What’s your dream job?

A reader re­cently sent me a graphic he thought might in­ter­est me, given the fact that in this col­umn I gen­er­ally write about cul­tural dif­fer­ences I ob­serve be­tween my adopted home­land and my coun­try of birth. The graphic was taken from the web­site of a Seat­tle-based on­line re­mit­tance ser­vice called Re­mitly, and is en­ti­tled “Dream jobs around the world”. It does in­deed make for in­ter­est­ing com­par­isons, re­veal­ing cit­i­zens’ dream job for each coun­try based on Google search data. Now, the first thing we should note is that we do not have the data for Cat­alo­nia, of course, and must there­fore use the data for Spain for our com­par­i­son. And sec­ondly, don’t ask me how the data were col­lected, that is, how the re­searchers de­cided that peo­ple search­ing for these terms re­vealed their dream job. Let’s just go with it for now.

What caught my at­ten­tion first about this graphic was the gar­ish green colour that lights up the coun­tries of the US, Canada, the UK, Ire­land and Aus­tralia. In other words, all of these coun­tries share the same dream job. I won’t tell you what it is yet. Then there was the bright red colour dom­i­nat­ing Brazil and the African coun­tries of Mau­ri­ta­nia, Mo­rocco, Chad, Sudan and An­gola, to­gether with Iran, but nowhere else. Again, I’ll let you have a lit­tle think about that be­fore I re­veal which dream job unites these coun­tries. Fas­ci­nat­ingly, China has its own dream job that nowhere else in the world shares. I won­der if you can guess what it is? I cer­tainly couldn’t. France shares its dream job with sev­eral African coun­tries, and it’s one that is very guess­able, as is the one unit­ing all of the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries, and many other coun­tries around the world, coloured in or­ange on the map, and which is clearly the most de­sired job world­wide. More on that in a sec­ond. Let’s just con­clude this guess­ing sec­tion by com­ing to the key rev­e­la­tion of Spain’s dream job, within which we of course must in­clude Cat­alo­nia, and when I think about my son’s life am­bi­tions, does in­deed res­onate, even though I would not have guessed it, and in fact would not even call it a job. As a side­note, it is shared with Ar­gentina, sev­eral cen­tral Amer­i­can coun­tries, Jor­dan and Kuwait. There, that should get you think­ing.

So, now, for the big re­veal (drum­roll please): the green colour that unites many Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries is ac­tu­ally the job of pilot, which per­son­ally I find a lit­tle old-fash­ioned, as I don’t see the glam­our in it any­more, al­though I do un­der­stand that it re­flects peo­ple’s de­sire to travel. The red colour I men­tioned ap­pears as “busi­ness­man” in the leg­end, which, aside from any­thing else, makes you won­der how a mod­ern-day North Amer­i­can com­pany can still use such gen­der-bi­ased lan­guage. The dream job that only ap­pears in China and nowhere else is that of di­eti­cian. I will leave you to dis­cuss that amongst your­selves. The job unit­ing France and sev­eral African coun­tries is that of at­tor­ney, and the most pop­u­lar pro­fes­sion ap­pear­ing in or­ange all over the map is that of writer. So that only leaves us with the dream job of peo­ple liv­ing in Spain, and there­fore Cat­alo­nia, and the other coun­tries men­tioned along with them. It is none other than “in­flu­encer”, which means that ei­ther I or the peo­ple around me are com­pletely out of touch with the mod­ern world. I think I know which one it is. But then, at least I have my writ­ing.