A lack of mythological awareness is the biggest mistake you can make in your career and family journey

 A lot of Human Resource managers are familiar with the Myers-Briggs typological “Personality Profile” which explains how certain psychological profiles coincide with employment roles. For instance, an introvert (I), a person who is energized by spending time contemplating their own thoughts and experiences, or pursuing their own intrinsically satisfying pursuits, such as fishing, piano, calligraphy, graphic arts, etc. will be better matched with a career based on that same psychological architecture. On the other hand, an extrovert (E) who is energized by spending time at parties, social clubs, or high stimulation environments such as large sports stadiums, buzzing nightclubs, will resonate more closely with employment opportunities such as sales, teaching, performance as a musician, or business management. However, since American culture has become both post-literate: see Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion but also secular: see David Sehat’s This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism, Americans have lost one source: myths, which would contribute much to illuminating one’s career path, which is an ambiguous process for the majority of people. For instance, Forbes, The Economist, Pew Research, and Gallup data all suggest Americans overall exhibit a high level of job dissatisfaction.

As a direct consequence of my own lived experience, I posit the explanation that when an individual is simultaneously unaware of their own emotional, psychological, spiritual, intellectual, and mythological architecture, which is an awareness that is challenging to develop, and requires a lot of effort, they will experience unnecessary suffering, as it relates to the development of their livelihood, and career construction.

As a Gifted individual—I read within the 99th Lexile percentile when I was 9 years old—and as an neurodivergent individual with ADHD and Auditory Processing Disorder, I am activated by certain types of work such as independent academic projects, and I am paralyzed by other obligations such as navigating linear systems such as poorly designed and unintuitive unemployment portals, and filling out forms according to Byzantine bureaucratic regulations. The Harvard Center for Education Policy Research reports that American students are performing at a dramatically weaker level than in the past, and that coincides with my own lived experience. When I taught 8th Grade World History, 9th Grade World History, 11th Grade U.S. History, and 12th grade U.S. Government & Economics, the majority of my students in South Florida, both enrolled within the Archdiocese of Miami as well as corporate run charter schools, obtained significantly lower reading levels than their grade level would suggest. I was dismayed to realize that among poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, and extremely affluent students, regular reading for pleasure occurred only among a minority of students. For 5 years I couldn’t articulate why I experienced such a high level of job dissatisfaction as a Social Studies Instructor. Thankfully, my therapist was able to identify the disconnect: the chasm between my personal ceiling, and my student’s floors, was too great. In my last role, the majority of my 9th grade students read at a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grade reading level. In a class of 25 students, only 5 would volunteer to read aloud, and of those 5, only 2-3 could perform the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: identify the who, what, where, when, and how involved within a particular paragraph. Thankfully, I was able to transition to EdTech, an industry that sits between the disciplines of Education and Technology. I am able to develop testing questions for 5th, 7th, and 11th graders in a state that I cannot name due to a non-disclosure agreement however, my employer wants me to evangelize about the positive aspects of their workplace, such as the fact that I am permitted to develop questions about marginalized populations, LGBTQ+, discrimination against African Americans from chattel slavery, to Jim Crow, segregation, and red-lining. The only thing off the table is questions about controversies in the Middle East, which I am at peace with because we don’t want students leaving a testing room in a huff because a question raised their blood pressure.

However, the development of the ability to listen to my own instinct, primarily through the practice of Jungian dream analysis was the primary catalyst in facilitating my transition from work that felt like a “prison sentence” to work that feels genuinely sustainable and fulfilling. It is essential that individuals engage in Carl Jung’s process of individuation, as that is the only mechanism through which they can ascend to the top of Maslow’s pyramid, that is, self-actualization.

Authors like Dr. Jordan Peterson maintain that “human beings think in terms of stories”. One phenomenon I noticed in my experience as a High School Social Studies Teacher is that students with religious backgrounds tended to possess the socialization, or “home-training” to demonstrate greater effectiveness within the learning process. Anecdotally, that applied to a diverse set of spiritual traditions: LatinX students who attended Catholic mass regularly, Caucasian students who participated in evangelical, Protestant, and Baptist communities, and Southeast Asian students involved in a Hindu upbringing. One parallel was that students from Asian households who had not grown up religious demonstrated a high level of respect, conscientiousness, and dedication to their studies, ostensibly because Confucianism, a philosophy in which individuals must demonstrate respect to their elders, and those higher within the social hierarchy developed during the 5th and 6th centuries is integrated into their consciousness.