Sometimes I feel great guilt for not being more productive at work. I check off lots of small tasks and meet deadlines—often just barely, but I spend a lot of time spinning my wheels and thinking. Thinking counts, too, I suppose. Or at least it should.

Garrison Keillor wrote a piece for Salon a few months back that seemed a little barbed. He wrote about how young people have an inflated sense of entitlement at work and want “creative, flexible jobs.” He wrote that all of them want to be writers, and he seemed to be disparaging that idea.

I know the entitlement part was the core of what he was getting at, because he’s a champion of the liberal arts and English majors specifically, but the words still stung. He wrote about how hard our fathers and grandfathers worked (and our mothers without pay at home) in uncreative, inflexible jobs so that we wouldn’t have to. And he pointed out that many of them enjoyed their work.

But somewhere, something shifted, and many of us wanted something different, something more. The idea of going off to a job where workers check in and leave their creative brains at home is such a recent development, but we think already that it’s the way things have always been.

None of my grandparents lived that way, and neither did their parents before them.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was an important film because it was on the cutting edge of a new trend, and that wasn’t so long ago.

Transparent is the word that keeps coming back to me. Our ancestors’ lives, until just the last 75 years or so, were transparent. They grew food and ate it or sold it. They traded skills in things they liked and knew how to do well for the few things they couldn’t produce themselves. Some people had enough money to pay others to do their work, but not so much the ones I’m descended from.

Maybe—and I hope so for their sakes—they didn’t have this panicky feeling that they were giving away years of their most productive time to things that just didn’t matter and weren’t real somehow. I hope they knew that their work did something that counted--that mattered.

I, on the other hand, am a cog in a machine I don’t believe in or support. I am surprised at myself that I’ve now spent 20 years working almost exclusively for schools when I’ve had so many objections to them all along. I want to get my kids out and as far away from schools as I can. I don’t trust other people to look out for them and expose them to good ideas anymore. And it isn’t just a local problem. I’m not keen on where schools are going anywhere else, either. So what do I do?

I teach freshman composition part-time at a college, and I really like the work. To get a fulltime gig in higher ed, I'd need an MFA or a Ph.D. in English. (I have a master's in English in professional writing, but not enough formal literature credit to pass muster for most college English jobs.)

I look at Ph.D. programs and worry that I’m nowhere near smart enough to pursue that route. And I don’t know how I’d ever pay off more student loans when college teaching starts out paying so much less than K-12 jobs.

Then I see what passes for thinking in classrooms and think I must be smart enough.

I have Big Ideas about all that I see that needs to be changed, but I don’t know solutions that don’t require scrapping everything and starting over.

How do I create a life that feels real, authentic, and significant?

How do I use what comes easily to me and what I enjoy doing to pay a mortgage and the debts incurred from years of soul-sucking jobs that didn't pay enough to keep us afloat anyway?