Don’t Be The Farmer
How a XVI century painting can help you pick your career path, and how to make the most out of your talent.
Don’t be the farmer. Take the tragedy of the world, and make it yours.
Kristina Tremonti is one of the world’s most famous activists in the field of corruption. She showed up as a special guest during my political science class and told us a story I could not keep to myself.
During her last class as a Yale student, the professor showed her the painting above. It’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by dutch painter Pieter Bruegel.
If you look at the bottom right corner, you’ll see Icarus drowning, after falling from the sky, as the myth as it, because he had gotten too close to the sun.
But Icarus is not the protagonist of this painting. The landscape is stunning, and the atmosphere is serene. Nobody is caring about him. The ship goes on with its business; and the farmer minds his own field. He’s ignoring Icarus altogether.
Kristina’s Yale professor’s interpretation of the painting would change her life:
Don’t be the farmer. Take the tragedy of the world, and make it yours.
Shortly after, Kristina took up an internship job at Loreal, in NYC. She spent her days designing marketing campaigns to make people buy more shampoo. She was earning good, and lived in the city of her dreams.
But one day, while queueing at Starbucks, she saw a very particular New York Times first page. The headline said that riots were devastating Greece, her home country.
She remembered of that painting. And she felt like she was being that farmer. Was her job at Loreal actually making any impact? Was she being useful in some way?
She went back to Greece, founded the website I Paid a Bribe and became a first line fighter against corruption.
Ask yourself. Are you being the farmer? Are you just minding your own business, while the world is drowning? What’s your part, in the play of humanity?
I am 20 years old. it’s a time where you have to make choices that will impact your life forever, on a daily basis. What to study, where to live, what to do with your only life. It all comes down to choices.
You can choose to be the farmer, and devote your career only to making some good bucks. And that’s okay. You know, I’m not making ethical judgments here. But research shows — and you’ll see in a moment — that NOT being the farmer makes you happier.
80.000 hours
80.000 hours is roughly the amount of time you will spend working throughout your career. I found this out on the 80.000 hours website
On the same website, they stress that fighting for a bigger cause is the ultimate way to find meaning.
Research shows how investing those 80.000 hours into a meaningful cause can help you make the greatest impact, and there’s where happiness lays: being useful.
That feeling of fulfillment when somebody turns to you to say: “Thank you!”.
That’s where you want to aim.
Imagine having that feeling every time you go to sleep.
Most of the human beings on Earth are just trying to get by. And this is okay, because there’s nothing else they could do. But I’m talking to those that are reading this. You’re most likely highly educated, living in the free western world. And this means you have choices.
You get to choose what to do with those 80.000 hours. Of course you have limits, but within every realm of possibilities we have, for how limited, we still can make the choice to be the farmer or not. We can choose to invest in a career that has an impact on the world. Or we can turn a blind eye and only follow the money. But again, this is not an ethical problem. It’s a matter of how full, how happy and how satisfied you want to be with your life.
I saw the best minds of my generation spending their working hours trying to think how to increase the sales of products we don’t need. Or they are programming phones that then the guys before will have to market.
There’s a brain drain that is stealing cognitive resources from the real problems of the world and giving them to the market.
Icarus is drowning. And you just can’t keep designing shampoo bottles, when Icarus is drowning. Climate change. Inequalities. Injustice. There’s plenty of problems to choose from. Delivering impact through your work on a day to day basis is the only way to fill that gasping void we all have within us.
Don’t be the farmer. Go there and invest those 80.000 hours for the greater good. Do it because you want to make the most out of your talent. Do it because you only have one short life and you want to make it meaningful. Don’t do it because somebody is asking you to do it. Do it for yourself.
Yes. But how?
By choosing.
If you are a student or recent graduate, you can choose to specialize in a field that will allow you to help solving the world’s biggest problems. Environmental sciences; education; policy making; you name it.
But even if you are already started in your career, within every field there are different options. You can be a software engineer for Amazon, or for an NGO that acts on sustainability. Same job description, same tasks, more impact. Less money? Maybe. But you already know they don’t matter.
On the 80.000 hours website, there’s a vacancies section. Here they list impactful jobs. There are hundreds of possibilities, even very well paid. You see, money are not a problem per se. But make impact a priority. Only then you’ll start filling that void we all have within us. Start with why.
