Life: A User's Manual

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Chapter Eight: Careers

Whether it’s straight out of high school or after some time in college, at some point you’ll have to decide what you want to be when you grow up. Whatever it is, consider this: you’ll probably spend more waking hours at your job than you will with your spouse (should you get married). Despite this, people tend to spend a lot more time making sure they pick the right person to marry than the right career. I’m not saying you should just pull names out of a hat to decide whom to marry¹. I only want to convey how important it is that you put some thought into which line of work suits you best. The following is a guide to some of the careers that you can choose from. It isn’t all-inclusive, but should serve as a starting point.

Scientist
    Scientists work very hard helping society. They dedicate their lives to proving things like “children don’t like to be poked in the eye” or “eating donuts increases the risk of obesity.” Unfortunately, you have to go to school for about a million years to be a scientist. Another downside is that society has gotten very used to scientists working very hard to help it. It even goes so far as to resent that scientists haven’t yet solved every societal ill. Case in point, no matter what you accomplish, someone will throw in your face that you haven’t cured the common cold.
    “But the common cold is actually a bunch of separate diseases and would be impossible to cure with one treatment,” you say.
    “But you were able to put a man on the moon,” society insists.
    “Well not me, personally. Those were other scientists.”
    “All that and you can’t even cure the common cold.”
    “But I’m an astronomer!”
No, the work of a scientist is very valuable but is best left to other people. It’s like cleaning up public restrooms: be glad that someone does it, but you don’t really want to volunteer. If you like science, a better route is to become a…

Mad Scientist
    Most people think that the tricky part about being a mad scientist is the madness. It lends the vocation its uniqueness. In fact, that’s the easy part. Lots of people are insane. My Uncle Leroy is insane. He thinks he’s a needle-nosed plier. It’s very awkward at parties.   He couldn’t, in a million years, be a mad scientist, though. He’s just too stupid. The brightest thing he ever did, by far, was to stop mistaking his copy of Naked Lunch for a cookbook.
    A mad scientist needs to have developed or be well on their way to developing some significant technological innovation. Social scientists, thus, are disqualified. No matter how crazy their ideas might be, economists needn’t apply. Further, it can’t be just any technological innovation. It does have to be, well, mad. Inventing something obviously useful, like self-cleaning underpants, just isn’t mad enough.
    I doubt I even need to explain the selling points of this job. Mad scientists tend to be snappy dressers² with charismatic laughs, huge mansions and even a sidekick. Their hours are long, but quite flexible³. I’ve never worked in the field myself, but, based upon their laughter and enthusiasm, it appears that mad scientists very sincerely enjoy their work (See Fig. 8a).
The downside is that, not only are you doomed to die an early death, you're pretty much guaranteed to die an ironic death.

Fig. 8a

Relative to regular (a) scientists, mad scientists (b) enjoy a higher rate of job satisfaction.

¹Of course, neither am I saying that you shouldn't.
²All of the cool regular scientist garb, like goggles and big rubber gloves, without the need to brush your hair!
³You never think about mad scientists going on vacation, but they do. I sat next to one on a plane once. He was trying to breed guinea pigs that could sing. For most of the conversation I assumed that, when he said “guinea pig” that he just meant “test subject.” I was pretty disappointed to find out that his guinea pigs were just guinea pigs. Once that was clear I went to sleep. Though not a job requirement, a mad scientist who isn’t out to conquer the world just doesn’t hold my interest.

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