Choose Life

"You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?"

(Thanks to Chelfyn) This is a fantastic piece from George Monbiot about choosing life as a career path. He offers some good words of warning about taking old skool careers advice using journalism as his guide.

"be wary of following the careers advice your college gives you...It teaches you to do what you don’t want to do, to be what you don’t want to be. It is an exceptional person who emerges from this process with her aims and ideals intact. Indeed it is an exceptional person who emerges from this process at all. What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution."

Instead he advocates the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: "whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither."

All too often people cling on to jobs that make them desperately unhappy. Like Tim in the Office they find themselves stuck in a rut but unable to break free.The bonds are usually monetary reasons. He offer this wise advice on keeping your lifestyle simple: "If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by."

Wise words indeed. After all who really needs a bigger TV? I always envied my friend Liz who could leave on the dot of 5 p.m. each night and not give work another thought until 9 a.m. I eventually learned her secret. It was down to a daily dose of Dilbert.