LIFE LESSONS
The Dark Side of “Doing What You Love”
What I went through while working my dream job in academia.
Do you have a dream job you would anything for? Note the last five words: “you would do anything for”. This is the real danger of landing our dream jobs. We would do literally anything for them and we don’t realize before it’s too late that some things might not be working for us the way they should.
This is my story of taking up my dream job, discovering its dark side, and trying to get back to its good side. I describe this process as 3 stages I went through, plus the 3.5 stage I find myself in right now. My Lego comics will illustrate some of my stories and serve as a funny diversion to this gloomy topic.
Stage 1: The bliss of finding out that doing what you love can be a job.
Everything starts with a blissful realization that the thing you love learning about can be made into a job. For someone who spent their teenage years getting convinced by everyone, from teachers and parents to school counselors, that my university degree in linguistics would never give me a job, I was insanely happy to find out that you can work as a linguist in academia (aka university and research institutes).
