Career Counseling
Pick A Hobby And Go For It To Find Fulfillment
If a sense of fulfillment has evaded you there is a readily apparent cultural reason why. We tend to equate fulfillment with financial success, or better said we believe achieving financial success will bring fulfillment in its wake. This means that we make career choices compelled not by what really moves us at the deeper existential level but by what we think will make us the most money. Many of us never take the time to scrutinize that deeper existential level in the first place because we don’t know it exists, we believe that what we really want is perfectly aligned with attaining material wealth.
But from an existential point of view fulfillment can only be attained through self-actualization, and self-actualization can only be attained through developing your unique potentialities. Your occupation is a monumental part of this process, both because of all the time you spend at your job that ends up representing a large chunk of your life and because this job can itself act as a vehicle where you develop yourself through your productive work.
But this is only when you choose a profession that allows you to develop your potentialities, and like we were saying in the first paragraph this doesn’t happen for the majority of people because their career choices don’t align with these potentialities but with what will make them more money.
The humanistic ideal is to find fulfillment through your relationships and through your productive work, but if your work isn’t offering you this sense of fulfillment right now there is another route you may not have considered. Neglecting this route goes back to the cognitive bias that fulfillment can only be found if the possibility of monetary reward is attached to it. You can find your fulfillment through choosing a hobby, some activity you have always secretly wanted to do. Decide to go for it, to give everything you have and develop yourself as far as possible in this discipline.
Productive work comes in many shapes and sizes when we shrug off the idea that it has to make you money to be meaningful. Actually at least in the realms of literature and art there is very little worthwhile, past or present, that was made primarily for monetary reward or fame. Great work is prompted by the need for self-expression, it’s the outer, objective representation of that inner process of self-actualization. Choosing a hobby gives you the chance to do something with no expectations other than making your behavior align with who and what you are, so that you can water these seeds and watch them grow.
