Enteth wrote:Hi everyone,
I've been lurking for a week or so - taking the advice to read some posts before jumping in with my own. This seems the perfect thread to begin with.
I bought 'I Could Be Anything ..' years ago and it has helped me enormously. I'm a Scanner, although I refused to admit that for some years. I've tried out a few different careers in my life but just when they get serious, I get out. I am hoping to overcome this since it has left me feeling very unfulfilled. Not unhappy - I actually enjoy everything I do. However, I showed enormous promise at school but I am still at the same point as I was when I finished, except older and with less energy. I have a much better understanding of myself than I did, but I know it is time to move on. I'd also like a real income, and my husband would love to share the burden of the mortgage and the costs of raising children.
I tend to be very happy with whatever I am doing, until ... I don't know what it is - the enthusiasm drains away, I can feel it happen, within a few hours I know that what I've passionately worked on ,day in day out for the past months, is now done with and I'm able to leave it - no - I'm almost compelled to leave it, I feel an almost physical ache if I force myself to stick with it.
Two of my four children are exactly the same. I've seen it in them from the time they were toddlers and they are now in university and high school. I'm hoping to find techniques to help myself become established before I end my days with no superannuation and no respect from my highly professional extended family, and so I can have the fun that I know is out there for people with a thorough understanding of their field and an authoritative position in society.
I can really relate to most of the things I've seen written here. I'm saving up for 'Refuse To Choose'
I hope you both got your hands on Refuse to Choose. (It's in the library, and it sells for a buck or two on abebooks.com so you shouldn't have to save up for it.)
I could come up with very practical solutions to these problems but 1) I already answered them in Refuse to Choose, and 2) for some reason, today I'm seeing words like this jump out at me: "and no respect from my highly professional extended family," and "a thorough understanding of their field and an authoritative position in society."
I'm beginning to wonder how often a Scanner's problems are due to a simple lack of familiarity with the practical solutions, solvable by excellent books like Refuse to Choose

and how often they're all twisted up in the yearning and sorrow of being different from their own families, and never being seen as valuable in their own right. "Highly professional" extended families with 'an authoritative position in society" can often be totally blind to any other way of living and it's impossible for them to believe anything could be better than what they've chosen.
In Leonardo da Vinci's day, they wouldn't have been admired more than he was - or even as much. The same was true of Plutarch, Goethe and Benjamin Franklin and many more whose names aren't as familiar. In those days, the world respected talent and knowledge - not only the kind you got a universities (which produced, basically, civil servants and priests) but the kind that came from the minds of inventive and creative people.
That time lasted longer than you think, but it passed. Generalists became less valuable, specialists became the ones with "authoritative position in society." And now, the world envies them. They can afford nice clothes and send their kids to good schools. If they're happy, there's nothing you can say to them. All's right in their world. Only the intellectual, philosophical giants among them understand that life isn't that simple. The rest just feel that they got the gold ring and have no reason to question it.
And then again, some of them drink too much, and you might suspect they don't fit in quite as well as they had hoped. If you have relatives like that, even though they might look like the same kind of successful professionals, it might be worth talking to them to see if they ever had other dreams they had to give up, and how they felt about them.
But I sympathize with that aspect of the problem. Unless your family was made up of monsters, you can't help wishing they could see you and admire who you are.