Quarter-Life Crisis

Lately I’ve been undergoing a little bit of a Quarter-Life Crisis. Much like the more common Mid-Life Crisis, a Quarter-Life Crisis is about direction, as in, at this point in my life I should have one…

Given that I don’t have a particular direction, I’m exploring careers. I know what I want: a salary that provides for the kind of lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed, very little stress, and a time commitment of fewer than 45 hours a week.

To meet these rather stringent standards will be difficult, but I’m casting a wide net in hopes of striking career path gold. Generally, I’m searching for something that is primarily predictive, rather than reactive. It is also essential that I avoid consequences. I am left with two alternatives:
1. Meteorology: Have you ever heard of a meteorologist being fired because he or she didn’t accurately predict the weather? Nope. I would look out the window about five minutes before I gave my weather report, confirm my suspicions by consulting my Magic 8 Ball, then go on air. I don’t think I would do too much worse than anyone else. If I realized I was missing out on major trends in weather (thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.) I would just watch someone else’s program and say basically the same thing they said. There could hardly be any proof that I didn’t have any professional integrity. When I make mistakes, all I would have to say is “Gee, it’s the weather, it’s sometimes unpredictable. That’s why I always carry an umbrella!” And, best of all, except in the movies, there is never an emergency conference of meteorologists. (cf Day After Tomorrow, where an emergency conference of meteorologists get together to—wait for it—do absolutely nothing to combat global warming.)
2. Economist: You might think being an economist would be pretty hard, but lets just run through some classic goofs in economics: Malthus predicted the end of civilization in the early 1800’s, Marx predicted the end of capitalism and the rise of communism starting in the 1840’s, God knows how many people thought Reagan was wrong about his tax cuts, and Ben Bernanke thought he didn’t have to regulate sub-prime lenders because they weren’t banks and therefore had no impact on the Federal Reserve. So basically the top economist in the United States can say, “You don’t call yourself a bank, so must not be one, so even though you lend millions of dollars per year and are funding one tenth of our economy with what might as well be monopoly money, I will look the other way.” And I read Malthus and Marx in college, even though they are pretty much undeniably wrong. Irrationality is a staple of economic prediction: the U.S. economy has less than five percent unemployment and has for some time, but if I call that a recession, I bet I can get on the Six O’clock News to talk about it. So about once a year, I will consult my Magic 8 Ball, learn what’s happening in the American economy, and then shamelessly exaggerate.

Unfortunately, these kind of jobs are hard to come by, probably because everyone else has figured out how sweet they are. I, however, am confident that I can rise to the top by shameless self-promotion, outlandish statements, and a couple lucky breaks.

So watch for my name in the coming months and years. If you see it next to a statement about what’s going to happen next, offer me your silent congratulations. Oh, and seek a second opinion. And a third.