Miraculous! Look at you go! You’ve landed your dream job amidst those pesky AI layoffs. Wait a second, hotshot. What’s that? You’ve been fired? Already!? My deepest condolences. Wherever can you go from here?

Perhaps you now find yourself caught in a quite unpleasant tripartite tug of war between mutually opposed forces—the creation of good in the world, the pursuit of your own happiness and a newly overpowering awareness of the fact you need to stop wasting time on philosophical bullshit and find a job!

Perhaps you wake up the next morning with a twinkle in your eye, ready to maximize shareholder value like never before! Not quite? Flights to Indonesia are looking cheap these days. The mangoes are delicious, but going digital nomad is so blasé.

But I’m forgetting something: the vigor of youth! Why, you’re just a shareholder-maximizing, baby! It’s still a good 12 to 18 months before your career becomes synonymous with your ontological self perception. How swell it’d be if you could just walk the earth like Cain or Forrest Gump. Van life has never seemed so enticing, but reality is never as pretty as 33mm. There are, of course, obligations and such. Yet again, the rent will rudely decline to pay itself back at your Brooklyn apartment.

It might be hard to keep your head straight amidst all this “freelancing.” Just remember, beneath the gilded exterior of a social justice warrior, there may lie a social justice crybaby. Every Wall Street executive is either (1) an idiot, (2) an idiot or (3) both.

Surely there must be a middle path, shouldn’t there?

After much socio-anthro-culturological research, it seems there’s not. Shit. The good news is, all of you are more than sufficiently qualified to get a job tomorrow that meets all of your basic necessities. The bad news is, nobody wants a Hannaford salad for dinner seven nights a week. The really good news is, the extent to which you allow your vocation to infringe on your concept of self identity is totally up to you.

So, while “society” wants you to “conform” and totally, definitely not go around inciting class consciousness or something, you are free to reject its premise of attaining a dream job so you can then live your best life. Work is 40 hours a week. That leaves like 128 hours for… literally any other stuff. Even if you get stuck working 80 hours for the banks, the week still holds 88 hours of free time ripe for drinking espresso martinis and atoning for your sins.

Such leisure is lovely, but one must still toil away to pay the bills. In the absence of any justifiable, logical direction that fords the gap between moral obligation and personal happiness, I offer passion. So long as you can provide for your basic needs, why not do whatever you want? Be a musician, a mechanic, a practicing Voodoo psychic or a proselytizing communist. God doesn’t care, and neither does the government, so long as you pay your taxes and speak no evil. There is, however, a caveat. True passion points to the creation of beauty and thus naturally aligns itself with the Good. Displacing low-income tenants to develop a new Erewhon simply won’t cut it, regardless of how much you like the smoothies.

In the formulation of self-worth, the central positioning of “career” is not merely illusory but deeply harmful. You are more than a job: Perhaps those insinuating otherwise, whether Jane Street or CXD, stand to gain quite a lot by deceiving you. Anyone striving for a “career-oriented” life has been blinded to the fact that they can live fully and bring good into the world independently of the job they happen to be doing.

To all my “career-oriented” bears, please hire me someday! I didn’t mean anything I just said, promise! To be perfectly fair, you can always just retroactively buy back into the career-oriented framework once you’ve made a bunch of money or sailed on Freedom Flotilla XXVII or attained whatever it is you all have as “dream jobs” these days.

In sum, thank God almighty I’m not a senior!

Nate Berg is a member of the Class of 2027.