Our Profession And The Status Of Our Profession

Meet Bob and Charles. They're neighbours.

Bob and Charles both have cars, yet both of them look after their cars differently. Bob makes sure that he always gives his car a good clean after each week of using it - it's sparkly and spotless to everyone else. But because he spends his free time cleaning it and making sure it looks good to others, he rarely finds the time to give it a service that will extend the duration of its life and increase its performance.

Charles doesn't bother looking after the cosmetics - his car looks a bit dirty and unremarkable - however he does look after the internals of the car. He's always changing the oil, the filters and making sure everything is ticking over nicely.

I'm trying to write a book at the moment. When I decided I wanted to commit to writing a book, I decided it would be safe to tell everyone. Maybe they were interested in critiquing any work that I had written. But what happened at that moment is I became Bob. I had put out a goal - a flashy external status: "I'm an aspiring writer" - without doing any of the leg work to work towards accomplishing that goal.

Life's a bit like that. There's a lot of stuff that people are working on under the bonnet. And most of us want to look like we're busy people all working at achieving something with our lives. Perhaps the most productive people are those that don't worry about publicizing or validating their status, they're just interested in the actual production associated with that status.

It makes me think: what else are my friends doing in their free time that never gets studied? There is so much unaccounted time with all my friends and they could be doing all manner of amazing things.

It also makes me assess my own reasons for wanting to be a writer. Do I want to write just with the shallow intention of saying, "I'm a writer!"? Or do I truly want to transport people to a whole new world, have them connect in a deep, personal way to the characters that I've managed to materialise from my ideas and hopefully give some sort of message along the way? Maybe I'm just shallow but later I've attached more meaningful reasons to try to rationalise what drives me... kind of like this Dilbert strip:

Maybe all I want to do is to write these kind of blog posts, but I realise that not many people are going to read them in this form. I need to create a packaging for them that entices people to read what I've written. If I write about them in a way that uses characters to tell the narrative of my messages: it's in a more mainstream, accessible product.

Or maybe not. I don't know. The question continues...