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March 25, 2006
Hmm
Out of idle paranoia and curiosity today, I wandered over to Patty Wilson's site CareerCompany.com. I'm not actively looking for a different job, just wondering as a shareholder whether I'd throw myself out on the street if it were my decision. My shareholding is more than partly tied up with continuing there at my job, so if I were to throw myself out, I'd be diminishing my shareholder position, too. Thus I'm not totally objective. (Philip K. Dick described the mindset well in A Scanner Darkly.)
Anyway, Patty lets you take a FREE! 7 Step Career Scorecard test, which I failed dismally. As you start taking the test, you get worried about two things. First you're basically hopeless at selling your labor, woefully far behind where you need to be. Help with this is what Patty's selling, however, so that'll be all right as long as you can pay. Second, you get worried that you won't be able to overcome the cynicism you developed on the job, that in whatever interviews you do it will shine through to the interviewer that you want to do the job not because your deepest values naturally align with the content of the company mission statement, but because you need the money. If you're lucky -- as I have been for my current job -- you get to pick work that you find inherently interesting, which helps to keep your mind off the grovelling obsequiousness.
If the economic powers that be no longer can profit from my current work, then I hope what comes next won't be any worse.
Patty's site linked me off to a Myers Briggs test, too. (That was her other FREE! test.) The first time I took one of these, I came up INFJ (introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging), with extreme I and N.
This time about half the statements seemed almost impossible to answer with Yes or No. It was rough. I think I lied on a few of them, because I was in disagreement with myself. (More and more, I am in violent internal disagreement with myself.) I came up a fairly extreme introvert, but the rest was different. I'm still intuitive, but it's weakening. I'm still oblivious to the outside world. Only with great difficulty can I see beyond my own interpretations. But I don't trust my interpretations or feel I can rely on them either. They're mostly illogical garbage and inner gibberish. One of the strange superpositions that now happens from time to time is seeing us as primates in human-like situations. This sometimes occurs when I find myself in a group and my mind wanders off topic. We're all in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.
Next time I hear someone use the words alignment or leverage metaphorically, perhaps I should start acting out the part, but in the other direction, grooming the person next to me. It would no doubt fall flat. Nobody earnestly using the words alignment or leverage metaphorically will have read Kafka.
The ex-feeling-judging me came out thinking-perceiving. Thinking came out moderately strong, stronger than intuition. Perceiving only weakly edged out judging, as though I couldn't make up my mind. Maybe Jung, like Freud, was simply good at elaborating verisimilar theories. (INTP: 78%, 25%, 50%, 22%)
Myers's book Gifts Differing would, according to today's outcome, let me go back to school this time to do research. There's still a residue of INFJ in me, which is the idealist. Idealism and pessimism make a bad combination. You'd think they'd weed themselves out by suicide, because the universe is unending failure and impending doom. Didn't Martin Luther's nasty patches touched off when his doubts got the upper hand on his faith?
Posted by Mark at March 25, 2006 03:58 PM
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