dream jobs are a scam
- Date
- 2025-09-04
- Host
- Design Buddies
About this event
Most people are taught to chase a dream job as if there’s one perfect role, one perfect company, and one perfect path that will finally make work feel clear. This event starts from a different premise: that idea is often more myth than roadmap, and believing it can keep you stuck, disappointed, or constantly measuring yourself against a fantasy. If you’re ready for a more honest conversation about work, ambition, and what actually makes a career worth building, this meetup is for you. About the Event This is an in-person community meetup built around a simple but provocative idea: maybe the goal isn’t to find a dream job at all. Maybe the better goal is to build a working life that fits your values, your constraints, your interests, and the season of life you’re actually in. The event is designed to be social, thoughtful, and grounded. Rather than treating career questions like a branding exercise or a formula, the conversation will make room for nuance: what people want from work, what they’ve been told to want, and where those two things don’t match. Expect a format that feels closer to a smart community conversation than a lecture. Whether you come feeling cynical, curious, burned out, ambitious, or in-between, you’ll be in a room with people who are also trying to figure out how to make work more realistic, sustainable, and honest. What to Expect The core of the event is likely to be a mix of discussion, networking, and shared reflection. The title sets the tone, but the goal is not just to complain about work. It’s to unpack assumptions, compare experiences, and explore better ways to think about careers. You can expect space for conversations around questions like: What do people actually mean when they say “dream job”? How does that idea shape career decisions, expectations, and self-worth? What happens when a role looks great on paper but feels wrong in practice? How do you build a career around tradeoffs instead of fantasies? What matters more than prestige, identity, or external validation? Because this is a meetup and community-focused event, there will also be room to connect with other attendees in a low-pressure way. That might mean meeting people who are changing industries, rethinking success, questioning hustle culture, or simply trying to have more honest conversations about work than they can usually have in professional settings. You do not need to arrive with a polished point of view. You do not need a five-year plan. You do not need to be in crisis to belong here. Showing up with curiosity is enough. Why Attend A lot of career events push answers too quickly: optimize your résumé, refine your personal brand, chase the next opportunity. This one is valuable because it slows down long enough to ask whether the story you’ve been handed about work is even worth following. That shift matters. If you’ve been feeling pressure to love your job, define yourself by your title, or treat every role like a referendum on your potential, this conversation can help loosen that grip. You may leave with a clearer sense of what you actually want from work, what you’re willing to trade for it, and what myths you’re ready to stop organizing your life around. There’s also real value in hearing how other people think about these questions. Career uncertainty can feel isolating when everyone around you sounds certain. Being in a room with others who are navigating doubt, experimentation, and change can make your own situation feel more workable and less like a personal failure. By the end of the meetup, you may not walk away with a single grand answer, but you should leave with something more useful: better questions, more honest language, and a stronger sense that there are many valid ways to build a meaningful working life. Practical Details This event takes place in person on Thursday, September 4 at 3:00 PM PDT. If face-to-face conversation matters to you, this format is a big part of the appeal. It gives you the chance to meet people beyond profile pages and job titles and have more natural, open-ended conversations. Because this is a social and networking-oriented meetup, come ready to participate at your own pace. You can contribute actively to discussion, focus on one-on-one conversations, or simply listen and take in the room before jumping in. A few helpful ways to prepare: Bring an open mind rather than a fixed position. Think about one assumption you’ve absorbed about work that you might want to question. Be ready to introduce yourself in a way that goes beyond your title if you want to. Give yourself time to stay for conversation, not just the starting minute. If the title made you laugh, bristle, or feel unexpectedly seen, that’s probably a good sign. This event is for people who want a more grounded conversation about careers than the usual scripts allow.
Who should attend
This is for you if the usual career advice feels too neat, too performative, or too disconnected from real life. - You’re rethinking what success means and want to talk about work without pretending prestige is the only thing that matters. - You’ve felt pressure to find a single perfect role and want a more realistic, useful framework for making career decisions. - You’re in a transition, whether that means job searching, changing fields, recovering from burnout, or questioning the path you’re on. - You enjoy thoughtful, honest conversations and want to meet people who can talk about ambition, tradeoffs, identity, and work without defaulting to slogans. - You’re curious about networking that feels human instead of transactional, and you’d rather connect through ideas and shared questions than polished elevator pitches. - You don’t need to have the answer already; you just want to be in the room with other people who are willing to challenge the script and think more clearly about what a good working life can actually look like.