Is this the relevant passage from Strangers Drowning? If so, I don’t find this that compelling for considering totally revamping one’s career plans, since it’s not clear why her radical new career plan of becoming a psychiatrist is better. As far as I know, Julia’s current job at the Centre for Effective altruism is much closer to social work than it is to psychiatry. I think it would be worthwhile to look into other possible readings (or to write one, as Nikola is planning!). I’ve only skimmed the Julia Wise chapter, so it’s possible that I missed something.
It was bad enough to worry about these questions in retrospect, but they became far more pressing when Julia had to think about a career. She wanted to be a social worker—she had wanted to for years—but she could earn far more money doing something else. Was it okay for her to be a social worker anyway? How much was she entitled to consider her own happiness? She could justify not going for the absolute maximum she could earn on the grounds that she would be so crushingly miserable in finance or law that she would have a breakdown within a few years, and then she’d be out the cost of law school or business school or whatever it took to get into the field in the first place. She knew that pushing herself past what she could endure wasn’t going to help anyone. A career had to be sustainable over the long haul. But obviously there were lots of jobs that paid less than finance but more than social work. How could she justify going into a field that paid so little? She struggled with this question for a long time, and though she never did come up with a satisfactory answer, she enrolled in social-work school anyway.
All of this was much less of a problem for Jeff. If he had married someone other than Julia, he thought, he probably would not be spending much more than he was now, he would just be saving the extra rather than giving it away. He wanted to have a pot of money in reserve so he would have more options in the future, and so that, if anything bad happened to his family, he would be able to help. If he hadn’t married Julia, he would have spent a bit more on nicer musical instruments—he especially coveted a new fiddle—and he would have felt freer to quit his job and do something else that paid less. Maybe he would have become a full-time musician or a folk-dance caller. But other than that, his life would be basically the same. He figured he would enjoy any number of different jobs, so he felt free to pick the highest-paid one. He liked working as a programmer, and he imagined that if he had no charitable duties he would probably be doing something pretty similar. It wasn’t hard to make him happy.
While Julia was working on her social-work degree, it occurred to her that she might have enjoyed being a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists earned much more than social workers. That was what she should have done with her life, she realized. But the thought of investing vast sums of money and many years of her life on premed courses and then medical school—years in which, she had reason to believe, she would be utterly miserable and wouldn’t be able to donate anything at all—was too awful to contemplate. Later still, it occurred to her that she could earn more money within social work by becoming one of the despised subspecies that adjudicated claims for insurance companies—those who spent their time denying sick people coverage. The work would be awful, but it would enable her to give a lot more without requiring any additional training, so did she have the right to turn away from it?
The trouble was, she loved her job. Her first position was as a counselor in a prison. Much of the time she couldn’t do very much for the people she talked with—they were in prison, after all—but many of them were so miserable there, and so desperate for kindness, that she saw that just listening to them and being supportive meant quite a bit. And once in a while she felt that something she had said had really helped. One woman in the prison was the daughter of an alcoholic father who had died from the effects of drinking; the father had always told his daughter that her bad behavior had driven him to drink, and the daughter felt dreadful guilt about this, believing that she had effectively killed him. Julia said, What if your father had told his AA group that he drank because of you, that it was all your fault? The daughter at once saw how wrong that would sound to other people, and felt her guilt ease. Moments like that made Julia happy, but she was careful not to let herself get carried away. She was there to think about what her clients needed, not what made her feel good. She wrote in her blog:
This is an ad for a food bank that appears on buses all over Boston. Here we have a pretty young white woman hugging an older white woman. I guess the young woman is supposed to represent the food bank, since she looks happy, whereas the faceless older woman is presumably hungry and therefore in need of comfort. Oh, wait. Except she doesn’t need a hug. She needs groceries. I have a rescue fantasy—what social worker doesn’t? Somewhere inside, we love to believe that we could just hug our clients and make everything better. If we took them home and gave them a good meal and enough sympathy, we believe we could fix everything and earn their undying gratitude. But that is an inside thought. You do not tell your clients about that thought. The point is to help, not to feel helpful. . . . If I needed groceries, would I really want to go someplace where I might get hugged by some misty-eyed young lady with a savior complex? No way.
It’s an interesting passage to reference because the moral of this story is almost opposite to what’s being suggested in the post. Julia did decide to stay a social worker, even though she believed at the time being a social worker would be less impactful, because she loved her job.
Is this the relevant passage from Strangers Drowning? If so, I don’t find this that compelling for considering totally revamping one’s career plans, since it’s not clear why her radical new career plan of becoming a psychiatrist is better. As far as I know, Julia’s current job at the Centre for Effective altruism is much closer to social work than it is to psychiatry. I think it would be worthwhile to look into other possible readings (or to write one, as Nikola is planning!). I’ve only skimmed the Julia Wise chapter, so it’s possible that I missed something.
It’s an interesting passage to reference because the moral of this story is almost opposite to what’s being suggested in the post. Julia did decide to stay a social worker, even though she believed at the time being a social worker would be less impactful, because she loved her job.