Drivethru paradox
A famous c.1995 drive-thru paradox stylized cartoon, found and kept in the personal file notes of Libb Thims, sometime following or amid the completion of two engineering degrees, during which time the big picture mechanism "why" of doing any "thing" comes into immediate view, such as captured well in the Einstein-Pascal dialogue.
In paradoxes, drive-thru paradox is the difficult to reconcile flipsidedness of the, on one hand, vanity, i.e. something that is vain, empty, or valueless, and superficiality associated with educational and occupational climbing and social label prestige, e.g. doctor, lawyer, or engineer, etc., obtained thereby, and accompanying sexual value increased therein, and, on the other hand, the seeming contentment and happiness obtainable via remedial low-level jobs, e.g. drive-thru worker, dishwasher, janitor, brick-layer, auto mechanic, or ditch-digger, etc., and accompanying sexual value decreased therein, and the loss of individualism (or being) yet gain of social respect that comes with the former, and gain of individualism (or being) yet loss of social respect that comes with the later; and or something equivalent to this effect in respect to the bigger picture of the movement of the universe.

Goethe
In 1770, Goethe, in personal notes, in respect to the Faust play, ruminated the following about how whose who become "professionally" schooled or accredited in the various branches of knowledge, e.g. physician, lawyer, jurist, artist, scientist, philosopher, etc., were but things done in vain, i.e. for reasons of nothing but showy vanity:

“The puppet-play [see: Faustian] echoed and vibrated in many tones through my mind. I, also, had gone from one branch of knowledge to another, and was early enough convinced of the vanity of all. I had tried life in many forms, and the experience had left me only the more unsatisfied and worried. I now carried these thoughts about with me, and indulged myself in them, in lonely hours, but without committing anything to writing. Most of all, I concealed from Herder my mystic-cabalistic chemistry, and everything connected with it.”
— Johann Goethe (1770), reflection on intercourse with Johann Herder, in Strasburg [1]

(add)

Thims
American Libb Thims, at age 15, got a work permit—thermodynamics being the governing science of the relation between “heat” (e.g. sexual heat) and “work” (e.g. occupation)—and began to be employed at a minimum wage summer job (paid work), and thereabouts began to date (feel relationship heat); during the course of which, he began to notice, in the lifestyles (states of existence) of some of the girls-turning-women (age 17-22) he began to chill with, who each worked (at or near minimum wage jobs) and thereby paid their own rent and seemed to be "happy" (friends, throwing parties, etc.), according to which, based on this observation, one could, theoretically, very easily (in theory), work a minimum wage (simple manual labor) job, exist and be happy.

Buss sexual propostion study (1994)
The 1994 "sexual proposition study" done by David Buss, which found sexual receptivity to be directly proportional to the social "status" and or prestige of occupation or "label" of the male.
In circa 1994, Libb Thims, as a new undergraduate chemical engineering student, had decided to switch form dating multiple girls/women, at the same time, whom he had largely attracted via traits such as: fun factor, charm, personality, fitness, coolness, craziness, eccentricity, etc., to dating one particular female, a graduate school student, working on her master's degree in architecture, a semi-child prodigy, who had been high school valedictorian and completed here BS in architecture by age 20, who thought [possibly half-jokingly] that she was smarter than Thims, whose family, both maternally, heir to a multi-million dollar vacuum company, and paternally, president of a large engineering corporation, were in high social standing.

“I told her you were a chemical engineer.”
— Anon (c.1994), “Comment to Thims”; made to her mother about Thims

This nearly floored Thims, mentally, at this moment, and for many years afterwords (still not yet fully remedied at 2015), according to which Thims was reduced, not to being a "fun person", "nice guy", "cool dude", or "super personality", but only to a social door opening parental pacification "label", according to which, seemingly, one's whole being is becomes meaningless, and one becomes but a vanity label in the mind of the opposite mate, her family, friends, and social network.

At about this time, or shortly thereafter, Thims was reading David Buss' The Evolution of Desire, where mate selection is broken down mechanistically; one dominate study, presented therein, being the Buss sexual proposition study, according to which women were found, via polled opinion, to be less and less upset by direct "sexual proposition" as a man's label status increased, the results of which are shown adjacent. The "occupationally" perfect fictional male of Dr. John Wayde Prentice Jr., of the 1967 film Guess Whose Coming to Dinner?, specifically scripted that way to highlight the issue of "race" in mate selection, is the epitome of the "label", as he movie tells, that will make a women fall in love in 20 minutes.

Here a grand confusion began to embed into Thims' mind, surrounding the nature of happiness, contentment, and or mental satiety, and its connection to "work" (see: principle of the transmission of work), work output (occupational ladder), and specifically "status level" of work, such as embodied in the defining first engagement query: "so what do you do?" [for a living], e.g. see: David Buss' 1993 "Occupation vs Sexual Receptivity" study, in respect to mate selection and existence, surrounding the question "why" a person was or has to do anything, past the point of minimum society mandated education level (high school), past the minimum demarcation point of paying for rent (below which is homelessness)? English-born American philosopher Alan Watts' circa 1955 “here kitty kitty” social indoctrination ideology or process (see: South Park annotated video (Ѻ) at 5:54), idealized or rather carrot-sticked for the person age 0 to 40 to follow, captures some of this issue well.

Drive-thru Paradox (1997)
The famous "bar scene" from Good Will Hunting (1997), where Clark says pointedly that although Hunting may know more than him, from his library studies, he will have a Harvard degree, and will go on skiing trips, with his family, while Hunting will be working at a drive-thru, which pits vanity against knowledge and meaning, in a confusing manner, aka the drive-thru paradox.
Good Will Hunting | Bar scene
In 1997, Matt Damon, a Harvard English major turned film writer, in his Good Will Hunting, co-written with Ben Affleck, pitted the fictional genius Will Hunting, supposedly based on William Sidis, who learned the equivalent of $150,000 dollars worth of Harvard education via trips to the public library and $1.50 in late charges, against the over-typical superficial label-monger Clark, described as “obnoxious graduate student thinks he can impress [women] with his academic browbeating” (Ѻ), who replies to the library late charges jab, with the following resonating statement:

“Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.”
— Clark (1997), apex moment in “bar scene” of Good Will Hunting

In circa 2008, Thims began using (Ѻ) the term "drive-thru paradox", themed on the Good Will Hunting bar scene, to describe this phenomena.

Good Will Hunting | Brick-layer dialogue
The following is the brick layer-dialogue scene:

SEAN
Do you think you're alone?

WILL
What?

SEAN
Do you have a soul-mate?

WILL
Define that.

SEAN
Someone who challenges you.

WILL
Chuckie.
Bejan (heat transfer diagram) (labeled) (2013)
A Thims-labeled (Ѻ) 2013 4th edition of Adrian Bejan’s Convection Heat Transfer.

SEAN
Chuckie’s family. He’d lie down in traffic for you. I’m talking about someone who opens up things for you. Touches your soul.

WILL
I got it. I got plenty.

SEAN
Well name them.

WILL
Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O'Connor, Kant, Pope, Locke, --

SEAN
That’s great, they're all dead.

WILL
Not to me, they're not.

SEAN
You don’t have a lot of dialogue with them. You can't give back to them, Will.

WILL
Not without some serious
smelling salts, and a heater, no...

SEAN
That's what I'm saying. You'll never have that kind of relationship in a world where you're afraid to take the first step because all you see is every negative thing ten miles down the road.

WILL
Oh, what? You're going to take the
professor's side on this?

SEAN
Don't give me your line of sh*t. No.

WILL
I didn't want the job.

SEAN
It's not about that job. I don’t care if you work for the government. But, you could do anything you want. You are bound by nothing. What are you passionate about? What do you want? I mean there are guys who work their entire lives laying bricks so that there kids have a chance at the opportunities that you have here.

WILL
I didn't ask for this.

No. You were born with it. So don’t cop out with this ‘I didn’t ask for this’.

WILL
Cop-out? I mean, what’s wrong with laying brick? That’s somebodies home I’m building.

SEAN
Right. My dad laid brick. Ok. Busted his ass so I could have an education.

WILL
Exactly. That’s an honorable profession. What’s wrong with fixing somebody’s car? Somebody gets to work the next day because of me. There’s honor in that.

SEAN
Yeah, there is. There’s honor in that and there’s in taking that 40-minute train ride so those college kids can come in, in the morning, and those floors are clean, and those waste baskets are empty. That’s real work.

WILL
That’s right.

SEAN
And that’s honorable. That’s why you took that job, for the ‘honor’ of it?

[A pause. Will says nothing]

SEAN
I just have a little question here: you could be a janitor anywhere. Why did you choose to work at the most prestigious technical college in the whole fu*king world? And why did you sneak around at night and finish other people’s formulas, that only one or two people in the world could do, and then lie about it?

[A pause. Will says nothing]

SEAN
Because I don’t see a lot of honor in that, Will?

SEAN
So what do you really want to do?

[A pause]

WILL
I want to be a shepherd. I want to move up to Nashwood, get some sheep, and tend to them.

SEAN
Maybe, you should go do that.

WILL
What?

SEAN
You know, if you’re going to jerk-off, you should do it at home with a moist towel.

WILL
You’re chucking me …?

SEAN
Yeah, get the fu*k out of here.
Scareface (dishwasher scene)
The famous "dishwasher scene" from the 1983 film Scareface, wherein being called a "dishwasher" is an grave insult.

Slipping a few lines, the scene ends with:

SEAN
You and your bulls*t. You got an answer for everybody. But I asked you a straight question and you can't give me a straight answer. Because you don't know.

(add discussion)

Other
The famous “don’t be calling me no f$%king dishwasher” scene of the 1983 film Scarface, and the “the world needs ditch diggers too” scene, and Kuder Preference test discussion scene, espoused in the 1980 film Caddyshack, seem to be in the neighborhood of the drive-thru paradox.

References
1. (a) Goethe, Johann. (1811-1833). From My Life: Poetry and Truth. Publisher
(b) Goethe, Johann. (1832). Faust (translator: Bayard Taylor) (pgs. 230-31). Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1883.

TDics icon ns