The problem with ‘follow your dream’
science.sciencemag.org
science.sciencemag.org
The former seems much more about extrinsic motivations: status, salary, prestige, title, etc.
I am getting more and more convinced that to have a sustainable and fulfilling career you need to be honest with yourself and find out what you like to do not what you'd like to be.
Trade-offs apply...
-- L. Tomlin
I think the vast majority of people in the world do not have this luxury. They should be working backwards by figuring out what their goals are, prioritizing them, figuring out how much they cost, and then figuring out what they can sell (including type of labor) to make that requisite income happen with the highest probability.
For example, do you want to write about science more than you want to have children and be able to purchase a home in a high end neighborhood? Do you want to be not working in the evenings and weekends and find and marry a spouse who also is not?
So it's a dead end to start with this because you just end up with "earn a lot of money" without any more information about how to reach the goal.
It also assumes that people are very good at career planning. If not, then it might be better to just follow the main stream.
If they’re coming out of high school and their goal is “high social status”, something went wrong in the parenting. I would hope that does not apply to the majority, but I guess it’s not out of the realm of possibilities.
There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you build a satisfying life for yourself.
But make sure that you live your own dream not your parents'.
And to avoid that risk, you need to think long and hard how you want to fill your time. This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.
That sounds like a different issue. By parental guidance, I mean offering your experience and resources as a parent to the child to help them model their world. For example, if my kid came to me and said their goal is to make and sell clay art full time, then I would not dissuade them. I would, however, ask them if they have other goals like buying a nice house or living in a certain area or attracting a certain type of spouse, and let them know of the various probabilities of that. A parent is a cabinet member, the kid is still the president.
> This means focusing on what you like to do instead of being miserable being someone you're not.
The purpose of my original comment was to point out that most people do not have the luxury of not being miserable just because they do not want to be. A plumber does not spend time in crawl space because they like to. But the plumber has multiple goals, and compromises have to be made to accomplish various portions of various goals. Such as not being able to do what you like to do for x hours a week, but in exchange, you get a high probability of being able to feed and house your family to your acceptable standards. And then having a couple days a week where you do get to “be someone you want to be”.
I'd feel better as a parent if they liked a lot of stuff (manual, intellectual, artistic, helping, electronics, clothes, cooking, selling, building, repairing, teaching), had an open mind and excellent work ethic, so that when they find themselves doing any job, they'll try to excel, find something in it, and 'be who they want to be' in their job too. Office politics, the way you treat others, helping colleagues, improving your skills, taking responsibilities, being a responsible and helpful member of a team or a society, keeping ethics standards high... You name it. They can also be achieved through work, while not really being fond of what you're doing. CPA, blue collar jobs (or plumber for you) don't seem to be dream careers, but there's many opportunities to be a productive, impactful, helpful and happy member of society while working those.
I think there’s a lot of bias and assumption about what people want behind your comment.
And, to be clear, most of my family and ancestry have been manual workers, laborers, in construction, fields, and they all wished dearly for us never to have to work such jobs. Maybe it's their bias, and even though they probably liked their jobs, may have some better insight (than me or you) as to why they wouldn't want their children to go the same way. My family always smirks at the modern romantic vision of manual work. 'if you have a chance to stay behind a desk doing intellectual work why would you ever want for shit working conditions, outside in the cold or heat, or doing something that breaks your body'. Their bias, doing the work is 'do something else if you can'... Who am I to say I know their life better than them?
And yes, CPA is a great career too for them. Just not anything back-breaking if they can convince you otherwise. And if you like the manual stuff, they're ready to have you take up the family business! They'll open all the doors for you. But they'll worry for you.
It may be strange, as the manual-job part of the family is far wealthier than us engineers or diploma-ridden grand-children, but they still think we're better like this...
That may be a 'stupid' view from a build-multi-generational-wealth perspective, but we're mostly 2 generations removed from starving farmers, so knowledge work seems better from their life. I only wish they'd have been as serious about teaching us practical skills and construction, home maintenance and all their manual skills, as teaching their work-ethics (Portuguese descent here, may be different in other cultures I don't know).
If the former, then I would say that is changing and see plummeting fertility rates in developed countries as proof.
If latter, then yes, teenagers can be extra prone to making non data driven decisions due to various reasons, but the hope is maybe it can instruct them in the future if not today?
Most people aren’t data-driven.
Parents, teachers, guidance counselors etc are also part of the problem.
The outcome for most who do not go into finance is a rude awakening that most high paid individuals in a business have a technical skill which allows them to produce. There is a very limited market for entry level people managers who lack the skills of employees.
One acquaintance of mine discovered his business degree qualified for a job managing the schedules, incoming deals, and pricing of HVAC technicians at roughly half the income of the HVAC technicians with a comparatively limited career advancement route. Considering that this management position also cost twice the education time the business degree had a highly questionable ROI.
That’s why there is such an emphasis on STEM education for those looking to maximize income. The higher the hurdle, the more valuable the hurdle is as a signal to others. Hence the competitiveness of entry at some schools.
The only way out of this is to have skills which are extremely rare owing to lack of training paths, rapidly changing execution skills, or demand which rapidly outstrips training capacity.
e.g. Software Engineer with experience in the latest X, NeuroSurgeon, Software Engineer with experience on hyperscale services etc.
My suspicion is that this is only an auxiliary goal to get something else - which might be some degree of material security. Especially in societies where social security is weak or non-existent. A high social status can sometimes be helpful because it increases negotiating power. And this might be one reason why people might buy expensive cars and such. But I think it is rarely the end goal, because it is so unspecific and has little to do what an individual /is/.
An individual is a highly social primate that saw reproductive gains from status (for both sexes) during its evolutionary history.
With status being 'cash in the bank' for so many desired things including security and mating success, why wouldn't accumulating enough of it be an end goal, at least in the mind of an individual?
Doesn't your theory predict that as people get richer/more secure they'd care less about social status? I tend to see the opposite, and people care very much about relative vs absolute wealth a lot.
The problem with a dream like marine-biology-professor in particular is it can take so many years to find out you have failed due to the tantalizingly low rung of grad school admissions and postdoc jobs.
A high school grad may be vaguely aware of this, but the reality is that many people choose to be a nurse and find out later the realities of the job.
There's no research, there is little growth. You don't get to change your job. Your title is exactly what you do.
Same story for the various lab techs.
This was a huge shift in mentality for me. I wanted to do exploit dev, I wanted to (and for a while, did) teach computer security online, and the list goes on. There was always this huge dissonance when I didn't do those things.
Then I sat down and looked at what I did do. I program obsessively. I defined that as what I enjoyed doing, rather than conflating what I wanted to do or be with what I enjoyed doing. I don't reverse engineer or create content for 10 hours a day. I do sit down and work on problems I'm excited about though.
It doesn’t mean “I want to win Wimbledon so I should follow my tennis”
It means “I love playing tennis. I should pursue that and make it my vocation.”
The attacks on “follow your passion” really annoy me, because they’re based on a straw man that says - you need to blindly follow what you enjoy and ignore all other concerns. Which is stupid, and no one would ever advocate for that. We’re just saying - life is short, do what you love, and aim to make it your main vocation. All within reason, which shouldn’t need to be said.
And now all these people are saying “don’t follow your passion follow the money” and it’s just the worst advice, because at least if you follow your passion you’ll enjoy what you do some of the time, even if that time is around a day job.
If what you really care about doing quickly eventually liberates you from laboring at it, you'll not stop - you'll have a lot more liberty to expand outward from that core and build on it. No matter how little most people appreciate it (set theory, for example) ... who cares? there will always be a least a few others.
I am an 'elite athlete'. I compete in one of the oldest sports/events in history.
I am top 3 in the country and top 60 in the world.
My dream is to be a full-time athlete and represent my country at the 2024 Olympics and also many Major international competitions.
Unfortunately, I will never make a 'living' from my sport. After sponsorship deals and prize money the Top 5 athletes in the world are making $100K USD (before flights/accommodation/manager fees)
I am perfectly content with that and it has influenced my lifestyle greatly.
I chose to get a good education and work from home and pursue X/Y/Z because it gives me more freedom to Train and pursue my "real-dreams".
which one?
That has to be some form of running, right?
I hate how the sports world has been consumed by -top players- on the most lucrative markets, which are mostly marketing products.
I love sports but hate the sports current -way of selling out-, the power law distributions, etc...
I do think someone should get up and running a Patreon/KickStarter for sports....
You as an athlete put up your profile, you can put updates with your training etc, and you have your -goals- competitions you want to attend in the future and need X dollars for equipment/travel expenses etc...
Just a random idea, reading an athlete like you telling how it is, makes me think it's more needed than ever.
You still probably won't make 100k/year from it, but no athlete should have to not go to a competition, or not be able to train or afford the equipment, etc...
But yeah, I'm not even an athlete so what would I know, heh
I am not familiar with details how exactly it works, I guess you are supposed to provide some media to your subscribers, but I guess you could simply publish videos from your training, or make a vlog before/after a competition. The idea is that people would not pay you because the videos are super awesome, but simply because they are your fans.
The subscriber tiers could be like "sponsor", "sponsor who gets autograms", and maybe something special for those who pay really lot.
Content should'nt matter...
I got the idea from my couple's sisters needs, she does iron mans all around the world, travelling there ain't cheap. Also bikes and shit etc, but I never got along building any of it.
I'd watch that.
Must definitely have a target audience, but not me.
Have an awesome day!
Figure out your life goals. Find jobs that meet them where you would be happy (or at least not unhappy). Pick from among those to maximize your life goals and happiness is a much better algorithm.
This view however suffers from what I call "the postmodern trap." If everything is relative - if there is no objective function to maximize - then how do you actually do anything? There exists no optimal decision - no rationally justifiable decision at all - because there is no direction upon which you can orient for any reasonable period of time. And so postmodernism, while logically sound, leads to abject paralysis. This is the trap of an entirely deconstructive and equally self-deconstructive philosophy.
What remains then, in my opinion, is a more pragmatic outlook. You need to believe in some arbitrary, "objective" axis upon which you can orient your life, be it career, knowledge, family, health, and so on. This gives your life purpose, for now. But none of these rational purposes are truly unimpeachable - nothing is (see Gödel). And so, over time, things will change - life happens. You simply re-orient when it does, without being seduced by the false allure of "objective" goals, nor falling into the postmodernism abyss of nihilism.
Reminds me of Pratchett's character Mr Nutt in Unseen Academicals.
The problem is when people decide that X is the thing every human should optimize for. Even though pursuing X is often as meaningless as pursuing Y.
"Figure out your life goals" sounds like the same thing.
Another idea is to time box it. Dedicate every fiber in you to it for a fixed amount of time and at the end of that truly evaluate your odds. This kind of dedicated application and focus does transfer into other areas.
When it comes to sports, you are only young once and school and a vocation will always be there. But have an exit plan and a hard cutoff where you really evaluate your trajectory.
If you have a dream and a well defined purpose that fills you with passion don't throw it away casually. It is a rare thing to know exactly what you want. Figure out a way if you can.
For the rest that can't determine their dream, choose goals and paths that give you the most options at their end. Don't decide what you are going to be for the rest of your life, pick a place you want to be at in three to five years and shoot for this.
I went from a decent junior athlete to top ten in country in that amount of time to compete on world cup. Was really lucky. It was apparent by then that it'd be a continuous grind with little to show afterward. Left healthy and coached for a few years while completing university. I was the old kid in all my classes but way more focused than I would have been straight from high school.
The freedom you have when you do something in your free time is underrated.
The risk of suppressing that dream and compromising everything is realizing you have an unfulfilled life.
So following your dream responsibly entails learning a skill that is lucrative but which opens the possibility to fulfill that dream.
The luckiest people are on their path to fulfill their dreams early on in their lives and all the work and effort is alligned with their vocation, all work and effort becoming much easier to attain.
For some things it's just not possible (or at least way harder than following your dreams in the first place)... the kind of things that require being part of something bigger and having a certain reputation and seniority among your peers. E.g. flying fighter jets or do underwater welding after a career in investment banking, or trying to enter a decade later an industry that was at its infancy in the first place.
There are lots of dreams (probably the majority of them) for which I fully agree with you though.
My wife has a childhood friend and a cousin who were both very talented in Indian classical music in their youth and regarded as potential stars. The friend came from a well to do family, the cousin from a lower income family. The friend didn't really need to pursue a college degree in a professional field and take up job to make ends meet and instead could devote the entirety of higher education and focus to music because even if she doesn't succeed monetarily, the family still owned several properties and the rental income and capital appreciation could give enough of a passive income for survival together with say teaching.
No such luck for the cousin who now does music as a hobby when he can.
People need to follow their loves... Dream of being a Rock Star? Play at your local bar. Write a novel.
He was saying it in reference kids who would practice hip-hop dance and pursue it as though they'd all actually get somewhere with it.
His advice was. "raise your bar up until it's stable and won't fall back down, then try to kick it up so that if it were to come back down, it'll stop where you left off but won't go lower." Or stabilize yourself first, then shoot for the stars that way even if you fail you can fall back to where you were before.
Do what you enjoy, understand and appreciate what it means to be among the best at it, and then learn to do it very well.
Solving dynamic programming problems on the spot is about as useful to physics (or software design) as reciting the alphabet backwards very quickly is to being a good author. A lot of those problems were originally solved as someone's thesis (i.e. not in 5 minutes). Most people who do well on such problems in interviews just spent a lot of time practising, and companies like candidates who are willing to spend a bunch of time grinding something monotonous because that's what most of the work will be if hired.
99% of theoretical physics papers consist of torturous incremental research that no one gives a shit about, not even the authors. (I might be exaggerating slightly, but not much.)
Yyyyyuuuppp. I'm now 33 and still haven't figured out my 'dream'
I have figured out I probably have ADHD though. Cheers for missing that, school.
Tell you what, whether I have it or not learning of ADHD and using the techniques that work for it has helped immensely. I'll take that if nothing else!
Yeah I completely missed it too. It'd be great if there was some way for schools to pick it up! Probably through seeing how certain students learn and providing differing education style as needed. It might even already be the case to be fair, it's been a minute since I was at school
I wish I could give a perfect headline technique as an example but it's more changing how you do things to work with the way your mind works instead of against it
and if that doesn't happen at least I'll have tried haha
What resources did you use to find those techniques?
edit: nevermind. I saw your other comment; "
Essentially I watched every video from the YouTube channel HowToADHD" Thank you.
I like the advice in this piece to find something you are good at and makes you happy 80% of the time. That’s good advice.
E.g. I decided about two years ago to transition from Education (I was a special ed teacher in the private sector), where I hoped to develop useful tech for learning, to the world of Tech with the same goal in mind. I have always had an affinity for programming-- I have fond memories of making games (e.g. snake), bots, harmless trojans, etc. with the mIRC scripting language--, and an interest in solving problems related to the contents of our minds. I completed a few contracts in web development related to Wordpress (html, css, js, php, mysql) to get myself going, before deciding to learn a stack that would enable me to find better work opportunities or develop a learning product. I settled on React/Apollo/Express/Prisma/Postgres and have been working part-time on a flashcard web app eversince. I'm inspired by the likes of Duolingo, Anki and Quizlet, though I have a special appreciation for Lichess, among others. I wish to make it easier to choose/manage/share what one knows. I would like to generate revenue with this enterprise, but I'm unsure whether I will succeed. If I don't, I wonder how difficult it would be to find work related to what I've learned.
We should also reference the fact that people coming up through the academic system generally have very little exposure to anything else - it's natural for them to believe that 'professorship' is somehow this great and noble thing, because the system they are in effectively enforces that psychologically. Which is why I believe internships should be a part of the process for almost everyone.
Also almost never referenced in these talks: many people have an inherent, communitarian instinct. Their 'dream' isn't that important, rather what they want to do is 'their duty' - which is to say 'be useful to the community'.
Personally my communitarian instinct is much stronger than individual aspirational instinct, and so literally 'my dream' is something like 'to do my job very well'. I would be considerably 'more proud' to have effectively created a 'good company' that 'employs people' and 'creates work for others' - than having written a really good album.
Those with such a communitarian instict may look at those 'pursuing their dreams' as being selfish.
I believe that if you were to ask the questions properly, you'd find that maybe more than 1/2 of the population is like this.
For example, raising children is 'exhausting, draining' and generally not considered an aspiration, and yet for many it's possibly the most fulfilling thing they've done in their lives.
I wish we would teach children about the fulfillment they get from doing useful things and being of service to others, as much as we taught the aspirational elements.
Providing jobs and even providing for your family is very noble.
It's worth noting some people are wired differently. If I loved acting, I'm not wired in a way where I could move to L.A. and spend a decade of my life to trying for and probably not getting various roles. I know myself, I'm risk-averse and need stability. But for somebody else, that's exactly what they should do.
Any advice aimed at EVERYone is going to be wrong for some people.
I too an earning money doing something I never thought I'd be doing. But I got here just following the scent of what people appreciated me the most for, and most of the time, it's a good job. All of the time, it's a high paying job. And half of my time, I'm not at it. :-)
Peter Drucker says in one his seminal business books "look for the easy wins", even when they aren't where you think you should be looking. Because they point you at what you can do really well at. Best business advice I think I could give anyone.
Even with this context "the dream" can change over time though. In the beginning I thought my dream was electronics since at 16 "the bug" hit me and started to devour tons of books and practice little circuits on garage. However once I failed to enter at my desired Uni and landed on an adjacent one the dream changed once I was face to face with a computer.
Currently, having a 25+ years career in software development, I can also do electronics on the side. With IoT and hardware-software integration I am involved in both worlds but I consider myself a software developer first and secondly a "good enough" at electronics.
I do realize I am one of the lucky few that got to "follow your dream" and land on a lucrative one at the same time, but for the first 10 years was not that easy in Europe to do that. EU market drop at beginning of 2000's combined with my "amazing" country's politicians made me struggle just above poor line at times. Only after 2005 onward I could say this career also allowed me to live good.
Being a Software Developer IS really my dream job, I enjoy it almost all the time, but there are always parts which I hate. I don't think there are a lot of jobs if any, where you enjoy it 100% of the time.
I think it's true for life in general that you should aim for 100% in everything but expect to never reach it. This way, you won't disappoint, but you still try everything to make it happen.
even in life, enjoying it 100% of the time is an unrealistic expectation, in any aspect. school, relationships, work etc.
people should be realistic about the "shitty parts" of life and decide what is acceptable for them. This is different for different people.
Reminds me of the advice that the ideal situation is to find something that you love, that you are good at, that you can get paid for, and that the world needs.
I’m currently “following my dream” because with enough work I hope it will satisfy the first three, and I’ve (selfishly?) decided that I should prioritise doing what I love over doing something the world needs.
It might be poorly compensated but it's not a banal career. A good career advisor has the potential to make a huge difference in people's lives, more even than a teacher. As someone who grew up in a rural lower-class family (where good career advice was scarce), I'd have saved a couple mostly wasted years of my life if I'd met a good career advisor in high school.
Plenty of sources in criticism section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
Although, one can easily see that we do not have the ability to perform good experiments with concepts as nebulous and ill defined as “personality types”.
This is not an issue specific to this idea in popular psychology, but in general to almost any field with difficult to define parameters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
Even in physics, you have statistical truths like second law of thermodynamics. they allow you to generalize where precise computation is impossible.
So Jung’s insights into personality attitudes, dichotomies of perception and judgment seem like interesting conjectures worth knowing about, possibly difficult to prove.
Mission accomplished!
Joke aside, I grew up with a undertone of “whatever you do, think about the fact that you will have to pay the bill son”
A experience that is wildly different from my US wife. Bless her heart.
The rest is:
- Understand what the job really entails. Speak to people who currently do it, try get work experience doing it etc.
- look at supply and demand, if only 0.01% of the people who are doing it are making any money, that’s a tough market to do well in.
- look for barriers to entry that you can overcome that limits supply. See what’s involved in building a moat. Passion helps with this.
- work to address the bias towards jobs that sound interesting to everyone eg YouTube celebrity, game designer, footballer etc, although these also fail at the supply and demand stage. Actively look for jobs that are less obvious that have the properties you like.
- consider you’re career holistically e.g. does it fit with the lifestyle you’d like, is it populated by the kinds of people you’d like to work with, how likely is a stable income.
- think long term, dreams change, how hard would it be to pivot
etc.
Are you someone who gets energy from working with other people? Helping other people and solving social problems? or are you happy when you solve technical or discrete problems?
figuring this kind of stuff out is far better then "following your dreams in job X".
"finding overlap between what I like and what I'm good at was not easy.... I don't like repeating the same content every year.... I love telling stories about science.... loved the freedom to choose what to write about ... My writing got noticed ... I was given opportunities "
When you find a good fit, you radiate. Ananya was the only one who -knew the particulars- s/he needed.
I can think of other reasons, for an average person, to absolutely not in any way try to follow their dream as a source of livelihood; what are the arguments FOR it, though? How did this idea even come about; is it related to the "self esteem" fad in education?
The biggest group of older candidates are ex math teachers who couldn't pay the bills with that job, but you do run into an ex poker player every now and then.
If you make money doing it, that is the best case scenario. Else you can make it a hobby, and still be happy. There are no black and white answers, unfortunately, and tradeoffs always apply.
Sounds like being a science writer fulfils the author’s current dreams, though. Perhaps it’s OK to follow your dreams, as long as you react when your dreams change.
Whatever you do and you're good at must also match a market requirement, otherwise you will starve.
Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, the most realistic dreams can be the most ominous by far.
And you need to recognize the nightmares early and run the other way.
Dreams would be at the top, the mistakes people make is chasing the top without fulfilling their needs first.
Even if you had a "job" following your dream, it is quite unlikely to make you happy 80% of the time. If you've found something to do that makes you happy 80% of the time, _that_ is your dream.
> in grad school I saw how applying for grants is a constant source of worry for many professors. I realized I did not want to be responsible for the salaries of my hypothetical lab members.
If that's all you needed to worry about being a Professor of Marine Biology, then your life would indeed be dreamy. Other pursuits = other things to worry about and other hassles, often much more worries than the bureaucracy of leading a research group.
Being a grown-up sucks that way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPi2s1K_pgU
There's another problem with research positions though: There aren't any. I mean, there are a few, but a very small few with tenure, and in the non-tenure-track ones you often have to research stuff you don't care much about. Academia is massively underfunded IMHO.
> My writing got noticed, eventually by people at my institution, and I was given opportunities to write press releases and stories for the university's news bureau.
That seems like a pretty bad job. Especially since one keeps being faced by what one's former colleagues have managed to do, with one only getting to report on it. IMHO anyway.
> After 3 years of writing, I was offered a position as a science writer.
Now that's much nicer, but - scientific writing is a small niche. I believe a lot of graduate researchers share most/all of your sentiments. I would not suggest they aim for that kind of position. Teaching, which was mentioned in the article, is relevant. But that is again quite likely to make you happy less of the time than research.
---------
Now let's be a little more general...
We live in a Capitalist and hierarchical society, where resources are rarely made available to you without large amounts of money, which the vast majority of people don't have. To follow most (?) non-trivial dreams, much effort by people with different skills is necessary. You would need to locate and convince such people to help you. Again, this is facilitated by being super rich, which you aren't. You could seek funding, but then you're essentially selling your dream to a bunch of investors.
Regardless of social structures, humans' overall time and resources are insufficient to realize everyone's life dream. So even under ideal conditions you would have to compromise for a joint-dream of some sort.
But - this is not necessarily a bad thing. There is absolutely no reason why your childhood life-dream would be the same as your teenage life-dream, or the same as your university life-dream etc: Our dreams and interests change with experience. So it is quite possible that if you go do something new which expands your horizons, you'll develop different dreams, or a different take on your dream. If that process also involves interacting with others - a group of friends, a community, maybe that can help the lot of you agree on some common dream, and then pool your abilities and resources and pursue it together.
He debunked the "passion hypothesis" and gave practical advices along with the stories of several successful people from real life.
He is vehemently against "follow your passion" advice. He said in his book that if Steve Jobs focused on what he was passionate about, he would be a Zen monk in some monastery, and not a tech billionaire.
I picked up his book because he is a CS PhD and Asst. Professor, and not another 'buy-my-book-because-I-am-successful-in-selling-this-book' guy.
This is a short book and I highly recommend it.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13525945-so-good-they-ca...
And I agree that people should dream. But they should base it on certain things, for example-
0. Nature of the field. If you are 10,000th best Engineer in the world or the 20,000th best Math teacher, you will have 0 problems financially.
1. Past success and ability in your dream field
etc.
The Japanese concept of Ikigai also comes to mind in this context.
I love the dreamers and see myself as same, and I want people to be aware of these knowledges before taking the leap and becoming and remaining a dreamer.
"People arrogant and self-confident enough to think they'd be the one and they could do no wrong and who'd hold little to no regards for the status quo and the concept of opportunity cost"
The self-confidence of people is dropping at an ever increasing rate ever since the turn of the millennium, concurrently the awareness of the concept of opportunity cost is skyrocketing. People blamed the Financial Crisis but I think it's the other way around. The financial crisis happened because people self-confidence and risk-taking suddenly collapsed (it's not going fast that kills you, becoming immediately stationary does).
Economists claim that the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' are taxation or the taking care of the environment or public parks.
In reality the biggest 'tragedy of the commons' is people not having the confidence to try out whatever crazy idea they have in mind with regards to the natural world or the entrepreneurial world or the industrial world etc.
It's like we know it's a tragedy of the commons because we encourage (or at least we did) people to follow their dreams, but in the dark of our office with the curtains closed we play it safe .
We need to try a lot of crazy ideas, some of them will stick and we could go back at having 10% YoY real growth...but we are afraid to do so ourselves because we don't want to try and fail, we want to try and win! And get the accolades and status which goes with it.
At the same time who knows if other people are trying themselves or they are playing it safe? Maybe in the dark of their office with the curtains closed, just relentlessly buying the S&P and index funds in awe of their preacher John Boogle....the similarities with tax avoidance/climate/public good care is again there to be seen.
I think it's a known problem outside of academia.
Ray Dalio mentions it very often [1] and Sergey Brin [2] dedicated a couple of minutes to this problem in a talk he gave at Davos (I guess if you follow your dream long enough that's where you end up!) and thinks the Internet is at fault for this pessimistic attitude
The internet might have complicated things even further, people were already becoming more and more risk averse, now they have a projection of all the things which could go wrong as well as rapid access to the info about the #1 person in that domain so they can compare themselves against their accomplishments. They become stuck in a "play it safe" and "analysis paralysis" mode for a very long time before actually experimenting.
Other than the internet I guess the only other reason could be the ever diminishing levels of testosterone in the median male (of all age groups and ethnicity). Testosterone has been declining and nobody knows why.
It makes sense in theory, Testosterone is correlated with risk-taking, might also explain societal changes and the constant level of stress which is put nowadays on security, safety, financial stability. In one word Stasis. Might also be the reason why a President like Trump is not acceptable whereas John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who were exactly the same personality and all around the same persona were elevated as heroes (initially by the left but also nationally)
There is some hopes though, people who take shots have a much less crowded trade so to speak. There is also the reason why I should remember myself that a guy like Musk extracting his richest man in the world wealth and status from Tesla before the company is even out of the woods of bankruptcy and insolvency would have earned him the title of scam artist and fraudster a while ago. Today people are so adamant and desire to see somebody take a shot that would elevate him and praise him, because in a world where nobody tries , he does.
Similarly I have to stress that what is happening with Musk right now is not normal, those are the type of exagerations and grotesque situations which happen when the stagflation and stasis is really inflicting its toll.
Richest man in the world can't be the CEO of a company on the constant edge of going under. In a world were everybody takes risks, the public would have not been captured by the rarity of such all-in endevours and the stock would have never propelled to 800B
Trump finances were really bad in 2000 and then the financial crisis hit.
Had he managed to run in 2000 he'd have been a regular President. He'd have gone down as 43(D)
It's not Trump who changed from 2000 to 2016, society did and now the walk-in closet of what's socially acceptable is much smaller