Occupational Hazards
The term occupational hazard is usually used to describe “physical” hazards, which one is exposed to in the process of pursuing their occupation/work. Like being exposed to anthrax as a wool rearer, dangerous radiations for nuclear factory workers or just plain old back pain in the tech industry (I am turning 24, and my back is already starting to show signs of rebel, even if I am fairly physically active).
What stroke my fancy in one of my ever present parallel thought plane of mental existence, was the “personality” hazards which your career might expose you to.
I have been working in the tech industry for a little over 2 years now, and a little introspection makes it clear that my personality has been affected by my choice of occupation, if its been a hazard or not in this regard, is upto anyone’s guess.
I think my current mental utility function, the force that drives me, assuming I am a rational agent (which I certainly am not), is heavily conditionally dependent on my occupation. A lot of things which are important to me as a person, might not have hold any value for me if I was in a different career.
I am a deeply individualistic person (having already use the phrase “I” 9 times since beginning this article), and I don’t really care about anyone other than myself except maybe a very small handful of people, which sounds like something you’d say to sound dramatic, but I mean that in all seriousness. Sometimes I wonder how much of it is my innate nature, and how deeply I am nurtured by the occupation I pursue. Tech as an industry is individualistic, fascinated by powerful individual role models who created a path beyond all odds and despite all costs. With leaders using wartime terminology in boardrooms, somehow glorifying the horrific destruction that is a war, to the chants of doing “whatever it takes” to win the arms race to technical supremacy.
I am not looking to question the culture,I myself am a child of, but I wonder, what would happen if I took upon a different career path. What would be my values. Currently I only care about my own success, have little regard to whatever the hell happens to society or even the people around me, I am deeply meritocratic, almost certainly sapiosexual and I work in an industry which has seen an influx of the most talented (and often ruthless) brains of the generation, and is capitalism incarnate it its most glorious ( and scary) manifestation in the 21st century. People (including yours truly) are driven by profits, by academic/professional glory, relationships are put on the sidelines and the most unlikely of alliances are forged for a chance to get a chance to make an “impact” on the world, and transform our society, often forgetting, that that’s not the only way to make an impact or even the most “impactful” one.
In contrast to this individualism, I wondered, what if I went into maybe something like the military, what would that make of me. I don’t have any idea of what goes inside a military life, but surely it involves a level of sacrifice of the individual identity? Atleast while watching a military parade, with people clad in the same uniforms (maybe decorated with varying level of paraphernalia indicating their rank), marching in groups to the same beat, their must be a strong sense of belonging to a larger group and of surrendering yourself to a cause, for the greater good. I don’t think when my job is to literally protect other people, I would care a lot about what petty concerns make of my daily headache in my current life, and obviously that life comes with its very own (and MUCH more physical) occupational hazards, but I was just wondering if I was drawn to the tech world because it suits my personality, or my personality has just been moulded to like the work I do.
Or what if I was a doctor? It feels like such a noble profession, though I know there is a LOT of stress and pain and occupational hazards that go into that lifestyle, but again, would that have made me a “better” person, would my personality be more caring, more sensitive and empathetic to the suffering of others, or would it have made me numb to it all, due to the constant overexposure to it?
I also often wonder about the total absence of social responsibility I carry, bordering almost to an apathy to whatever socio-political issues in the world around me, always having a feeling that all these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, and are not my problem. But what if I was working in an NGO, would I have been able to turn away my eye and pretend not to see anything wrong while staring right at the problems that are omnipresent around us. As an example, I am finding myself unable to look street beggars in the eye, because it somehow makes me very uncomfortable, and I can’t do any better than just pretend they don’t exist or I don’t see them, and that is so fucking brutal, because its only a coin flip which decides which side of the line I was born in, and it doesn’t take a lot of misfortune to even make me cross lines from one end to another in the future, and be on the receiving end of being pushed around in a world, that pretends to not see you, exist.
Maybe it's just the nascent emotional maturity developing inside me, as I am growing slightly older, although still being VERY young emotionally to be sensitive to a lot of issues, that my brain is making me think of all these things. It has affected the content I am consuming, the books I am reading (I am very much interested in history, political books, even though I didn’t like them before). I don’t know if its just a phase of life, where my brain is trying to figure out what its identity is, and how much of it, is just a result of occupational hazards in a mad industry?
