One of the mistakes I made in my last post was conflating “enjoyable” work with “meaningful” work. I railed against jobs in the financial sector first for their lack of social benefit, and second for being just plain ol’ no fun. I advocated pursuing work that has value to society, but I also spoke to the importance of loving what you do.

Unfortunately, these attributes aren’t necessarily packaged together. There are plenty of shitty, paper-pushing jobs out there which contribute mightily to humanity. I wouldn’t want to be the secretary recording minutes at the Gates Foundation’s board meetings; but I wouldn’t short-change his importance, either. So, too, are there kick-ass jobs which confer no social benefit. For instance, you could work as a snowboarding instructor in Aspen and adore getting out of bed every morning; but your vacuous responsibility would be teaching rich teenagers how to have some frivolous fun. So: how to navigate these waters? How to negotiate the balance between “enjoyable” and “meaningful”?

I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately. This summer I’m going off to an island in North Carolina to research loggerhead sea turtles. Pretty cool, right? I think so; I think it’ll be a blast. The turtles are nocturnal, meaning that we spend our evenings patrolling the beaches for egg-laying females - which also means that we have most of our mornings off to revel in sun, sand and ocean. The next three months of my life will equate to a glorious combination of entertaining research and deliriously relaxing vacation.

But how socially valuable is my Summer O’ Turtles? Well, loggerheads are a threatened species; thus, insofar as you care about biodiversity, my work will be meaningful. If you’ve ever had the privilege and pleasure of snorkeling with a sea turtle, you probably appreciate their existence and don’t want to see them go extinct. I sure don’t; I think the loggerhead is a gorgeous creature with an incredible life cycle, and its very existence brings me pleasure. If my fellow human beings brought about the turtle’s extinction, effectively eradicating hundreds of millions of years of evolution, that would weigh heavily on my conscience. So, okay, I think turtle research is pretty darn important.

Still, I’d be the first to admit that, in the ranks of dire environmental problems, the threat to loggerheads doesn’t rate very highly. The disappearance of sea turtles would be unfortunate, sure - but not nearly as unfortunate as a three-degree rise in global temperature, or the extirpation of rainforests, or the world’s population reaching nine billion, or the escape of swarms of genetically-engineered velociraptors after a candy-bar eating computer technician deactivated Jurassic Park’s electrical fences. That last one still keeps me up at night. The point is, turtle extinction would be bad. But the world has other problems, and many of these problems are much, much worse.

So: as an environmentalist who wants to employ his passion for maximal social good, wouldn’t I - and the world - be better off if I did something else? If I really care about the earth (and I do, I swear!), shouldn’t I spend my summer, say, lobbying for a hiked-up gas tax? Or dispensing birth control? Or studying for the LSATs so I can someday prosecute evil, groundwater-polluting corporations? Yeah, maybe I should.

But would I enjoy doing those things? Would I enjoy going to law school? Would I enjoy fundraising? (Hint: the answer is no. I’ve tried doing this, and it sucks.) Meaningful though it may be, I just don’t think that a desk job could ever satisfy me - at least, not to the extent that cruising around the beach in search of turtles will. So when the Turtle People offered me an internship, I jumped at it without a second thought. But it’s only a summer, after all. I’d think much longer and much harder about signing my life away to loggerheads, considering that I could serve as a more useful environmental advocate in a different role.

All of this is to say that I still haven’t negotiated a balance between meaning and fun. If anybody else has been having similar career crises, post ‘em in the comments. We can start a foundation teaching snowboarding to underprivileged inner city youth. Somebody get on that.