The point of careers

In less than a month I shall be 17. This comes as quite a shock to me, as I am sure I am yet to become a 12 year old but soon I shall be old enough to drive.
As a slightly different way of looking at my current age I worked out that based on the percentage of my life I've got through (based on average life expectancy) if my life was Die Hard I would be about 26 minutes into it, just where Hans is listing facts about Mr.Takagi. This means I've got quite a bit of the film left to go, with all the best bits still to come. And, if Die Hard is anything to go by, there's still a lot of shooting and blowing stuff up left in my life.
And, just as John McClane had to decide how best to rid the Nakatomi Plaza of terrorists, I have to decide what I want to do with my life (I'm not sure how long I'm going to run with the Die Hard metaphor). Specifically at this time I'm looking at the different possible careers I might go into. Instead of boring you with the details of all possible career paths (if you want that you can read the 3 posts I did on the arts, the sciences and philosophy. It should be noted my feelings towards these fields change with time), instead I'm going to look at what the drive behind a career choice should be.
Of course most people already know that they should try and do something they want to do and not something they need to do and that their career choices should be motivated by passion, not money. However, it normally doesn't turn out this way. You might try and rob a large corporation, but in the end you just get shot out of building by some cop (you probably thought I'd stopped that metaphor, didn't you?). What went wrong? Life. When you come out of university and you've got very little money that dream of being an artist seems like something you'll just wait for a few months to do while you get enough money together by doing some more steady work. Then one day you realise it's 20 years later and your easel is gathering dust in the garage.
The thing is, people spend so long making sure that they stay alive that they often forget to live. Perhaps living with the jungle people in South America isn't a practical idea for you (it might be, depending on how many jungle people you know) but if you can get a job that you're passionate about then you can at least know that when it comes to the end you'll be able to look back and think that you did it your way.

Or not, you know. I'm not really in a position to judge as I'll probably end up being like that artist with the dusty canvas. But hey, at least when I'm older I'll be able to look back on my blog and think "What an idealist moron, such a cliché teenager." in the brief minutes I get to think in my soulless, life-sucking corporate career.
For further musings on this subject listen to Time by Pink Floyd. It gave me a mid-life crisis when I was 12. In fact, listen to all of Dark Side of the Moon.

Anyway, it's less than a week until Christmas and my last post of the year, which might be on Christmas Eve, if I get round to it. Of course I do have to watch the film I watch the every Christmas Eve, the greatest Christmas film ever made. I speak, of course, of Die Hard.