I went to din­ner with a friend yes­ter­day who had a career and then got mar­ried and became a mommy, for­tu­nate enough to be able to stay home to child rear. Wind for­ward many years and a brand spank­ing new col­lege degree and she is chomp­ing at the bit to anchor the news on TV.

Age dis­crim­i­na­tion in the TV news biz is fairly com­mon — swept under the rug by rat­ings about ‘viewer pref­er­ence’, for sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als with many years of on-air expe­ri­ence. What would it be like for a mid­dle aged woman with only intern­ship expe­ri­ence?  To com­pli­cate the mat­ter, the small mar­ket we live has few oppor­tu­ni­ties for employ­ment in the media — with the excep­tion of sales, which churns and burns through account exec­u­tives like Pam­pers, and five col­leges in the same county pop­ping out perky broad­cast jour­nal­ism majors like donuts at Dunkin.

With the excep­tion of a few local sticky long-timers on the tube, this is a farmer’s mar­ket that grows reporters and anchors for larger met­ros. She isn’t able to uproot her fam­ily and take off for a job if she found one some­where else…   What is she thinking? 

I did not allow the empa­thy I have for her on a per­sonal level to over­shadow logic. I sug­gested per­haps a job in an orga­ni­za­tion that would have some aspect of com­mu­ni­ca­tion to it, maybe train­ing videos, inter­nal, exter­nal or both — and to start ful­fill­ing her dreams on her own rather than being over the top frus­trated and defeated by employer rejec­tion, by learn­ing more about social media and star­ing in her own Inter­net based media empire, allow­ing her to drive her own suc­cess (albeit on off work hours). Noth­ing ven­tured, noth­ing gained. And maybe, just maybe, if she is par­tic­u­larly star-a-licious, she would get rec­og­nized and picked up by com­mer­cial media and prove me com­pletely wrong — I would love to be wrong like that…

I could have eas­ily said, don’t give up, you’re great, they don’t know what their doing, knock on their doors every week till you land the job of your dreams.… nah, it wouldn’t be right to drive her to Xanaxville. After all, we are not defined by our job title or employer. Employ­ment is hokey con­cept designed by the greedy haves to have more. No mat­ter how you paint it or embel­ish it with flow­ery Con­fu­cian prose like

Do some­thing you love and you will never work a day in your life…

unless you are an entre­pre­neur or free­lancer, most jobs are a way to pay the bills and have some dis­pos­able cash for instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Go ahead argue with me about how invested you are in your career, how much you love your job, how won­der­ful your employer is, how mean­ing­ful your work is.. I under­stand, you have to tell your­self that so that you can deal with work­ing under a feu­dal­is­tic arrange­ment that makes some­one else a lot of money and con­tin­ues to divide the classes. Ouch..

If you’re not an entre­pre­neur, a job is a means to an end. Get a job you don’t mind doing that doesn’t tor­ture your psy­che or body, and com­pen­sates you fairly for your work. Take your earn­ings and use them to enjoy your life and ful­fill your dreams.

Some­times, mak­ing deci­sions about what’s really impor­tant and qual­ity of life can be tricky. So too can be hav­ing real­is­tic expec­ta­tions — when we have been taught to be com­pet­i­tive, not to set­tle and to reach for the stars. I’m not say­ing you shouldn’t stretch your­self , I’m say­ing you shouldn’t set your­self up for failure.

Don’t lis­ten to those wolves in sheep’s cloth­ing who will preach the ether of a sexy career… They are Satan’s spawn.

Me? Well, around the mid­dle of 2011 I started to feel severely under chal­lenged. It seemed that no mat­ter how much I worked, no mat­ter the project, speak­ing engage­ment, vol­un­teer effort or social exper­i­ment, noth­ing was doing it for me and I couldn’t really fig­ure out what was miss­ing. I was stumped won­der­ing what was wrong with me. I had prac­ti­cally given all of my energy, time and brain cells over to work — work I ‘love’ but there was lit­tle bal­ance except for sleep and an occa­sional Wii fit­ness game.

It wasn’t about doing more of what I was already doing (I was doing plenty of that), it was about doing some­thing dif­fer­ent — and then I fig­ured it out. I was miss­ing cre­ative expres­sion above and beyond blog­ging and work. My last per­sonal expres­sion project was inte­rior dec­o­rat­ing what seems like eons ago. Since I’m not look­ing to give up what I do for a liv­ing at the moment, I have decided to make 2012 a year for cre­ativ­ity — and I’m going to sub­ject my read­ers to those pieces that are related to careers, human cap­i­tal man­age­ment and social media. That’s right, HR art.

Don’t Try to Fool Yourself.

“The Jonses ain’t got nothin’ on me” by Karla Porter, is a mixed media col­lage rep­re­sent­ing per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion and hap­pi­ness with one’s self through lack of pre­oc­cu­pa­tion about the the lives and pos­ses­sions of others.