Before deciding what—or whom—to do with your time on earth, you ought to see statistics that relate lifetime happiness to job choice. While career counselors work tirelessly to place you in graduate schools, consulting firms and corporations, they are less disposed to reveal data that reflects levels of insanity among the different professions.
Considering that you will be working in that field for many years, it pays to be informed about its psychological consequences. And with the looming implosion of Social Security, having a satisfying career until death do you part becomes a necessity. Unless you fancy standing on run-down street corners with poor grandmothers in stilettos and short-skirts, make plans to hold down a job for the long haul. And if you want to maximize your chances for happiness, one career offers the best shot.
In a study of high achievers, researcher Anthony Ludwig found definite trends in the risk for mental disease associated with different career paths. “… Poets have the highest rates for any emotional disorder (87 percent), followed in descending order by fiction writers, actors, nonfiction writers, artists, musical composers and musical performers (68 to 77 percent). Explorers, military officers, politicians and natural scientists have the lowest rates (27 to 35 percent). Overall, 72 percent of artistic types, 49 percent of social types, 41 percent of investigative types and 39 percent of enterprising types suffer from some form of mental illness over the course of their lives.”
Relating these findings to the career choices of Duke undergraduates yields encouraging mental health conclusions, since it seems that a majority of students nurture aspirations in the “enterprising” and “investigative” fields, including business, medicine and law. Yet we still have our thespians—though we cannot tell whether they gravitate to the “artsy” professions because of a predisposition to insanity or if prolonged exposure to the field makes them that way. But even if you are not a budding poet, there remains a 32 percent chance that you will develop a mental illness someday. And this bitter statistic holds for every profession—except one.
Within this astounding group, Ludwig recorded no cases of anxiety, depression, melancholia, mania, schizophrenia like psychosis, pathological anxiety, somatic dysfunction or stress reactions. Twenty seven percent abuse alcohol, but at Duke one suspects that a similar percentage of pregnant students have a drinking problem, to say nothing of the others.
Indeed, explorers enjoy superb mental health relative to members of other fields. Since sanity largely depends on living in accord with human nature, it is reasonable to suggest that they behave in ways more compatible with our evolutionary heritage. And, in fact, this seems to be the case.
Primitive hominids blessed with a taste for novelty, discovery and adventure gained an advantage in prehistory by finding superior environments, technologies and buxom virgins. Consequently, this legacy endures in us today. If we ignore it, we do so at our own peril, doomed to become like caged animals, neurotic and pacing our cubicles.
But considering the absence of expeditions recruiting on campus, you must satisfy your primordial need for discovery and new knowledge in other ways. And while it may not be possible to find new continents, the frontiers of possibility remain wide open in other fields.
The explosion of wisdom in the wake of the Enlightenment has enlarged our understanding of the world enormously, but what we know doesn’t begin to compare to what we don’t. Perhaps you will win a Nobel Prize for explaining the adaptive significance of the female orgasm, or for refuting Darwin. And the merry list rolls on forever.
Yet however it goes, those of you who will be happiest will be the intellectual pioneers, students—in the words of James B. Duke—of “outstanding character, ability and vision” willing to pursue careers that “most help to develop our resources, increase our wisdom, and promote human happiness.”
In the end, we live on this bizarre planet together, and will sink or swim as a single breeding unit.
Matt Gillum is a Trinity senior.
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