In the West, especially in America, careers are awfully important. Three questions:
Question 1: Why care about a career?
Most people have jobs in order to live well and eat. Can a career be anything more than that? If you are “successful” and wealthy, how much does that really matter? Put it in perspective, having a successful career (for a lot of people) means you can eat better food and drive faster cars. Ah, but you can put your kids through college! Yes, so that they, too, can have a better career and can eat fancier food. To what end? So that your family (of homo sapiens) can have an easier time releasing dopamine in their brains?
Question 2: Why care about a career?
Put it into perspective: by becoming wealthy enough to have lots of disposable income, you have the opportunity to lift people out of poverty and change their lives. You can invest money in cancer research and literally save people’s lives. You can invest your money and lend it to an entrepreneur who can use it to create value for millions of people in the marketplace.
No no, that is not all. What if we humans have a soul? What if you can spend your money to hire missionaries to go out and save peoples souls! Think about it: your earthly possessions might wither away once you die, so what do you need them for? You can instead put those possessions to use and make objective, infinite impact on the most important part of a human: their immortal soul. Eternal bliss in heaven, at the mere cost of choosing to fund missionaries over eating tastier steak! Perhaps a successful career is objectively worthwhile?
Question 3: Why care about a career?
Really, put it into perspective: humans might be the greatest of cosmological accidents. There might be absolutely no point to our accidental existence. Do we care about the careers of ants? Apes? Why are we any different? We might just be big ol’ clumps of molecules bumping into eachother on a random corner of the universe. What pretense it takes to think something so whimsically arbitrary as the career of one homo sapien has any purpose whatsoever. Yes, individual homo sapiens might care about their material well-being, just as a dog does, but who cares? Perhaps at the end of it all, the universe dies thanks to heat death, or planet earth gets destroyed by an asteroid, or the sun blows up and cooks everything living. With that in mind, what could be more pointless than the chosen profession of a group of animals destined to be forgotten, once the earth is destroyed and no one is left to remember us.