This quote captures a rule I’d like to live my life, and by extension my career by. I’d like to have a job where every day looks different because you respond to whatever eventualities arise. What is a good way to find these?
I’m not asking for specific job positions (although feel free to suggest some) because I imagine such positions exist in most fields — I’m rather asking for ways to find these/filter for these in a given field.
I think the most alive you could be would then be some manner of homeless drug addict. You have no power over your life, so no notion of what any day will look like.
This quote kinda rubs me the wrong way because it treats predictability the same as banality.
If you want a job where you never know what the day is going to look like, work for a poorly managed company. You never know what you’re going to be doing, sometimes the project you’re working on one day is cancelled without warning and now people are mad at you for not having been working on the new priority for the past month. Sometimes you go in and you work 36 hours straight without warning because someone else messed up and your boss doesn’t give a shit who’s responsible and you’re the one who knows how to fix it, so fix it or fuck off. Better hope you don’t have a family or you’re going to have to make choices.
Knowing what you’re going to do tomorrow is just having work of any consequence. Food service knows what they’re doing tomorrow. So does a CEO, a software developer at a competent business, or a project manager. I can think of very few jobs whose scope of work is limited to a day, and is so variable that you just don’t know what you’ll be doing. Temp? Personal assistant to an eccentric actor? (Not the manager type assistant, they need to know the schedule. The one that buys coffee, six turtles and a pair of roller skates and doesn’t actually exist).
I could just be dead inside because I know that tomorrow is going to go a particular way that I like.