Why careers are overrated?

Careers can be a really positive thing to go after and to feel accomplished in.  However, careers can definitely come with negatives, and depending on what you have heard about careers, they can be really overrated.  There are messages out there that people will feel a passionate purpose in their careers.  While that might be true for some people, it is somewhat rare and even when you find it, it can be somewhat fleeting.  Careers have shifted as far as the values around them.  Back in the mid-1900s, people found a career and stuck to it throughout their life because it was a secure income.  In today’s world, people are less worried about that and tend to move around from career to career. 

The reality is that careers are a long-term relationship and with any long-term relationship there will naturally be some highs but also some lows.  The lows in your career can be really hard to deal with because we spend most of our awake hours working in our careers.  Therefore, when things are going wrong in our careers it can feel really heavy.  These lows are only natural but can add to how careers are overrated compared to what some messages in society promote careers to be.  For example, when these lows happen some people might quickly think that they mean that they did not find the right career because the passion is not there when they choose a perfectly okay career. 

Some other messages in society will promote that careers will help fix things in our lives.  A career can help with certain things, such as finances, but at the end of the day, they are really challenging and will not fix everything in our lives.  Also, careers tend to put people in a specific box when in reality people are multi-faceted.  For example, if you decide to be an accountant because you enjoy math, that is great, but there are also likely other parts of you that will then be ignored.  There could be other sides of you, such as an artistic side, that will be more ignored due to being an accountant with most of your awake hours.