the unbearable lightness of being

The job search continues, with few tangible results. I've been to a couple of interviews, have one looming in the near future, and have several things floating out there in the ether. I am casting a wide and somewhat unfocused net; there are approximately three to five paths that I am considering, each fairly radically different from the other, each with its own set of pros and cons. This is a critical juncture for me in many ways; it is perhaps my last opportunity to choose from significantly different alternatives, my last and best chance to consciously will a particular identity. Assuming I am able to find a position with career potential (as opposed to something just to pay the bills), I will be committing to a particular professional trajectory for the foreseeable future. In political science circles we refer to this as path dependency, which is just another way of saying that past practices significantly determine future outcomes. For example, choosing to pursue a masters degree in political science constrained the realm of feasible choices from which I am now able to select; opening one door necessarily closes several others, or pulls them to to such a degree that moving through them becomes a practical impossibility. I currently face those three to five doors with the knowledge that stepping through one means perhaps permanently closing the others at the same time that it means I will face a different set of doors in the future, and that is a sobering reality. I feel the weight of this decision more acutely than any other, yet I am also aware that quite a bit of it is determined by things beyond my control: the labor market at this particular historical moment, the need to remain, at least for the time being, in this narrow geographical area, etc. It is, as you might imagine, quite a maddening situation, and I look forward to its resolution. Yet at the same time, I fear it.

"Here, then, awaiting our study, lies man's authentic 'being' - stretching the whole length of his past. Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. Other things might have happened to him or have been done by him, but what did in fact happen to him and was done by him, this constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle of all he possesses. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man's future. If we do not know what he is going to be, we know what he is not going to be. Man lives in view of his past.

Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is - history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man."

- Jose Ortega y Gasset, "Man Has No Nature"