From: GBurch1@aol.com
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 06:08:13 MST
In a message dated 12/14/00 8:09:46 PM Central Standard Time,
Dreamsinbytes@aol.com writes:
> I've been tuning into the list which I must say is quite thrilling. I'm now
a
> sophmore in school, and have no clue what I want to do with my life. After
> reading such books like The Age of Spiritual Machines etc... how can I
> possibly know what field to go into? Technology is just moving so quickly,
> and I know I am more aware of this than most (not including extropians of
> course) but how can I prepare myself for what is to come? Currently I'm in
> the business school of my University, however, I feel I am wasting my time.
> Any help is greatly appreciated.
If the views on technological progress you've read about in Kurzweil's books
and others are right, there will be interesting and challenging work in a
broad range of career fields. One thing you ought to think about doing is
separating as much as possible personal feelings of impatience from the
process of making core career decisions. Most rewarding careers require a
long period of study and apprenticeship - at least they seem long when viewed
from the perspective of someone in their undergraduate years :-) Instead, it
seems you should engage in a course of honest self-assessment of what you're
really good at and what you really enjoy doing.
This is not as easy to do as it might seem and requires both time and the
courage to engage in a broad range of study and action to build up the base
of knowledge and experience upon which you can make good decisions. As I
wrote here recently in response to a similar question, I'd advise that you
shouldn't feel compelled to make career choices too soon in your life. Our
society can grant a lot of leeway to young people to experiment with
different lifestyles and career paths. Unless your aptitudes and goals seem
extremely clear to you right now (a rare thing for someone at your stage of
life, I think), give yourself permission to try new things and spend as much
as many months working at something tentatively, i.e. without full commitment
and without sacrificing your options to "back out" and start again.
The more I'm called on to do career and life counseling for young people
(which I find I do a lot of these days), the more I think that humans in
their late teens and early twenties may have some hard-wired compulsion to
make a commitment to a particular life-path. In the broad sweep of
humanity's evolutionary history, such a behavioral mode would have had great
survival value for the individuals that possessed it: It would have helped
usher individuals from their early "learning" years and out of the protective
cocoon of the birth family into the necessity for mating outside their
lineage and establishing a secure foundation for their offspring. But that
behavioral compulsion may be counterproductive in an increasingly complex and
technological world, where gathering a much broader base of knowledge and
experience is more valuable than would have been so for our simple
hunter-gatherer ancestors.
So perhaps the best thing to do is to resist the urge to make an irrevocable
commitment at this stage and stay flexible. Make a commitment instead to
building as broad a base of knowledge and experience as you can, building
skills that give you an adaptive advantage in highly fluid and variable
contexts.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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