A lawyer, an engineer and a surgeon had to create a dessert that would win them a reprieve from elimination on the 25 May episode of Master Chef Australia. As someone who was made at 16 to choose between studying to be a lawyer or an engineer by my parents, I found it reaffirming to watch how deeply they wanted to begin a career in cooking via the unlikely vehicle of a reality show.
It's a cliché but being a lawyer, engineer or doctor is among the dream jobs many parents (especially Asian parents like mine) wish for their children. After all, as was often pointed out to me, 'sooner or later we would need the advice and assistance of one or all of them'. Yet, despite the status, earnings and mountains of cash invested in their training, these Master Chef contestants had relinquished this and sacrificed time with loved ones to be part of the show.
Why is there such a disconnect between the jobs we train for and the jobs we want? Is the conflict between the urge to join professions that provide a good living and the urge to follow one's passion when choosing an occupation?
When I wrote a few weeks back that the future of work lies in understanding work as 'pleasure in the exercise of our energies', one reader commented that 'these discussions have little meaning when you are poor or dispossessed' and that 'KPIs were a little inconvenient, but having no food on the table is also an indicator that does not need to be measured'.
Yes, gnawing hunger, unpaid bills and the want of a roof over one's head would push 'the joy of work' off one's list of priorities. My call then was for us to resist the debilitation of KPIs and tortures of Taylorism to plumb instead for 'the joy of work'.
As the Master Chef contestants showed, spending your life doing what you are competent at pales into insignificance when set against the prospect of a life engrossed in one's passions. And that is a decision that every worker, elite profession or not, paid or otherwise, has it within their power to make.
Still, why should this be a concern of the unemployed?
Ann Allison writes in Precarious Japan of a 21st Century Japanese society where swathes of people are 'everyday refugees', so called because they are 'stranded inside their own country without access to a secure