Blog Mirror: COULD HAVE SHOULD HAVE WOULD HAVE: THREE THINGS FARMERS WISH THEY WOULD HAVE KNOWN WHEN THEY STARTED.

 

COULD HAVE SHOULD HAVE WOULD HAVE: THREE THINGS FARMERS WISH THEY WOULD HAVE KNOWN WHEN THEY STARTED.

Missed Vocations?

This thread was originally started months ago, and then sort of abandoned.  I then found it again, and oddly enough, for some other reasons, I started typing out a thread that was sort of related to it.  Given that, I'm picking this one back up.  I quite frankly don't know if it's still on the same topic or not.

Anyhow, the other day I was speaking to a working class fellow who is connected to a lawsuit when the topic of his children came up.  They're in the same line of work that he is.  He told me, "I tried to get them to be doctors or lawyers but . . . "

He probably ought to be glad they didn't listen to him.

I listed to my father the one and only time that he gave me career advice, which I've noted here before, and that was a mistake.  I was planning, at the time, of becoming a game warden.  I was still in high school at the time, probably a junior, and mentioned it, and he noted that there were "a lot of unemployed people around here" with wildlife management degrees. There likely were.  Indeed, a family friend of ours was glad when his son gave up that pursuit to become an electrician for the same reason.  I never commented on it, but it saddened me.

I started off in geology, but when I graduated with that, there were no jobs in it. So, ironically, I ended up with the no job situation anyway.  I went to law school after that, as I'd never heard of an unemployed lawyer.

The other day, a friend of mine from my geology student days, who now works in another field as well, commented on how they can't find people to work. We've been noting the same thing.  He noted that "it's nice to have a job that you love, but most work is just work". 

Truer words were never spoken.  

Having said that, some work is worse than others.  One thing that's been noticeable recently in the law is that younger people are leaving the field of litigation.  Quite a few young law school graduates are just not going to work at all.

On the upper end, where I am, peering out from the edge of my late 50s into my early 60s, I'm at the point where retirement becomes a possibility, or maybe not.  Like Col. Nickerson in A Bride Over The River Kwai, you also begin to look back.  You also find, right about that time, that if you are a professional that you have no real frame of reference for retirement, and that everyone will conspire against it.

Indeed, most conversations that you will get into right about then start off with the "you're too young" or "what would you do?".  But beyond that, there are those who will express outright fear about your retiring, and they're mostly members of your own family.  Nobody encourages a person to postpone retirement more than a spouse, I think.  That's probably not true for people once they hit actual retirement age, say 65 or 67, but if the topic comes up earlier, you'll get the "that's a great idea, if you just get in . . . "  In other words, you need to keep working.

And for a person in my situation, with two kids still in college, that's probably true.  Something has really changed since I was that age in that conditions that existed when I was young are now pushed upwards in years.  

Or perhaps I just didn't notice them then.

Insurance is one such thing. We just switched insurance carriers as insurance for our two college age children is brutally high.  If I were retired right now, that would be the single biggest expense month to month I'd have right now.

So the old plow mule is turned around to plow another row.

"You missed your calling" is a phrase I used to hear adults utter when I was a kid, in reference to people who seemingly should have entered some occupation they didn't^[1]. .  The phrase was based on the concept of everyone having a "calling".

Given that it was so common, when I was young, I sort of assumed that everyone actually had a specific calling.  I.e., you might have a calling to the priesthood, or you might have one to be an auto mechanic.  I know that I'm not the only one who had this assumption, as one of my uncles mentioned having had the same concept when he was a kid.

That's not the way that Catholics generally understand it, however.   What Catholics actually believe is that people generally receive a calling to a vocation, in religions terms.  As one Catholic site puts it:

A person can have many different callings in life. For instance a person can have a calling to marriage, to fatherhood, and to a certain occupation. In the Catholic worldview everything we do should be ordered toward discerning and responding to the will of God, the ultimate good in an imperfect world. Ordering our lives toward God’s desire is the way in which we get to heaven. We do this in many ways. The following list is not exhaustive:

• Discerning our primary vocation (marriage, priesthood, religious life, etc.)
• Discerning our particular vocation (whom to marry, etc.)
• Following God’s will for our relationships
• Avoiding sin and seeking to examine our conscience to discern where we are falling short and where we are responding to grace
• Seeking to understand how God wants us to respond to circumstances in the world around us

That no doubt is not only partial, it may not even be fully accurate, but generally Catholics believe that you have a calling to a state of life, i.e., some sort of vocation.  Maybe you are specifically called to be a priest, monk, or nun.  Maybe you are called to the married life.  Maybe you aren't called to either, but to something else.

I bring (brought)^[2]  this up in the context of the news over the past couple of weeks about Native schools in Canada.

Eh?

Bear with me.

Probably most people who might stop in here have read a bit of this news, but I'll first note that reading a news story like this from a foreign country is inherently confusing, as you always feel like you aren't getting the full story, because you are not.  So, given that, those of us down in the US are only partially informed on this story.

From what you can pick up, and in fact a lot of this has been reported before and isn't new, news, this is the story.

Canada and the US both had, in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a policy of what we can more or less call forced assimilation. This was a government policy.  The general concept was that it was doing Natives a favor if you separated them from their children, and raised the children in the predominant European culture.

Now, this is obviously a gross condensation of the policy and the deeper you get into it, the less uniform it was.  

In the US, for much of this period, there was a policy of cooperation with religious denominations in this effort.  That varied enormously by location and practice.  It was, for example, pretty extensive on the Wind River Reservation, but not in the way noted above. Children weren't separated from their families, but rather Churches located as missions, with schools, on the Reservation.  At least one, the St. Stephen's school, still exists.  At these schools, children came during the day and went home when school was over.

The big U.S. school was the Carlyle school in Pennsylvania, but it wasn't run by a religion at all, but rather by the Federal government.  This appears to be the pattern that Canadian schools first had.

Canada, however, unlike the US, was heir to the English education system, which was much different.  The United Kingdom in historical terms only went to what we call public education pretty recently, starting with minimal public education requirements in 1880, and only requiring education up to age 14 in 1918.  People with money, in the UK, didn't go to public schools, they went to private schools, and given the social stratification of the time, that meant that the people who counted, so to speak, were those people.  In Ireland, which of course was part of the UK up until the result of the Anglo-Irish War, this meant that nearly all the education was provided by the Catholic Church, which wanted out of it when Ireland became independent but which the government didn't cooperate with, meaning Ireland still largely educates its young through the Church.  In Canada, education worked on a mixed English model, with Quebec being the major exception, as the education there was all private.  Indeed, up until the Quiet Revolution most Quebecois were still educated by the Catholic Church, which the Church also wanted out of in Quebec.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Quiet Revolution was that it came about, in part, as the Church wanted out of education and running the hospitals.  Ireland would have done well to have learned the Canadian lesson at the same time, but still hasn't.

Anyhow, in the US there was a mixed Native American education model.  Some children were carted away from their families and educated in boarding schools, the most famous one of which was run by the United States government.  Some were run by religious institutions. Other children were educated locally, often by religious institutions, but on a model that's familiar to us today and which didn't involve separation from their families. Others simply weren't educated at all.  And as public education advanced in the United States in the 20th Century, Native American children came more and more into local school districts, some of which, like Wyoming's Fremont County School District No. 14, were almost all Native American by default.

So what's the point here?

Well, generally there's a lot of retrospective horror over this system that both the US and Canada had, and not without good reason.  It seems awful now.  At the time, however, it was generally accepted that Native populations should be subject to forced assimilation through education and that was a good thing.

That was never a good thing, but it was the universal view.  The added part of that, however, is that even if that was the European-North American view of things, neither of the two large North American countries were well-prepared to take the task on.

That probably ought to give us some pause about the educational direction we're forcing on young people today. Does it really suit what's going to make them happy?

I can't really use my own example in this context as it's too old to be relevant, but there was zero effort to provide students with any insight into this topic when I was that age.  Figure it out for yourself was the method that was used, which in my case was really figure it out for yourself.  My father, not without reason, was pretty silent on the topic.  My mother was ill, and her contribution was basically "you can go to any school you want to", with Notre Dame being mentioned as a possibility, probably as a cousin of mine who was a good student, and one year older than me, had gone there.

And that suited him really well.  He pursued a course of study that ultimately lead him to a career as a university professor in a neighboring state.

In my own case, the only suggestions on careers that ever came were from a grade school teacher, who suggested to my parents, or rather predicated, that I'd end up a teacher, the comment from my father as noted, some comments from my mother that "you're good at science", and then a comment from Casper College prof Jon Brady that I was suited for an analytical career as a lawyer.  Brady, interestingly, was a lawyer by training who spent his entire post Navy career as a history professor.  That same view, I'd note, is a view held by a lawyer friend of mine, who felt that the only other career I'd be suited for is that of priest, but then he's German and holds a German view of such things.

Anyhow, that's how I ended up where I am.

I've been thinking.Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day  that I've been in the service.

        

Twenty-eight years in peace and war, I don't suppose I've been at home more  than ten months in all that time.  Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it  any other way.   

But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're  nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder...you ask yourself...         what the sum total  of your life represents...what difference your being there  at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference  at all really.  Particularly in comparison  with other men's careers.    

I don't know whether that kind  of thinking is very healthy...but I must admit I've had some thoughts  along those lines...from time to time.

Col. Nicholson, The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I've been looking out at the legal field now, from a 30-year deep in view. . . .no, that's not true.  

I've been looking at litigation, from a 30-year prospective.

And that's not the same thing.

I've worked almost my entire career, well actually all of my entire career, in litigation.  I can't say that that view is an encouraging one, really.  Conditions have in fact gotten worse, it seems to me.  Lots of attention is paid to the sorry state of American politics but very little to the sorry state of the American justice system, i.e., the litigation system, as people are acclimated to it.

A Catholic saint who left his career as a lawyer to become a Priest remarked to one of his friends that he was leaving the practice, as "there were too many ways to lose your soul" as a lawyer.  I don't know about people who draft contracts, but it's certainly true of litigation.  And it's gotten worse over the years.

It's also something that younger lawyers now generally want no part of, as has become increasingly evident in the post pandemic onset world.  To really find that "glory of the American judicial system" type of belief, you have to be talking to lawyers who are now in their 50s.  Nobody else believes that, and younger lawyers want no part of it.  

That's become increasingly evident to me in recent months.  I look across the deposition table and the faces I see are only a little younger than mine . . . if not older.

Frost wrote on The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

John Greeleaf Whittier, in Maud Muller, lamented what might have been.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,

Raked the meadows sweet with hay 

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

Of simple beauty and rustic health. 

Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee

The mock-bird echoed from his tree. 

But, when she glanced to the far-off town,

White from its hill-slope looking down, 

The sweet song died, and a vague unrest

And a nameless longing filled her breast— 

A wish, that she hardly dared to own,

For something better than she had known. 

The Judge rode slowly down the lane,

Smoothing his horse's chestnut mane. 

He drew his bridle in the shade

Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid, 

And ask a draught from the spring that flowed

Through the meadow across the road. 

She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,

And filled for him her small tin cup, 

And blushed as she gave it, looking down

On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown. 

"Thanks!" said the Judge, "a sweeter draught

From a fairer hand was never quaffed." 

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,

Of the singing birds and the humming bees; 

Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether

The cloud in the west would bring foul weather. 

And Maud forgot her briar-torn gown,

And her graceful ankles bare and brown; 

And listened, while a pleasant surprise

Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes. 

At last, like one who for delay

Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away, 

Maud Muller looked and sighed: "Ah, me!

That I the Judge's bride might be! 

"He would dress me up in silks so fine,

And praise and toast me at his wine. 

"My father should wear a broadcloth coat;

My brother should sail a painted boat. 

"I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,

And the baby should have a new toy each day. 

"And I'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor,

And all should bless me who left our door." 

The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,

And saw Maud Muller standing still. 

"A form more fair, a face more sweet,

Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet. 

"And her modest answer and graceful air

Show her wise and good as she is fair. 

"Would she were mine, and I to-day,

Like her, a harvester of hay: 

"No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,

Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues, 

"But low of cattle, and song of birds,

And health, and quiet, and loving words." 

But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,

And his mother, vain of her rank and gold. 

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,

And Maud was left in the field alone. 

But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,

When he hummed in court an old love-tune; 

And the young girl mused beside the well,

Till the rain on the unraked clover fell. 

He wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power. 

Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,

He watched a picture come and go: 

And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes

Looked out in their innocent surprise. 

Oft when the wine in his glass was red,

He longed for the wayside well instead; 

And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms,

To dream of meadows and clover-blooms. 

And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,

"Ah, that I were free again! 

"Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay." 

She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door. 

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain,

Left their traces on heart and brain. 

And oft, when the summer sun shone hot

On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot, 

And she heard the little spring brook fall

Over the roadside, through the wall, 

In the shade of the apple-tree again

She saw a rider draw his rein, 

And, gazing down with timid grace,

She felt his pleased eyes read her face. 

Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls

Stretched away into stately halls; 

The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,

The tallow candle an astral burned; 

And for him who sat by the chimney lug,

Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug, 

A manly form at her side she saw,

And joy was duty and love was law. 

Then she took up her burden of life again,

Saying only, "It might have been." 

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge! 

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall; 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!" 

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes; 

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

Paul Anka definatly wrote, however, about "my way" for Frank Sinatra.

And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

My friend I'll make it clear

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Regrets, I've had a few

But then again too few to mention

I did what I had to do

I saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Yes, there were times I'm sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

And Édith Piaf  claimed, likewise, to regret nothing.

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs

J'ai allumé le feu

Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs

Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

Balayer les amours

Avec leurs trémolos

Balayer pour toujours

Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Car ma vie, car mes joies

Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

So what to make of all of that.

Well, maybe they're all correct, in context.  Probably the healthiest view is that of Anka and Piaf, maybe.  If so, it's not one I hold myself.  I wonder what might have been.

People tell me I should not.  But I find myself like Col. Nicholson like that.

Which gets me back, I guess, to the original point of this now overlong essay.  The horrors described in the Canadian example are fairly mis-portrayed, or are to at least some degree, and we know that horrors likewise occurred in the American example that have no religious role in them at all.  And I've earlier written on the example of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath.  What I suspect, to some degree, all of this tells us is that a lot of people in those examples were not in their real vocations.  They took those ones up for various reasons, but a true calling, at least in some instances, was likely not there.

We can't really expect a calling, for most people, in the secular world.  But inclinations and talents do point us in certain directions.  People discerning a talent for analysis thought I should go into law, something I didn't see in myself.  That habit or inclination is definitely there, however, and spills out constantly on this cyber page.

What I likely didn't and still don't have an inclination for is fighting, which is what arguing really is.  But I've spent a life time doing it now, and apparently am pretty good at.  That brings up another oddity of human nature.  Some people are endowed with talents that they probably realize, but they don't really appreciate in an existential sense.  People endowed with athletic ability, for example, who are disinterested in sports.  People who can argue really well, but don't like arguing.

Even more mysterious is the strong drive towards something that can never be fulfilled, and this too is a central aspect, really, of missed vocations.  Willard Cochrane, an agricultural advisor and economist in the Kennedy administration, worried about the fate of so so farmers, for a lack of a better way to put it.   That is, farmers who were good enough to get by, up until then, but not good enough to get by in the Cold War fence to fence farming regime that the Cold War brought in.  Plenty of people have a deep love of something that is an occupational vocation, in the secular sense, or used to be, but in the modern world, are wholly unable to fulfill it.  People who would have been farmers, ranchers, or whatever, and now cannot be, as the means are not there for most modern people.

Indeed, I think the entire current culture of pet ownership shows that to a degree.  People will pack a dog around to their office jobs or install a cat in an urban office as in a world that better reflected their natures, they'd be around animals all the time. We all would.  In the world we have, we aren't, and we're much the lesser as a result.

Indeed, that gets back to the entire subject here.  I've looked at it in the context of the past.  I.e., women who became nuns as they wanted to be teachers or nurses in Quebec, or men who became Priests as they wanted to be academics.  In my generation and the preceding one, there are lots of men who became lawyers, doctors and dentists because they'd grown up farmers and ranchers, but there was no place on the homestead for them, so they took a professional occupation nearby.

Indeed, also in my generation, and I think in the prior one, the necessity to obtain and keep work was a huge deal, and forms a great deal of the current lack of understanding on the part of these generations and the younger ones.  Having a job was the most important thing about jobs in general.  People sent their children into law, medicine and the like not because they thought their kids would make great lawyers or doctors, but because they'd make money there and those jobs seemed stable.  That no doubt has massively contributed to the large dissatisfaction rate with law that young lawyers have, with some 60% of new lawyers wanting out.

It is, we know, a fallen world.

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

Genesis 3.

I guess we can't expect much better.

But I think we do.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things...

Thoreau, Walden.

Where does this lead us?

I'm not sure, but I suppose it behooves us to try to find our vocation and see if we have a calling, and to listen to it.  Consider that deeply and wisely.  Pray about it.

Footnotes.

1. This is where the old text starts.

2.  Part of the older text, showing how much time has passed since I first started working on this thread.

Blog Mirror: Tom Purcell: The AOC’s of student loan debt

Georgetown University, 1969.

Tom Purcell: The AOC’s of student loan debt

Purcell here is, excuse the pun, right on the money.

To add to what he's noted, the entire student loan system is grounded in a view of college that has more to do with the 1940s through the 1970s, than it does with any era after that.  The system is operating to destroy the affordability of a college education and is warping universities themselves by taking the element of competition out of college choices.

Purcell notes the insanity of letting somebody who is not even old enough to vote apply for a loan.  Add to that, however, that universities continue to put out propaganda that was more or less true in the 1960s, i.e., any college degree gives you an advantage, while also failing to note the degree programs that existed when that mantra was true were more traditional in nature than they are now.  

The entire system has decayed at every level, and the cheap Federal money is part of the reason why. The ultimate cruelty of it is that people end up with debt that they either can't service or which ties them to jobs that they really had no concept of, in terms of their actual nature, when they signed up.  Indeed, recently we've seen a fair number of articles about young lawyers who are locked into jobs attempting to service massive debt and feeling stuck. Well, they are stuck. They have to keep the high paying jobs as they have to service debt, and they'll be doing that well into their 30s, or even early 40s, by which time their careers are set, and their character impacted.

Truth be known, contrary to the Bernie Sanders "let's make it all free as money doesn't really exist" worldview, the best thing that could be done would be to would be to eliminate student loans entirely except for fields of national need.  That's it.  Do we need engineers and have a shortage?  Okay, have loans for that.  Lawyers?  You have to be kidding.  We'll still have them, but those it would be those who pursued it on their own dime and at their own risk.

If all this seems rather radical, it has precedents.  Programs that come in to boost the economy don't continue to serve their original purpose for all time and eternity. We no longer give away land to railroads, for example, to encourage them to build. We repealed the Homestead Acts. These bills and the student loan program, all served a vital interest when they were created, but the later ceased to.

The student loan program, in its current form, needs to go, or needs to be heavily modified for the world in which it currently exists.

Mid Week At Work. Career

 Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings.  Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Roads Traveled.

On Wednesdays I sometimes run a series called "Mid Week At Work".

Two items on that.

One is that the current issue of Wyoming Wildlife is really about wildlife and outdoor oriented careers.

I seriously considered that at one time.  I guess a lot of people have.  I know at least one other lawyer who has my exact same career path. . . wanted to be a game warden. . . studied geology instead. . . has military experience dating back to right when he was out of high school, ended up a lawyer.

Well, like the Grateful Dead used to sing, "what a long strange trip its been".

Except it doesn't seem all that long.

What also doesn't take along at all is to a career path to really set in.  You start one direction, you dip your toe in the water, and 30 years later, that's your career and its almost complete.  People like to celebrate those who radically start over, but the story of people having economic collapses or forced early retirements is actually much more common.  

I know of (not know, but know of) one lawyer who attempted to start over as a film maker.  Didn't work.  I also know one who went to Rabbinical school.  He might be a Rabbi back east now, but I also think he's practicing law back east also.  One lawyer I know who dropped out to become a farmer dropped back in and became a Federal magistrate.  At some point, careers sort of stick.

Anyhow, for those young enough, worth reading.  Indeed, I'm often struck by the fact that we tend not to know what all is available out there until years later.  How would we?

Secondly, as I was traveling yesterday I was listening to Pritzker Military History podcasts on the way back and heard an interview of a well known historian.  The interviewer, another historian, asked him how he had found his career.

He related that he first became interested in history in that sense as a small child and expressed an interest in following it into college by high school. As he was living in a small town, the normal reaction was "but what will you do with it?".  A history professor in high school encouraged him to follow it simply because he'd enjoy it. That's what he'd do with it, was the reply.  

He followed it and became a distinguished military historian.

That's also bold advice.  I don't know that I'd give that advice to anyone, but then maybe its really good advice too. 

I didn't receive any advice in high school, from anyone.  I didn't ask for any either.  I didn't know who to ask for one thing.  And high school career guidance was a bit of a joke back at that time, where I lived.  Hopefully its better now.

I did get some advice from my father, as I noted here before, but that was merely as a comment.  Not real advance, but a studied observation.  It wasn't until junior college that I got any advice, and I ended up following it.

Assumptions

Advertisement for Smirnoff vodka that played effectively on assumptions.  Part of a series of such advertisements, another of which is shown before, illustrating our  assumptions about a profession and "shattering" it.  In reality, vodka wouldn't have this effect, of course.

At some point in life, the assumptions really set in.  It's interesting.

Not your own assumptions.  At least if you are like me, your world outlook at age 57 isn't very much different than it was at 17.  

Well, I guess that's not really true, at least in a complete fashion. But it is in a core fashion.  There are some experiences you have/enjoy/endure that there's no getting back from, no matter how much you might wish to.  I know that in my own case, that's definitely the case, including some I wish I hadn't have had and could take back.  I know I can't, but that doesn't keep me from wishing I could.

And there are some experiences that probably impact your world outlook no doubt, but in my own case not that much really.  I look at most things the same way, and in the same way, that I did back then.  Indeed, in spite of 30 years as a lawyer (well, 31) I don't think being a lawyer has changed my mental process whatsoever.

No, what I mean is the way other people look at you.

That really changes.

And not just for people who know you in one setting, but people who know you otherwise.

And why wouldn't they?  You spend five days out of seven, or if you are like me more often than not six days out of seven, assuming you don't violate the Commandment and make it seven out of seven, doing your occupation. That is what you are to most people, your vocation.  And even if you occupy a secondary occupation, it'll be regarded as a hobby.

Your secondary occupation could be working in Executive Outcomes and fighting in desperate struggles in far off lands, but if work a day job as an accountant, even if that job is to support  your armed inclinations, you're an accountant.

"Oh?  Going to Crapistan to fight in the insurrection?  Well, hope you find it relaxing and it helps get you back to accounting with a renewed focus."

Sigh. . . 

Well, you might take up drinking Smirnoff out of desperation (and in my view, if you are drinking vodka, you must be desperate), but truth be told, you'll still be an accountant and you'll still be taking the caravan to Southend.

And you'll still dress like an accountant, or a lawyer, or whatever and sooner or later, that's what you will be to most people.  Even people who know you at least somewhat well.

The only exceptions really are those people who knew you when you were young.  Back when you were, whoever you were, and who you may still dimply be.

Those are the folks who want to know if you want to go gold panning, or fishing on the high streams, or look at mules.

Everyone else?  Forget it.  Even if they looked at mules with you once, they want you to look at their mortgage now.

Friday Farming. Blog Mirror. Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.

 

Blog Mirror with commentary*: NFU Series: Why I farm: Reflections on my absurd career choice.

February 11, 2021

Is her career choice absurd?

NFU SERIES: WHY I FARM: REFLECTIONS ON MY ABSURD CAREER CHOICE

Just the other day, I ran a post from Lex Anteinternet that is highly related to this topic here.  It was:

Lex Anteinternet: A Mid Week At Work

 Conversation. Why you became wh...

I'd already started typing out this post when I did that.  This makes this one slightly disrupted in some ways, and I've refocused it a bit.

Any, regarding the NFU writer and the question posted above, I don't think it is, but when you review it, you'll see that the young writer in question chose farming as she has very high ideals.

I wanted to be a farmer, but I didn't have high ideals.**

Well, I probably had some high ideals, and in many things they've become higher over time, which isn't to say that I'm close to obtaining sainthood by any means.  But my career choice as not based on high ideals.  Indeed, whenever I hear a practicing lawyer say they became a lawyer because they "wanted to help people", I automatically think, "oh bullshit".

I don't talk much on these blogs*** about my own early life or frankly my life in general.  I keep that stuff to myself, pretty much.  But I'll make a slight exception here.

I've wanted to be in the outdoors since I was small.  I never imagined a career in anything else really.  That's because I'm a nearly feral human, as odd as that may seem.  That tracks a lot into my post about being from and of Wyoming, which was linked in above.

My only real vocation, in the deeper sense, is that of hunter.  Well, frankly, that may not be true.  At least that's not how outsiders view me.  Indeed, a conservation of a year ago or so lead one of my legal colleagues to opine that a person such as me could have only two possible vocations, lawyer or priest. That was it.

That's was an interesting comment from a very highly educated person.  He's a lawyer too, as noted, but he's also an industrial psychologist.  I'm not sure exactly what industrial psychologist do, but they're some sort of psychologist.  Obviously he has some insights that I may lack. I've pondered that statement since then and I don't know that he wasn't right.

He's also, I'd note, a German by birth, having come to the United States as a young adult.  That makes a difference too, as culture heavily impacts your world view.

Be that as it may, when I was younger, I only wanted to hunt and fish.  Frankly, if I could do nothing else but hunt and fish now, that's what I'd do.  I'd be some sort of subsistence type character, hunt, fish, and garden.  And probably read.  What does that make me?

I've wondered if it make me lazy, actually, but I don't think so.  I certainly didn't end up in a career for the lazy and as other people think I'm a workaholic, I guess I'm not.  And somebody who eschews ATVs and who will go out in all weather and hike, often alone, for miles, isn't lazy.

Anyhow, with that sort of mindset, when I was young, I hoped for an outdoor career.  Early on I thought about becoming a soldier as, in my mind, they were outdoors.  As I aged into mid teens, however, I wanted to be a Game Warden, as they're outdoors.  

Around about the time I was a high school senior I looked at trying to homestead in the Yukon, which still had land available to do it.  It didn't seem quite feasible, and soon thereafter the Canadian government shut the door on that, probably correctly, but that option thereby seemingly closed with that door.  Queen Elizabeth II apparently had other things in mind for her distant ex pats.

Queen Elizabeth visiting war wounded in Canada when she was much younger, obviously.

My father was a dentist. Whatever you are thinking that means, it doesn't mean that.

My grandfather on my father's side had owned, in his final years, a packing plant in our small city.  He'd been in the packing industry most of his adult life, if you measure adult years the way they are measured today.  If you measure them the way he must have, he spent a few years in the oceanic shipping industry in the office, starting when he was 13.  But from his early 20s, he worked in the packing industry, which well suited his Iowa origins.

His later years were his 40s, and he died in his 40s.

I don't know what my father's early career goals were.  He never said.  As the oldest boy, chances were good that he was originally headed down to the packing plant.  He did work there in every aspect of it, as my grandfather "wanted him to see what real work was like".  The packing plant was sold, however, shortly after my grandfather's death, by necessity.  He was still a teen.

Given that, he went to work, while still going to college.  He worked at the post office and decided to make that his career, until my grandmother decided that wouldn't be his career.  He started off in engineering but one of my uncles was becoming a dentist and he followed that path as well.

By all accounts he was an excellent dentist, but I never thought of him in that way.

Nowadays, dentistry is somewhat associated with wealth, but it wasn't then.  Kids of dentists and doctors today will often flaunt it a bit, as it means they have vicarious money.  We didn't.  Rather, being the son of a dentist at the time meant that 1) people would tell you "I hate dentist", which they really didn't, but which you still hear today, and 2) they'd ask you dental questions, as if dental knowledge is genetic.

Dentists top the charts in professional suicides which says something.  My father never commented on what it was like to be a dentist but once, which was to note how people complained about going to the dentist all the time.  Anyhow, while conversations he had with other dentist and doctors were really illuminating and educational, outside of the office he didn't discuss dentistry.  He brought it home, however, as dentist made dentures at the time, and that was done in his evening hours.

In our home, table talk was on history, nature and science.  My father as an outdoorsman, preferring fishing over hunting but doing both.  He also was a heavy duty gardener in the subsistence farmer category, really.  It's from him that I received my love of the outdoors.

Me and my father at the fish hatchery in 1966 or 1967.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, I was leaving high school.

Well, farming in the Yukon was out and we didn't have a farm or ranch ourselves, so it was off to become a game warden.  And then my father mentioned that there were a lot of people around here who have wildlife management degrees that didn't have jobs.

That was enough, from a person who rarely gave career advice, to send me off in another direction, and that direction was geology.  Geology is all outdoors, right?

Well, ironically, it also lead to what my father had feared, unemployment.  There were no jobs as I graduated into an oilfield depression.  I tried to find a job for a year, and then back to school I went, as a law student.

Law student?

Yeah, a law student.

Being a lawyer, you might note, has nothing to do with being outdoors.

It was first suggested to me that I might consider the law as a career when I was a college student in community college.

The reason that it first appealed to me is related to the point linked in above, once again.  It wasn't that it sounded like "an exciting career" or that it afforded an opportunity to save mankind.  Indeed, when I hear people wo hare law students or contemplating becoming law students express really high ideals regarding being a lawyer, I know that they are in for a monster sized disappointment.  "I'm going to become an International Law Lawyer and save the whales!".  BS, you're going to litigate in small claims court in Dayton, Ohio, spanky.

What was the case, however, is that, like dentists, you could be a lawyer and be here.  

Now, the reason that the law was suggested to me had nothing to do with that. Rather, my community college history professor thought I had an analytical mind and that suited me to become a lawyer.

The professor in question was one Jon E. Brady, and he was a great community college history professor.  I think he would have been a great history professor in any institution.  In fact both of the history profs I had at Casper College, Jon Brady and Dr. David Cherry, were great teachers.

Anyhow, it was Jon Brady's comment that started the wheels in motion.  I didn't actually know that he was a lawyer himself at the time, and only learned that well after I was a lawyer.  At least one other lawyer has told me that he made a similar comment to him, which is what caused him to become a lawyer, but that lawyer's on line career story tells a considerably different tale, so who knows.  The truth is probably in the middle there somewhere.

Anyhow, while was only due to the recent conversation that I had noted on another one of our blogs that I recalled it, my thinking was pretty similar to my father's.  The law would bring me back here and as close to my feral state as an adult as I was in my youth. Or so I thought.

And as a student, I was pretty feral.  Living in my hometown while attending community college, I went hunting several times throughout the week as a college student.  When I moved to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming, I went hunting less, but still quite a bit.  And I lived on wild game at the time. When I was first a lawyer I hunted and fished a great deal, and my father and I came close to buying a small ranch together, before he died.  After that, I lived once again pretty much on wild game until I got married.

To make a long story short, my wife and I have livestock so in some ways I came back around to my original career goals, sort of.  So is this a success story?  I suppose it at least partially is.  I'm still as feral mentally as I was when I was 16.  I'm not outdoors in recent years, however, anywhere near as much as I'd like to be, and that's due to my work.  It's also my own fault, to an extent, and at least according to my wife, it's a matter of perception, as she claims I'm hunting all the time.

My first day on the job, the office manager, who had worked for the firm for decades, and who had probably wearied of young lawyers by that time, made the comment that she hoped I would like being a lawyer and that I might end up "wishing I'd been a farmer".  I recall thinking that if being a farmer was an option right then, that's what I'd become.  It isn't an option for everyone, not anymore.  The NFU writer's article doesn't really explain where she is now and what's she doing, but she is a climate activist and it sounds like she's worked at experimental farms. That makes a person a type of farmer, to be sure, but my guess is that it doesn't make a person a long term one.

Breaking into real agriculture today is really tough.  In my senior year as an undergrad in geology I told one of my friends that what I really wanted to do was to be a rancher, and that I guess that I must just not be ambitious.  He commented that he thought that a fine ambition.  I've actually worked at it now for decades and I am that, but I don't support my family doing it, and I'm now getting old.  I've done something else career wise, and I have to be honest about it.  I'm never going to be a full time rancher or farmer.  Never.  When I die, and I find myself in that odd dream retrospective state represented in the final scene of No Country For Old Men now quite a bit, even if that day is a decade or two off (and we never know), people who didn't really know me as a person will simply categorize me as a lawyer, and the state bar journal, in whatever form it is in then, will run an obit like it does for every passing lawyer that hails your achievements, if there were any, in the profession.  Lots of people think of me that way pretty much exclusively now, and one of my close friends in the law recently told me that "if I had your practice I'd be proud", which was an odd off hand remark to make (I'm not really sure what brought that up, and I didn't ask).  

I'm not really a proud fellow, about anything, I guess, so it was an odd observation to hear.  Of course, as Garrison Keillor says, "we always have a backdoor view of ourselves", which makes it hard, I think, for anyone but a narcissist to really be existentially proud of themselves.

Anyhow, is her career choice absurd?  No, definitely not.  Is the idealism behind it misplaced?  Probably so.  Idealism behind most careers of that type is misplaced, including the expressed idealism I sometimes hear about entering the legal field, which I tend to discount as self serving propaganda or words for other ears, not your internal ones.  

Life is packed with endless compromises. What ultimately governs the success or failure of them isn't based on economics too much, but economics is a big influencer in them, to be sure.  A lot of that has to do with your internal values, and if that value is money, you're not going to be a success no matter what.  A lot of success can be measured in just how close we can get to what we'd do if we wanted, in a world where we really don't get to do whatever we want.  Not too many people anymore can "choose to be a farmer" in the old time sense, i.e., buy a farm and farm it, or buy a ranch and run it, unless they're very rich.  There are other ways to do it, but frankly it almost always involves family ties, which is just fine, or it involves working at something else which probably amounts to your main job.  We'll take that topic up, the economics of land ownership, absentee landowners, and the wealthy in some other post.

Anyhow, farmers can help save the world.  Lawyers can too.  Youthful idealism is vital to all human endeavors.  But in wanting to be a farmer, and in being a farmer, I tend to think that its something that is practically in your DNA if you have it.  Hard to explain, but deep down.  

Which I guess is pretty close to the concept of youthful idealism.

Footnotes:

*This is the first original content post on this blog, fwiw.  It was originally going to be on Lex Anteinternet, and it actually will be, but here first.

**By farmer here, I meant farmer, or rancher.  I frankly have always preferred animals over plants, so ranching would be my first choice.

***We run a whole platoon of blogs, the most active of which as a rule is Lex Anteinternet where this was originally going to be posted.