List three jobs you’d consider pursuing if money didn’t matter.
Three isn’t enough if I were to answer truthfully.
Whenever money has been the objective it’s gone wrong quickly. I wasn’t attracted into stockbroking, but did go into advertising; I would have preferred theatre, or art, or any combination of the two — which might have meant musical theatre, film, tv, opera, or events.
And when I worked in these I was paid, adequately and sometimes well, but never consistently.
I don’t think being free to do whatever you want is a good thing. Artists need patrons, writers need people who buy their books, musicians fans who pay to attend a show, actors a paying audience. Don’t they? Surely by definition a job is paid? Otherwise it’s either slavery or a hobby. A chore or an enthusiasm.
It isn’t for want of money or lack of money that I do or do not write. Buying a new laptop isn’t going to produce a finished novel any faster than my current set-up.
If I had the budget, I’d find the side of a wall and paint a huge mural. I might fill a wood with sculptures. But these aren’t jobs, they’re projects.
So how about three jobs I’d do if qualifications didn’t matter? No want of money will make me a neurosurgeon, or a fighter pilot, or a ballet dancer.
So my conclusion has to be: there are no jobs I’d do where income or money defines them.
Or is the question really: what jobs would I consider doing for free? Like royalty. Or charity work.
Primary school teacher, perhaps. Kids are amazing at that age. Directing or producing children’s drama, for the same reasons. Town planner, creating spaces where young families can thrive.
And yet — today I’d like to be a news journalist, commenting on global politics, picking through the latest headlines with my own slant. Tomorrow I might want to be a marine biologist, out on a research vessel tagging whales. Or a glaciologist, watching the ice move and melt in Greenland.
I’d love to take a full-time MA in art and just paint. Probably paint, though working up my relief printing skills with chine collée would be rewarding too. Then again, Cordon Bleu cookery tempts me. Garden design, architecture — the list goes on.
I can see myself as a novelist, at last finishing and publishing those long laboured stories. Or a puppeteer, staging The Watersprites at the Pells Pool. Or a conservationist, still measuring trees and tracing their histories across maps. Or a swim coach at the very top of the game, guiding athletes to national squads.
Equally, I could be a curator of memory, piecing together my diaries, family histories, wartime fictions, and letting them flow into books, exhibitions, or films. I could be a documentary maker again. A producer. An editor. A gardener. A muralist.
The truth is, my enthusiasms are endless: neuroscience, gardening, cooking, the environment, Renaissance art, particular authors, music of all genres.
The list keeps growing, because my curiosity keeps growing. So the answer can never really be three jobs. It’s a whole kaleidoscope of possible selves, and each day, one or another of them flickers into focus.
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