An informal survey about people’s political and career trajectories

I’m curious as to whether there’s a connection between people’s career trajectories and their political views when they’re older. I have noticed in my own life that a lot of my conservative friends have bounced around a bit from one career to another in their younger days, while a lot of my Progressive friends have stayed with their original career. I sort of straddle the line, because I stayed within the legal profession, but molded my work to confirm to my personal work preferences, rather than the other way. I also added in writing and being a Mom along the way.  I also changed my politics along the way.

What about you? Without violating your privacy, can you sketch briefly what your political leanings are, whether they’ve stayed the same throughout your adult life, and whether you’ve had the same career forever, stayed in the same career but changed the way you do your work, or if you’ve had big changes in your work over your lifetime. If the last mentioned is true, how many changes have you had? Has your been a picaresque career, or was there just one seismic shift?  If this were a poll, I’d set it up this way:

1.  How would you define yourself politically today?

2.  Have you always held the same political views?

3.  If not, did you shift from more individualist views to more statist views, or vice versa?

4.  Are you still in the same career you were when you started working as a young person?

5.  If yes, you are in the same career, are you in the exact same line of work or have you significantly changed your work within the same field?  For example, have you shifted from being an employee to being a manager or even being self-employed?

6.  If no, you’re not in the same career, what kind of career change did you have?

7.  Also, if no, you’re not in the same career, how many career changes have you had?

I doubt I’ll have the discipline to take any information I get from this post and turn it into a more formalized observation about lifestyles and politics.  Mostly, I’m just curious about what might just be a coincidence amongst my acquaintances, and I figured that, if we’re all curious together, we can enjoy a little bit of crowd sourcing right here.

I’ll say right off the mark that my suspicion now, with minimal data, is that conservatives have had more practical experience in life than liberals.  Even if we emerge from the Ivy Tower covered with the dewy glow of the Democrat party, dealing with real life — especially multiple variations of real life, such as being in the military, then being an employee, then working for oneself, etc. — we’ve come to realize that the real world operates by certain immutable cause and effect rules.  For this reason, we’re eventually drawn to conservativism, which deals with the world as it is, unlike statism, which tries to force the world into conforming to academic theories about what a perfectly managed world could and should be.

Apropos fact and theory, on Facebook I very politely, respectfully, and with genuine curiosity asked a hard-core Leftist to explain to me how we could use peaceful solutions to deal with ISIS, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, etc.  It’s been three days and he hasn’t responded.  I suspect he never will.