The future

I’ve been having a few of the toughest weeks in my life.

It’s so ironic with people – they just can’t be happy. I finally move house, get settled with Nir, have a good time at work, and then I make a mess of it all, just for the sake of "personal growth" and some distant unknown future. I got a new job offer, which would mean i have to leave my current job, which I enjoy very much, for a job that I might enjoy as well, but also has more future prospects. If I leave, i’ll be hurting my wonderful boss who invested a lot of time and evnergy in me. And I may find myself with a much less nice boss – a scary prospect. If I stay, I will have the potential to develop in my feild, but I’d have to give up a good opportunity to make a step into a different feild, which might be better for me in the long run.

My current job is a mixture of an editor and a reporter in a newspaper. As time passes, I can tell i’m a pretty bad editor but surprisingly – not a bad reporter at all. Actually, my boss, who wants to convince me to stay, said that I have just begun developing and with enough work and help from the paper, I can become one of the top reporters in the paper.

I’m amazed by what he says. If you told me this even a few moths ago I would say your were kidding. But i have done some good work lately – my boss created some very important opportunities for me. He said that it doesn’t matter that I don’t really have to talent to get exclusive news and "scoops". He is more interested in how I write and the way i analyze the information. This is news for me. I never thought I had a real future in journalism. I thought I was only semi-good at it, enough to survive. But of course, instead of making me happy, what he said made me miserable, because I might have to nip this budding career, since i’m scared of getting stuck.

Here is what’s still bugging me. As a reporter, even of magazine pieces, I have no real deapth, no real profession. I know just a little bit about many things. This means that in the future, if I want to leave this vocation, I have to begin at entry level positions  in other professions (if they’ll let me at all). Basically, it means if I give up a current opportunity (i’ll talk about that side soon), it will be pretty much like making a decision to stay in the journalism profession for the rest of my life – or to have a really hard time changing careers later. I tried to see where writing about science (which will be my awsome job if I stay) can bring me in the future – it can’t, really. Maybe i can be the spokesperson for a university, but that’s pretty much it. And not a job I want.

Why not stay in journalism my whole life? Well, there are about 5 major papers in Hebrew. If i want a change of atmosphere, I will have to go to a direct competitor. The whole idea of the written newspaper seems to be dying down, and it’s a profession that binds me into one language – i can’t move out of israel with it, if something happens to Israel. Also, it’s basically the same kind of work every day. It can be in different subjects, but it’s always the same procedure – interview, write, edit. For two years? – amazing.  40 years? – less amazing. I look around and see women who have been in the feild for 30 years – they either have this drive for news that keeps them always on their toes – which i’m not sure I have, or they have become dried-up shadows of their former selves. They are very intelligent but etremely bored. Unless they move over to editing – which I already saw I can’t do.

If you had told me a few months ago that I would have to opportunity to be a journalist and I would throw it away…. i would say you were out of your minds. I can’t even believe I’m here. But part of it is that I think i’m not really journalism material – i won’t be able to do the job well for decades.

The other job is strategic planning in an advertising agency. This is the guy who reads the consumer research, the trend magazines and the focus group notes and says "men of the age of 50-60 don’t want blondes draped on their cars – they want a feeling of unification with nature". or "teenagers want to feel special in their group without being scared to be excluded from it". It’s pure psychology and sociology – very interesting. The work is almost scientific: you research, you decide on a direction, the creative team makes the campaign, which is basicaly a test of your hypothesis. If the product sells well, you might see it as a certain peice of eveidence in favour of your theories on humanity.  There is a lot of teamwork involved, a lot of thinking together, a lot of "eureka" moments. This is the good part.

Thae bad parts are. well first of all – giving up my opportunity in journalism and hurting my boss who rally cared for me during the past few months. Secondly – it’s a very political environment, in which i am going to be just a tiny little planner. If the client (the company with the product), or the creative department, or your boss, or the CEO’s secretary have a different idea than yours, you might have to fight for your idea, you might have to fight every day. And i’m not a fighter. Spaghetti is an account manager at an ad agency – she says she just "ignores" her planner because she doesn’t like her, doesn’t respect her. Help! what if they just decide to ignore me? would I be able to make myself heard without being annoying? And what if the creative department makes a campaign that’s not really based on what the research says, but they think it’s "cool"? will ibe able to tell them it’s not cool without them getting angry or without hurting their feeling and making them hate me? I have so much more independence at my current job. I offer a subject – if my boss says "not interesting’ i drop it. i f he says "interesting" I just do the article. And it looks just the way i want. I’m not a control freak, i really don’t care if the campaign is based on my idea or someone elses, but that’s exactly what i’m afraid of – that i won’t care enough and i won’t be strong enough, and even if I have good ideas (which is not a given), they will all be buried and, effectively, i will be a crappy planner and won’t survive in this market.

And what if I get tired of planning? Won’t i be stuck as well? Well, i’ve been told i won’t that there are jobs like "manager of strategic development" in a company, where the manager doesn’t really manage anyone (thank god), but does strategic planning for the company, a bigger and more significant job, with a significant income as well.

At the moment this is where things stand – I said yes to the planning company. then I cried. I cried and cried and cried. I haven’t stopped crying. And then I went to tell my boss that i’m leaving. He tried to get me to stay. He said I needed a place where I could raise my children – the paper is very child-freindly, with many mothers working from home or bringing their children to the office. But that kind of thing

– it was the wrong thing to say. I was raised to think that this kind of thinking was anti-feminist, though it isn’t really. But I knew what my mom would say about that! She really made a face when she heard what he’d said… and i’ve got a lot of my parent’s way of thinking in me. Then he mentioned to someone we both know, that he fealt like I had "stabbed him in the back". He would never say that to me, but i can see why he feals this way. So I cried some more.

And then the CEO of the magazine called me and said he’d be really sad to see me leave and tht he thinks i’m making a mistake – cutting my development in the middle of the process, only to begin from zero again. Pea, my friend from the paper, tried to scare me that ad agencies are nests of wasps, that i won’t survive there, and that if i stayed at the paper, the future would take care of itself.

I’ve spent the last week thinking only about this. Talking to people in every feild, debating different futures. I know these are both good opportunities, but only once in a while can i really feel that. Most of the time I focus on what i’m going to loose. I focus on the bad feelings and the risks… The past few days i haven’t been sleeping. I feel as bad as when being dumped by a boy! really. I know it’s stupid, people are so dumb they can’t be happy. At least I have a serious problem with it… In any case, when all this is over, I am going to take a long vacation….