‘Follow your dreams,’ they said. ‘But be realistic,’ they also said. Are you a dreamer? Or are you a realist? Or are you both?

Hold up — is that even possible?

Based on one of our readings, ’The Danger of the Dream Job Delusion’ by Cal Newport, I learned that there is this delusion about what ‘dream’ jobs should be. This in turn results in people possibly having second thoughts about what their dream jobs are because it’s not as exciting as the jobs which others consider to be the dream. The reading follows the story of a man named Ryan who went to college and ended up beginning his own farm business, which years later became very successful. And the back story for Ryan’s decisions was that he actually studied horticulture and this interest came about due to him being raised surrounded by farms. Some may think how is being a farmer a dream job?

Heck, even I asked myself this question while I was reading the article. Newport ventured to interview people to compile a list of dream jobs by interviewing people who loved their jobs and found that the occupations were quite ordinary. So I suppose that it doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of job you do, but more of what you do with your job if you actually like/love it.

In another article called, ‘The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life’s Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable’, again written by Newport, he discusses how your current work may be affected by your insistence to find the work you love. He makes references from the book ‘Quarterlife Crisis’ pointing out the same dissatisfied occupational experiences that people go through with their current situations due to their need to find that job.

In both readings, personally, I found that the only reason people were unhappy with what they did was because they were looking beyond what they already had. I mean it’s not hard to be influenced by the delusions that being a rockstar is a far greater dream job than becoming a milk man. But all this depends on you and what you’re passionate about. I think that the only way to really think that you’re not happy about the dream job that you have, or striving to have, regardless of what it may be, is to make yourself think that you’re not happy with it. So if you’ve found what you like, what you’re good at, what makes you happy; try to keep at it. If you’ve got what you want and/or what you need; keep it.