Friday, January 25, 2013

Does career make a life?

There's a story in the Daily Mail today about Nene King, a woman who once wielded much power in the Australian magazine industry.

It turns out that a friend managed to steal $223,000 from Nene King. How was this possible? Because Nene King was habitually high on cannabis and prozac and so didn't notice what was happening (according to her wikipedia entry she has also been addicted to prescription medication and has admitted using alcohol to "bury her problems").

The drug addiction struck me, because the last few women I've written about have all been powerful in the media industry and have all been addicts: the American feminist Elizabeth Wurtzel to heroin, the English feminist Julie Burchill to cocaine, another English feminist Suzanne Moore to heroin (I presume to heroin as she is described as a junkie), and now Nene King.

These women are living the highest dream offered to young women today, i.e. to be powerful working in a glamorous and creative field, and yet they have all needed drugs to get  by. Isn't one possible conclusion to draw from this that career, by itself, is rarely enough to anchor our lives.

Nene King had husbands (three of them), but had no children:
Nene King, at her height considered by many the most powerful woman in Australian publishing, confessed to being ‘ruthless … would not allow anything to come between me and the magazines’.

‘Power is an extraordinary thing,’ she confessed in Peter Fitzsimon’s biography Nene. ‘I didn’t want to be famous but I did want to be powerful.’

…Drug addiction and depression were part of a life that was too demanding.

‘Do I have any regrets? Of course. No children. Now, I can’t believe I went through with the abortions. I wish it was a different time. I would not have had an abortion. I hate abortions. I hate them with a passion. But I guess at the time that is what I had to do.’
 
A career, by itself, does not make a life. And yet that's sometimes the assumption when liberals talk about people "making it" or being "self-made" or having equal opportunity to make something of themselves. For instance, President Obama in his victory speech last year said:
I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn't matter whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight. You can make it here in America if you're willing to try.
 
 And from the same speech this:
We believe in a generous America...open to the dreams of ...the furniture worker's child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president.
 
The prize of life is assumed to be a professional career. And, in Obama's view, the "promise" of America's founding is to deliver such a prize to anyone who works hard, regardless of who they are or where they come from.

But what if you're the furniture worker rather than the scientist or diplomat? Does that mean you haven't made a life? How many people really get to work in a creative, high status, glamorous field of work?

And is it enough, say, to be a dentist? That's a well-paid and high status field in which you get to help people. But you're spending a lot of the day sitting in a chair drilling into the teeth of strangers. So does that qualify as a realisation of life and self in a liberal universe?

And it seems that even if you get to the very top of the liberal pile, and you "make it" in a well-paid, creative, powerful, glamorous field, that you can still be so unfulfilled that you turn to a lifetime of drug addiction to get by.

This is not to say that careers can't or don't provide certain kinds of satisfaction or fulfilment. But I reject the liberal assumption that they are sufficient to make a life.

11 comments:

  1. You're almost not a real feminist until you've crashed and burned and regretted your childless life. Even the great godmother of them all, Germaine Greer decided after looking after a friend's child that she regretted ignoring the most basic innate inclination of womanhood. Funny that they are always in favour of biological urges when it comes to copulation, but not so much for procreation.

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  2. You got it wrong Mark...

    Being a high-flier doesn't turn one into an addict.

    One must be an Addict to be a high flier.

    Rachel Zoe (jewish) is a drug dealer, she's the one who got Lindsay Lohan on drugs.

    The media is controlled by Jews, and they only allow gentiles who will give the money back to rise to positions of prominence. They get the money back by a) drugs in Charlie Sheens case or b) marriage.

    So if these woman was aggressive and really on the ball, she never would have been allowed to reach a position of prominence.

    Just because a person is in a position of power doesn't mean they are intelligent....it's the opposite...to be in a position of power you must be a front for the person whose really working behind the scenes.

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  3. Anon,

    In this case you've got it the wrong way round.

    The big media boss who employed Nene King was Kerry Packer, who was from an establishment Anglo family. Nene King herself is Jewish. They got on well because Nene King transformed Packer's women's magazines into celebrity rags and made him a bucketload of money.

    So it's a gentile boss making money off a Jewish employee. That employee rose to prominence because she gave everything to her career and because she was good at turning a profit for the company

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  4. So Nene King was Kerry Packer's drug dealer

    :) hehehe

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/foi/even-fbi-doubted-goanna-story-about-kerry-packer/story-fn8r0e18-1226457781644

    Either way, now you've gotten me onto something here...this is all very interesting :)

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  5. Jimmy Goldsmith together with Kerry Packer (Australia's richest man) and Jacob Rothschild made a bid for Anglo American Tobacco

    Interesting. Fun to see whose friends with who.

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  6. Anonymous 4.32 trollish and silly.

    Mark and Packer made a lot of money from part-jewish Ita.

    Shame that the high intelligence and creativity is used to peddle trash to our youth.

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  7. How many people really get to work in a creative, high status, glamorous field of work?

    Less than 5% of the population.

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  8. And is it enough, say, to be a dentist? That's a well-paid and high status field in which you get to help people. But you're spending a lot of the day sitting in a chair drilling into the teeth of strangers. So does that qualify as a realisation of life and self in a liberal universe?

    Interestingly enough, I was reflecting the other day that dentistry seems to be an increasingly female-dominated field. Not sure why that is - maybe it is local to where I am in the USA - but at the offices of my dentist and my kid's dentist, literally everyone in the office (dentists, hygienists, staff) is female. This fact may well indicate that the prestige of the field is declining.

    As for their self-fulfillment, I have not yet had occasion to ask them about it. =)

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  9. The way I see my future career is a means to provide for my family and to a way for me to spend time with them.

    Career isn't everything, God is, and these liberals will never understand why a poor Christian family making 40k-ish a year paying 2 mortgages(fiancee's parents are helping her grandma pay her mortgage) are happier than a drug addicted doctor that has sex with different women/men a night.

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  10. The voice of hip, with-it feminism says: "happier? you must be boring or lying. Not sure which is worse."

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  11. How many people really get to work in a creative, high status, glamorous field of work?

    And how many of us that get those jobs don't care about them and eventually decide to go be a homemaker instead? You'd be surprised.

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