Career When the Constraints of

¶ … Career When the constraints of worrying about a salary and staying within a budget for living expenses are lifted, many peoples' minds turn to their ideal avocation, or passion. People imagine themselves doing their best life's work, whether that be being completely dedicated to humanitarian causes, writing the next great novel, or simply living each day to the fullest with the people they love the most.

If I didn't have those fiscal constraints I would become a travel features writer with one of the internationally known magazines like Conde Naste Traveler, Island Magazine, National Geographic, or any other magazine that has a global focus on their content. I'd travel half the year in remote, exotic areas and spend the other half of the year in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia tracking down and writing interesting stories about the cities in those locations.

I'd also travel to Iraq and write a 30 day diary of a journalist there, and publish it in PDF form so everyone could read first-hand what its like to be there right now. I'd take the passion I have for writing and also write books about the places I visited. Both novels and guide books, and also work to get to know the native people in each country.

I'd work to create a blog that tracked all the paces I'd been and have a laptop with global wireless capability so I could file my stories, post to my blog, and upload pictures for virtually anywhere on the planet.

I think this would be an amazing way to go through life, and it would also be fun to share all these experiences with those interested readers in countries who read English I'd make a very special effort to chronicle the wars in Africa going on right now, and through photographs capture the insanity of having children be soldiers, many of which are taken from their homes at age 12 or 13 to fight in their nations' armies and militias.

I would want to expose the world's most interesting, controversial and painful topics, because in an always on world, a digital image can make it from a laptop in Darfur to the front page of the New York Times literally in hours. I'd do this out of motivation to help the children of Africa who are having the childhoods robbed from them through these incredible acts nations' armies make against their own people. People sometimes roll their eyes when I talk about this as it sounds like I want fame.

My response is that $1.65 and fame will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Fame is worthless, it is actually an albatross. It is in the telling of the truth and hopefully changing the world in some way through living this incredibly exciting, dangerous and purposeful life that possibly some other entire group of peoples' lives are made better. I would love the exhilaration of taking photos of a revolution going on and then getting to a safe place and writing about it; that would be incredibly interesting.

In addition, writing about the daily lives of people in these areas of the world rocked by conflict, and what is striking is the surreal nature of their lives as they go about their daily chores while rockets, grenades and bombs go off is so foreign for the majority of.