So tonight in my Issues and Standards class the prof was talking about professional identity, what it means to call yourself a counselor and all that stuff. All of us counseling psych students tend to think of counseling as a calling, not a career. You have to. If you're just looking for a career why in gods name would you pick one that is such a pain? The emotional investment required is tremendous, the schooling is costly, and the pay for the first 5 years or so is simply pathetic. So those of us who actually attempt to be counselors anyway tend to be dedicated to a fault. The choice to counsel for a living is a matter of self-actualization.
Anyway the professor was talking about how beginning counselors tend to notice that some people pull away from them as soon as they start on this path. He made the observation that people fit into fewer and fewer places in society the more actualized they become, and suggested that these two facts were related. So that got me thinking. I live with a PHD student. We are both illogically passionate about what we do, and neither of us fits into much of any societal role. Society is not built for people who are satisfied with life, comfortable with themselves, marching to their own rhythm ect... it is built for people who can make good mindless drones, who are just insecure enough to do what the boss wants even if they have a hunch their idea might be better. People who schmooze at parties instead of enjoying themselves because schmoozing is socially aceptable. A self-actualized person does none of this, or if they do it is tongue and cheek; they recognize the stupidity and futility of all the social rituals and self-repression.
We are a society designed to work best when people are just a bit unhappy, and those of us who can't deal with that are forced to the edges and looked at funny. You tell me the last time you met someone who followed a passionate calling to become middle management!
One of my classmates is a guy who currently works downtown for a bank while going to school. His coworkers asked him what he was in school for and then nodded and backed away when he answered with much exuberance that he was going to become a psychotherapist. Now they don't socialize with him simply because he's doing something academically that he loves. Loving school might be in the realm of the actualized, but among those who fit in, school is a means to an end and the end is NOT personal growth.
So much makes sense now. There are tons of people in my classes who appear to be "mundanes" and yet I relate to them really well. Until now I had no clue why. Pull a random mundane off the street and I will be fighting with them within a minute no matter how hard we may try to get along. But every single person in my class, no matter how superficial they appear, is choosing of their own volition to do a tremendous amount of work for little gain beyond personal satisfaction. They ARE a different class of people than the randoms folk on the street, or most of those random folk.
The more i think about it, the more I realize that the qualities I have always attributed to the class of people I call mundane are indicative of not only a lack of actualization but a lack of desire to actualize. I mean, some of my friends work pretty mundane jobs but they have the recognition of the job as "something that pays the bills" and somewhere else in their lives there is something that elicits an incredibly passionate response.
Geekdom as the culture of self-actualization... hrm... I may be onto something here.
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