Moral career

What are the moral implications of my career choice? It's a big question, but as I'm typing up my doctoral thesis, (nervously) hoping to be able to sufficiently defend it in a few months' time, and subsequently dive head-first into whatever and wherever my chosen career path leads me, the question needs to be asked. It needs to be asked because for better or worse, part of how I define myself is in my work. I don't work for the weekend, I work on the weekend, and for the most part I love it. It's fulfilling, challenging, and gives me the scope and opportunity to read, write, and study aspects of life that I would be reading, writing, and thinking about if I hadn't had the good fortune of actually being able to make a living doing what I do. From a personal - read: selfish - perspective, I'm very happy and I feel like I can make a contribution to my field, however incrementally small it might be, that will hopefully help in progressing the knowledge base forward. But that all feels terribly insular. And that's the crux of my concern regarding the moral aspects of my career: in the grand scheme of things, how useful is what I do?

Admittedly, there are worse things. I'm not on Wall Street buying hedge funds for sub-prime mortgages. I'm not trying to get elected on promises I know I won't keep. I'm not sending kids off to a dubiously-motivated war. Certain things are bad, and the jobs associated with that list are bad (I'm clearly not a moral relativist). I also realise that not everyone has to, needs to, or will, make massive transformational Obama-esque changes. And I'm not looking to do that. Small effects by many people makes big effects overall, and we can all make that small contribution. But I don't really know whether the insular path of my career will make a sufficient contribution to aspects of life that really matter and that could slot into one of those small contributions.

It pains me to core, to the point of tears, that there are people in this world that die because of the circumstances in which they were born. I've worked hard to achieve what I have, but much of that was facilitated by the circumstances I've found myself in by the luck of draw. The unfair reality of the coin toss of being born in a middle class Canadian suburb or a poverty and disaster-striken farm in Haiti literally haunts me. What right do I have to sit and ponder the hair-splitting theories of human behaviour while people are literally dying? I could easily slot into the academic machine, and continue to live the insular lifestyle I've grown comfortably accustomed to over the past few years. I could convince myself that I'm contributing to the advancement of human knowledge and that I should take advantage of the opportunities that I have in order to do that. I could convince myself that my brand of applied psychology is designed to make a difference in people's actual lives. Indeed, that's what got me into health psych in the first place. But SO much of my time is NOT spent making a difference in anyone's life expect mine. And I can't justify that.

I'm painting a bleak picture, but I do so with a purpose. In this final stage of my doctorate, embarking on my career, having a PhD, I'm recognising that I have a moral responsibility to emerge from the bubble of my academic existence. There are moral implications to my career choice, and I owe it to myself to figure out how to maximise the time I spend applying the skills I've had the good fortune to develop in order to contribute to making the world a place where more people can be given the opportunity to discover their passion and to flourish in its pursuit. I don't know how to do that. But I must.