I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective. Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.
Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik. His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.
I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career. I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary". When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.
Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them. I've defined existential occupations in this way:
Existential Occupations are ones that run with our DNA as a species. Being a farmer/herdsman is almost as deep in us as being a hunter or fisherman, and it stems from the same root in our being. It's that reason, really, that people who no longer have to go to the field and stream for protein, still do, and it's the reason that people who can buy frozen Brussels sprouts at Riddleys' still grow them on their lots. And its the reason that people who have never been around livestock will feel, after they get a small lot, that they need a cow, a goat, or chickens. It's in us. That's why people don't retire from real agriculture.
It's not the only occupation of that type, we might note. Clerics are in that category. Storytellers and Historians are as well. We've worshiped the Devine since our onset as a species, and we've told stories and kept our history as story the entire time. They're all existential in nature. Those who build certain things probably fit into that category as well, as we've always done that. The fact that people tinker with machinery as a hobby would suggest that it's like that as well.
Indeed, if it's an occupation. . . and also a hobby, that's a good clue that its an Existential Occupation.
Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men. I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.
Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier. It wasn't the only one I contemplated. As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture. Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college. Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.
At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier. It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of. I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have. And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course. So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.
I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away. But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state. So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard. This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.
I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans. By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it. My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then. My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness. She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.
Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management. He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.
As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old. One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.
I was right.
Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made. I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.
To play the story out, I was a geology major. I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?). While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.
Lots of people become lawyers that way. Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.
But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal. Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it. I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.
Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar. And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school Harvard JD? So fucking what?
Still, the idea resurfaced one more time. A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time. At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job. My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.
Yes, I'm an idiot.
Well, not really. But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.
Brian Nesvik is a Casper native. He decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.
He's 55 years of age now. He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree. He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General. Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense. I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out. He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school. I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that. He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.
His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command. His military career is also impressive, noting the following:
Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY
Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade
Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait
May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq
Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming
Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming
Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming
Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming
His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely. My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.
Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.
I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?
Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.
Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?
Well, maybe. I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all. Externally, I look like a real success.
But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?
This is an interesting article:
The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.
Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things. But, here goes anyone.
Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church. The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist. Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme. So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.
He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses. In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.
Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas. Not every week, however. It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town. The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.
These are not the only young women there. There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer. My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla. I know a few of them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time. There's the young lawyer and her family. And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.
The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago. She's been working there for about a year as well. Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart. Apparently, she has no desire to do so.
Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter. My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another. Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.
There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage. Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young. The opposite is actually the case. My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married. My mother's parents were about the same. I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either. Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so. The mantilla women are outliers.
What do they all hope for?
That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.
So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.
Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled. For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy. But people are sold in the idea that they do. Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:
Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.
Joanna, in Office Space.
What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either. It was foisted upon them.
One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people. People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species. For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers. Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm. Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.
What also was with us was our basic natures. No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children. Everything, in fact, centered around that. While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't. That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want. The existential occupations served that purpose.
Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis. Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else. Wealth always corrupts.
Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked. We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other. A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.
The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.
Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories. It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is. Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of. Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.
And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.
The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first. There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons. The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home. There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.
None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself. Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night. They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen. When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home. One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.
White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.
If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well. Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did. John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from. Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.
This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest. Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them. Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.
But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized. Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings. Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building. Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.
None of that was natural on a day to day basis.
The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment. Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two. After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.
The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology. The pill took care of that.
The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired. Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work. First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message. Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place. Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else. The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.
Problem is, it's all a lie.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not stating that women should not work. What I'm saying, really, is that men have to. We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying. But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging. And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.
Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young. When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it. We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.
Not can, but must.
And the pressure to do so remains massive. Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook. That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.
But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.
I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers. One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority). Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.
On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s. "Lawyers don't like retirement".
If that's true, it's phenomenal.
I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it,
Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog. I'm not sure why I even did. I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure. After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history. I should have. He was quite a character.
One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan. I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me. Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him. I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff. You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.
I'm not.
I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it. I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.
I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.
Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.” I think there was a huge amount of truth to that. There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..
Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it. As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know. I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years. The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.
A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left. Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it. All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently. It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.
I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.
Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved 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. And 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's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!
Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai.
Related threads:
Labels: Agrarianism, Christianity, Death, Existential Occupations., Health, Hobbies, Introspection, Killetarianism, Medieval Europe, Mid-Week at Work, Old Age, religion, Retirement, Work
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