dull and frustrating when you can't ever face novel challenges in your areas of strength/passion. I was never meant to be a SAHM. Never-- it relies on my weakest skills and leaves my strengths entirely untapped.
See, I've felt the same way in jobs that I've had.
Academia is known for pushing people into projects that are highly likely to get positive results (see
Why are Modern Scientists so Dull? or the last quarter of
The Trouble with Physics for more on the subject). The first paper was discussed here a couple years ago. This is because the university requires that you 1. publish papers and 2. get grants. Number 2 is highly dependent on getting a lot of #1, and you don't get there by dreaming up alternative, risky ideas.
I don't fit the mold in academia, primarily because of factors outlined quite well in the paper and the book I cited. Thing was, I didn't understand why I don't fit in until I read them both a couple years ago (out of academia at that point).
I did better in industry (got increased responsibilities and good raises), but the work in the last job was unbearably dull. I've looked at other jobs and have had other industry jobs, and most of them seem the same way: you spend your time cranking away on something narrow, be it writing code for the next feature upgrade or modifying expression vectors or writing specs for the next version of whatever it is.
I've ended up where I am because it's the only way I can do what really interests me. This means some tradeoffs: I don't have an obvious career, I'm mostly an outsider, etc. This can be frustrating, but the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones, given that I chart my course without worrying about organizational politics (which I am not good at) or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is that the dullness is probably in a lot of jobs requiring a BA or higher (especially office jobs in industry). I've been wondering a lot about this idea lately and thinking about how hiring practices squish people into little boxes based on exacting criteria; e.g. a company wants a <job title> and will only consider candidates with a certain degree (B.A.) and, say, at least 3 years experience in <x and y>.
In other words, they want someone who's already done the job. Yet there are many intelligent people who could learn on the job from scratch and feel challenged by it. They'd also have the kinds of fresh ideas that often only come from outsiders. Obviously, certain criteria are essential when hiring dentists or surgeons. But not product managers or even necessarily organizational leaders.
It's possible that for many people, working a narrow job is great. Fine. But I wonder if our industrialization is toxic to people who are highly creative and/or highly intelligent (two very different things). In other words, the kinds of people who can come up with very cool new ideas or inventions.
Even more disturbing to me is that idea that most people might not even be able to see this problem.
Please don't think I'm whining here. I'm trying to describe a problem that I think is unhealthy for our society because it's bad for individuals and detrimental to technological and other kinds of progress.
Val
