Job vs career

Evidently this new career wasn’t all thrills. There were spills, too, for some, maybe for me. Already I’d noted a few slippery patches. Little jobs had no such peaks and troughs, what you saw was what you got. You did what you were told to do, had as good a time doing it as possible and at five on the dot you forgot all about it. Little jobs didn’t raise ripples in the mind, didn’t disturb the surface at all. A career, on the other hand, seeped into evenings and weekends, popped up even in dreams, in fact took up so much of life that to all intents and purposes it was life, which might explain why it kept coming up with the same kind of questions: what am I here for, where am I going, is what I’m doing right or wrong? And, like life, the answers were never straightforward, often depressing. Very often there were none at all.

--Jill Tweedie, ‘Eating Children’