A Job Fixation is a determination to secure a particular kind of job that, for one reason or another, turns out not to be a promising or realistic option. It may be that the job is difficult to attain, it may require long years of preparation, or it might be in an industry that has become precarious and therefore denies us good long-term prospects. We call it a fixation – rather than simply an interest – to signal that the focus on the job is problematic because we have an overwhelming sense that our future lies with this one occupation and this occupation alone, while facing a major obstacle in turning our idea into a reality. The solution to such fixations lies in coming to understand more closely what we are really interested in: the more accurately and precisely we fathom what we really care about, the more we stand to discover that our interests exist in a far broader range of occupations than we have until now been entertaining. It is our lack of understanding of what we are really after – and therefore our relatively standard and obvious reading of the job market – that has pushed us into a far narrower tunnel of options than is warranted. The careful investigation of what we love in one field of work shows us – paradoxically but liberatingly – that we could also love working in a slightly different field. We may find that what we really love isn’t this specific job, but a range of qualities we have first located there. This job was the most conspicuous example of a repository of those qualities, which is where the problem started: over-conspicuous jobs tend to attract too much attention, are over-subscribed and offer only very modest salaries. Yet in reality, the qualities can’t only exist in that one job. They are necessarily generic and will be available under other, less obvious guises – once we know how to look.
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