The Dream Job That Wasn’t - A lighthouse keeper, a deep-ocean researcher, a park ranger, and a “Snoozetern” on the pitfalls of “doing what you love.”

When I was young, my dream job was to be a horse. I didn’t want to be a horse girl, but a girl who is a horse. This made sense to me back then and also now. People respect horses, whose reputation is unimpeachable. Their work often consists of clear, concise tasks, like pulling a plow from one end of a field to another or carrying a child in circles around a fenced-in ring. Their basic needs are also generally met: At the end of the day, they get fed hay and their little iron shoes get cleaned out and they sleep in a house with high ceilings.



My dream did not materialize, but as I entered the workforce, my early sense of what a dream job actually was only deepened. I wanted to do something I cared about and have my life taken care of in the process, but I always had some understanding that even the most fulfilling, best-paid job in the world would also still be work. After all, no one sees a horse pulling a cart and thinks that they aren’t laboring. Horses aren’t doing laps with fidgety nine-year-olds in their off-hours. No one says to a horse, “If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.”

It’s not hard to see why these kinds of jobs are so enticing. The concept of the dream job still persists, likely because so many of us are working in what the late David Graeber called “bull$#@! jobs,” or are simply not employed at all. Finding your dream job is a seductive idea: the do-gooder, Protestant version of the FIRE movement—rather than trying to escape work, why not try loving it instead?


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https://newrepublic.com/article/1609...=pocket-newtab