A lot of people around my age will remember the hour or so in school when you were sat down in front of a computer by the teacher and did the 'career test', answering a long list of questions about your interests, what you were good at, what you weren't, and at the end you would be presented with a list of job matches.
Of mine, I can only remember the first two: midwife and librarian. Two more different jobs it would be difficult to imagine - in experience, training, working hours, emotional baggage - and to this day I don't know how I managed to get the system to produce such an answer, apart from being 'interested' in a lot of things (I may have said I was interested in medicine, in a sort of abstract way garnered from watching ER and from thinking 'It's interesting how chemicals and surgery can do all of this stuff to our bodies'; the non-abstract reality of pulling a baby out of someone's womb was not, it's fair to say, foremost on my sixteen year old mind). Even more annoying was the fact that I already worked in a library for a Saturday job, and the three hours a week haggling over 20p fines and Dewie decimalising were more than enough for me without making a career out of it.
The unintended lesson I took away from this whole exercise was that I could potentially direct myself towards any job at all, but that only one or at best a handful of those would actually be satisfying to me, and that I wouldn't know which until I'd taken the plunge, presumably at the exclusion of all the other choices. Somewhere on the spectrum between 'Midwife' and 'Librarian' was my perfect job, but how to know what it was? The matches stretched to maybe a hundred different jobs, each with their own specialisms, a supermarket of possible lives stretching out for my choosing. I searched for Writer and found it a third of the way down, which I took simultaneously as proof of my calling and as the test's way of telling me there were a lot more things I could and should be spending my time on. I felt like a Lego man in the factory with a blank body, waiting for the machine to assign me my place and have my toolkit or librarian's glasses or nurse's uniform painted on and be put in the right box, except the machine was never going to come, and now suddenly I was expected to do it all myself. Duped, would be another way of putting it. When would someone tell me what I was meant to be doing?
Others have written about how this is a modern phenomenon, some linking it to the vastly increased amount of choice in the modern world as a whole (the supermarket again) and the anxieties this can cause - to which most conclude that while a farmer's son in the 17th century may not have had to worry about choosing what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would surely have preferred that worry over no choice at all. He would have chosen choice, in other words, over the 'easy' certainty that he would be a farmer. But still the anxiety over the freedom to choose our careers (which is really the freedom to choose the direction of our own lives) remains - the fear that we may make the wrong choice, and the linked fear that other people, perhaps most people, have made the right one.
There are a number of books, TV programmes and films that explore this anxiety - Joshua Ferris' And Then We Came to the End is the most obvious example that springs to mind, but also Friends, Spaced, Girls to name a few. These are fairly random examples, but it's interesting that they all centre around 20- to 30-somethings, drifting around in a directionless way to humorous effect. There is indeed humour to be found in privileged Westerners (and they are all white, middle-class, and child-free) trying and failing to find their way through life when it should be so easy for them. We find it funny because in it we see the shadow of our own failures, and there is pleasure in realising that we are not the only ones that feel this way.
The converse of this are the books, TV programmes and films that show, rather than anxiety, characters that throw themselves into their work, abandon themselves to it - abandoning their partners, their children, their own happiness. This is a heroic fantasy of work, like the labours of Hercules before it, a great struggle for a higher purpose. Or to put it another way, these are characters who have found the right box. The characters of The West Wing provide one of the clearest examples of this. Several times in that programme, the characters will comment and make jokes about how little sleep they get, four hours or less a night, the meetings that go through till dawn, the weekends in the office, and how little they are actually paid for any of it. President Bartlett's body begins to fall apart as the stress he puts himself under exacerbates his MS; Chief of Staff Leo McGarry suffers from a massive heart attack for the sake of his job. All this because they are working towards a higher moral purpose, which in The West Wing is the White House and more generally the United States of America and the values it represents - of left-leaning Democrats, of truth and the belief that there is a space for intelligence and nuance in the forums of debate.
Why do we get pleasure from watching other people work on TV? Is it that we too would like to have a job like those people in The West Wing, one that we feel matters and is worth throwing ourselves into (and, by extension, throwing some of our lives away for)? Or is it a vicarious pleasure of watching other people do this while not having to ourselves - watching them work their guts out while we are at leisure on our sofas?
Mad Men is another example, but here there is an added tension in that the characters have thrown themselves into something amoral - their aim is creating good adverts that both please their clients and their (or, mostly, Don Draper's) creative ambitions. Mad Men is about the struggle to sell the American Dream, whether through the medium of Lucky Strikes or Chevies. The big, moral issues of the day like the Civil Rights movement, or the Vietnam war, happen on the peripheries, on TV or to fringe characters. That none of the characters that work for the ad agency ask the question 'What really is the point in what we do?' can then be seen as an ironic comment on the characters themselves - these are people that truly believe, at least while they are working, and in spite of all the unrest and trouble around them, that the American Dream of the 1950s is unproblematic, can still be sold. It is both naive and cynical: they naively believe in the Dream, and cynically use it (and others' belief in it) to sell things, things which, furthermore, cannot hope to live up to the promise of the Dream they are sold on. The Dream is thus undermined constantly by the people who are selling it, who need it the most in order to sell it.
It is strange, isn't it, that we watch Don Draper and his team of creatives struggle towards an idea, and actually get pleasure from watching them succeed in finding and delivering it. The pleasure is not because the idea will save lives, or even improve them - indeed, in the case of Lucky Strikes the opposite is true. The pleasure is not moral, but in the shared experience we have had in our own lives, of pulling together to meet a challenge, of hard-won success. Mad Men shows us that success, at least in the realm of work, feels good in and of itself. It doesn't rely on the thing you are successful in being good, or meaningful. And as we cannot all be doctors or firemen (or midwives), if we are to get that kind of experience in our lives, then it is only outside of work, in the time left which is not in the office, that we will find it.
