Why I Created careersanity.com

My name is Marc Linn. As Paul Simon said

I had a childhood that was mercifully brief
I grew up in a state of disbelief *

Disbelief is pretty accurate: I remember as a small child suspecting that something was wrong with the world, that the grownups weren’t quite sure what to do or how to do it and they weren’t real happy about that.

As I ventured out into the world, I realized more and more just how correct my evaluation had been. In a part-time bartending position as a student, a manager dragged his feet for months before giving me a promised raise – long after I had taken on the new position and responsibilities. The amounts “saved” by his pettiness had to be trivial to the large company that ran the operation, but they were pretty significant to a struggling student.

In my first “real” job as a young graduate, a Vice President of Sales (at a fairly large corporation) had the habit of flinging his coffee cup – full at the time – across his office when something displeased him. I learned this from his secretary, who wound up cleaning up after him (and was nearly injured by his outburst on a couple of occasions).

Moving on: I enjoyed some aspects of working as a sales engineer, although the never-ending nuttiness of the company I worked for tended to drive customers away as fast as I could find them. I went to work for a competitor; they were even worse. To save money, this multi-million dollar company insisted on putting out proposals using an ancient typewriter (remember those?); they looked awful. I wound up buying my own machine and creating my own proposals. I’m not making this up!

Get frustrated locally, get shafted globally: meanwhile, the U.S. manufacturing base was slowly but surely beginning its emigration to other countries with lower operating costs. Demand for sales engineers diminishes.

Tiring of the corporate world, I became a freelance computer specialist. Things were fine with one client until the owner went to jail for felony grand larceny after bilking the IRS on behalf of her clients. Another client gave up and closed the doors after one manager was caught embezzling and another one sued for unfair employment practices… and California’s anti-corporate political climate became the last straw.

Is it me?

I began to wonder -– maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m just carrying on the tradition of being frustrated with life that I learned early on? I didn’t think the world really needed one more vaguely unhappy individual all that badly, so I decided to see if I could make some changes, or at least figure out what was going on.

My timing was good: I was living in Los Angeles at the time, right in the middle of the so-called “personal growth” movement. I discovered the works of Nathaniel Branden and decided to give psychotherapy a try.

It turned out that my frustrations with my career were not “just me” after all – although I realized that I had become an unwitting accomplice in my own unhappiness in a number of ways. I became aware of the fundamental disconnect between who and what we are and the kinds of societies we have created. We have evolved into beings that need to figure out for ourselves how to live, how to support ourselves, how to earn our keep; this requires an environment based on internal regulation, or personal freedom.

Unfortunately, our societies are based on an earlier, much more primitive form of existence in which “might makes right,” “dominate or submit,” and similar clichés made sense – societies based on external regulation, or coercion.

One consequence of this is the observable fact that we just don’t get along very well. But our entire civilization depends on just that – cooperating, specializing, and exchanging the results of our skills with others.

No wonder careers are problematic. We haven’t figured out whether to interact peacefully with each other (to mutual benefit) – or destroy each other.

Background

*Think too Much, from the album Hearts and Bones, Paul Simon, 1983