11-12-95
Career orientation tries to judge today what will be good for us tomorrow. To further justify its existence, it invests its conclusions with dimensions of prophetic threat, turning the decision-making of those being oriented into a product of psychological terrorism.
This hysterical fabrication, exploiting the anxiety of the older, the fear of the younger, and the needs of a society more concerned with the collective's successful path than with individual happiness, is based on precarious and arbitrary criteria, whether related to goals, means, or individuals.
In the first category, that of goals, the emphasis is on success as narrowly perceived through the quantitative criteria of money and publicity. These are respectable criteria, provided there is an awareness that they should be absolute goals (not even primary) and sources of definitive pleasure, as their pursuit excludes other contradictory dimensions. Unfortunately, we are all slow to understand that only a sparrowhawk kills with certainty every sparrow.
In the second category, that of means, everyone openly talks about values, qualities, work, and effort, but no one equally openly admits what they secretly believe: that the weapons today's society respects for achieving its recognized goals are mainly public relations and transaction. These are also respectable dimensions, if one again realizes that they constitute a one-way path that excludes the cultivation of other directions.
In the third category, that of individuals, a self-awareness is required from an early age, usually the content of a lifetime. We came into life to discover our abilities and desires, not to pre-decide them authoritatively and arbitrarily build on them.
Finally, this structure of orientation ignores some basic rights. The right to change, to surprise, to err, to seek utopia. That is, allowing ourselves to change without it implying frivolity, and to be surprised by life without it causing insecurity. Deciding while accepting that mistake is the most common outcome and that time cannot be pressing, since the end has a certain "if" but an uncertain "when."
Perhaps success, and possibly happiness, is to wake up in the morning with curiosity and a desire for discovery and creation, to be honest with oneself and others, to choose freely with only values and pleasures as criteria, to believe until the end that everything is possible, thus achievable, and to go to bed at night to rest and not to escape. To achieve all this, start working, and life will gradually orient you.
Plato Rivellis