Category: philosophical counseling

• October 5, 2012

  The career in review: Why bother?

  Changing Conceptions of Work This week I’ve been exploring our received understanding of the career. I’ve reflected some on what makes it desirable and on what’s the matter with desiring it. Philosophical considerations aside, the historical truth is that unemployment rates among young persons living in the developed world are astronomically high. Reporting on the…
• October 4, 2012

  On career respectability as a cover for shame

  Perhaps the strongest reason why people speak so often, at such great length, and with such perturbations and agita about the desire to have a career is that they wish to appear respectable in the eyes of others. It is not as if they wanted their lives to be flourishing; it is rather the case…
• October 3, 2012

  Why a career has to founder: Hegel’s causality of fate

  I’d like to tease out what is desirable about careers–that they are well-paid work, that they carry a sense of continuity, and that they are regarded as respectable–but first I’d like to consider how the conception of the career founders, leading many into strife. I’m keen to tell the story. In order to have a…
• October 2, 2012

  On our obsession with careers and career changes: A reconsideration

  Bafflement I’ve been observing that the term “second career” is gaining in popularity and I’ve been baffled by this. Only yesterday, someone considering becoming a yoga instructor pointed me to an article she’d read on why yoga may be a good “second career.” To confirm the upward tick in usage, I entered the term into Google…
• October 1, 2012

  On technology’s noises and nature’s silence

  At a pitstop en route to returning our rental car on Saturday, my love and I remarked that the automatic toilet flushers flushed before we were through. My manual flusher was also disconnected. I was thinking of these, perhaps, when I tried to get my weekend duffle–no large thing–into the plane’s overhead compartment and had…