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It’s okay to leave some in the box.

Dear Hipster:

I have been working in the service industry for several years, and I consider myself a consummate professional. Recently, some office-worker friends of mine and I were having a discussion about work, and how we felt like we were all stuck on some kind of a professional plateau or other. The details don’t really matter, but suffice it to say one of my friends asked if I could really be surprised by feeling stuck because, unlike the rest of them, I had “more of a ‘job’ than a ‘career.’” Anyways, this seemed really snobby, and, if I’m being honest, antiquated, considering there are plenty of people who work their whole lives in my industry and accomplish plenty. Does this distinction mean anything, considering we haven’t been living in 1962 for a long time now?

— Bobby

Perhaps antiquated, but not useless. I see it like this. A job is like the person you dated in college who was always drinking too much box wine and tearfully breaking up with you because you just don’t get them, y’know? So sooner or later, you got sick of all the drama, or maybe you were actually the one causing all the drama in the first place and you didn’t realize it, and you moved on with your life. You thought it would be a huge deal, but, in retrospect, it actually wasn’t that big of a deal.

In contrast, your career is more like the one you meet some unspecified length of time after the first person, who is all rock steady and has their shit together, so when you’re the one who drank too much box wine, they’re right there brushing your teeth for you so you don’t wake up with death mouth the next day.

Definitely different things, but there’s a rub (there’s always a rub). People make two kinds of mistakes. One mistake is thinking the second thing is always going to make you happy when you have the first thing; and the other mistake is thinking you’re missing out on the first thing when you have the second thing.

Dear Hipster:

When you find out the musicians or other artists you have revered and respected your whole life were, in actuality, terrible people (for whatever reason), do you have to stop liking them?

— Kelle

This thing you have here, it’s sort of like hippos. Early on in your life, before you know better, you think of these big, waddly goobers floating in muddy rivers with just their nostrils poking up above the water. So cute. You don’t think “raging, 3000-pound death machine,” but that’s exactly what hippos are. They kill people all the time in the wild because they are insanely territorial, and armed with gigantic teeth. Of course, after you learn the awful truth about hippos, that’s all you can think about when you think about hippos. Whenever hippos come up in conversation, your mind doesn’t go to that catchy Hungry Hungry Hippos jingle on YouTube. No. You go straight to blood-soaked battles beneath the pounding sun of the sub-Saharan African savanna because, you guessed it, hippos gleefully murder each other in addition to killing thousands of humans and other non-hippo animals.

Once you learn the truth, it’s innocence ruined forever, right? Yes and no. While you may be deprived of cute visions of cuddly hippos for life, you have to admit hippos become a lot more interesting when you know the ghastly truth. That’s something, right?