4 Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises
Nowadays ambition and the love of a job well done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission.
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967
There isn’t a job good enough for me. There isn’t a job good enough for anyone.
S. L. Lowndes, letter to the Sunday Times, 1982
Belief in the abstract invention ‘career’ is a middle-class affliction. The lower orders, wisely, don’t quite have the same faith in progress and self-betterment as the bourgeois classes and neither do members of the aristocracy. The aristos are at the top, so they’ve got nowhere to go. Paradoxically, this gives them a humility that is lacking in the successful meritocrats of the middle classes. If you are to the manor born, then you do not have the self-satisfaction and pride of the self-made man. And at the bottom, the people don’t see the point in striving for mortgages and security. But the middle classes as we know them today, the heirs of the Puritan tradition of money-making and self-denial, have elevated ‘career’ into the epicentre of their daily struggle. And now more than ever before, the middle classes attempt to impose their career ethic on everyone else. This is called ‘government’.
The idea of a career is that it follows an upward path to some ever-vanishing point above you. It is the quest for self-perfection and the secular version of the Protestant’s search for salvation. Career is a Puritan concept, it’s a sort of lonely pilgrimage. It is a pilgrim’s progress. Governments sell themselves by promoting the idea of ‘equal opportunities for everyone to make the best of themselves’ when really what they mean is ‘equal opportunities for every slimebag to rat on his friends and colleagues in order to worship the false god of career advancement’. Your career is supposed to be something more than just a job: it defines and limits you, and it supposedly provides your creative and competitive fulfilment. Career is not just how you earn your bread; it is your life. But career advancement tends to be based on the model of survival of the fittest. In other words, your promotion depends on some other guy not getting promoted or even getting sacked. The competitive principle applied to work means that your success is achieved at the cost of someone else’s failure. Big companies are hotbeds of intrigue and plotting for this reason. You start out doing work experience, you graduate to being bossed around by idiots, you become idiotic and, then, if all works out well, you end up being the idiot who bosses other people around. ‘The carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases, the present is always under the heel of oppression,’ writes Vaneigem.
Meanwhile, your salary rises, and you buy bigger cars and houses, thus feeding other people’s careers. Career precisely reflects the dynamics of other modern myths: it is a greedy monster, never satisfied, always wanting more. And career encourages what I consider to be a terribly unnatural self-specialization: in our urge to compete, we tend to try to become very good at one small thing to the exclusion of all others.
This is called professionalism but could be more accurately labelled ‘being useless’. The other day I asked my dentist if he was thinking of retiring soon. He said, no, because he wouldn’t know what else to do. ‘The problem with being a dentist is that you end up not being able to do anything else.’ And if you can’t do anything else, you become dependent on other people to fill your needs: culture is produced by experts, music by bands working for record companies, education by expert teachers, medicine by expert doctors. We are disabled. It will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf-putting-up.
The dangers of such overspecialization were analysed in the 1970s by Ivan Illich. In such books as The Right to Useful Unemployment, Illich saw the professions as literally disabling. Every bit of power we hand over to a professional is a bit less power for ourselves:
I propose to call the mid-twentieth century the Age of Disabling Professions. I choose this designation because it commits those who use it. It exposes the anti-social functions performed by the least challenged providers: educators, physicians, social workers and scientists. Simultaneously, it indicts the complacency of citizens who have submitted themselves to multi-faceted bondage as clients.
The ‘bondage of the client’ is a powerful notion. To submit to the professionalism of another is to admit that you are weak in a particular area. So we cannot blame an external authority for our lack of freedom, because we are the ones who have given them this power over us or, in Illich’s words, ‘submitted ourselves’.
And very depressing it is that women, too, have fallen for the career myth. ‘My career is really important to me,’ say the solipsistic new career ladies. How on earth bossing around a little coterie of idiots at Asda can be more important than playing with your kids, hanging out with your friends and family or doing creative things at home is completely beyond me. Over the last hundred years or so, women have equated career with liberation. To escape the perceived boredom, tyranny and powerlessness of domestic life, which was certainly a reality in Victorian times, they have sought out work which will provide money and fulfilment. That is the promise. But what is the reality? As G. K. Chesterton wittily put it, ‘I meet women who say they refuse to be dictated to, and they go and get a job as a stenographer.’ Now, I am not saying that women should not escape oppression at home and seek freedom, autonomy, creative fulfilment, financial independence and so forth, but I am saying that these things are unlikely to be found in conventional full-time jobs and careers. Instead, it is surely better to create your own job.
In a recent edition of the Idler, we ran a piece from the well-known broadcaster Joan Bakewell. She wrote that she had made a conscious decision early in her working life to avoid having a career. She had no desire to become imprisoned by climbing up the corporate ladder at the BBC. Instead, she says, she found the thing that she wanted to do and just carried on doing that. In her chosen field, the idea of endless, unlimited progress didn’t apply. Progress is a tyrant. Freeing yourself from a career-based model of working means freeing yourself from other people’s expectations. Career is a path set down for you by some outside authority, whereas the truly free make their own path through the woods.
In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart notes that ambition, competition and ideas of advancement are often absent from working-class attitudes to work, or at least they were in the fifties:
Once at work there is for most no sense of career, of the possibilities of promotion. Jobs are spread around horizontally, not vertically; life is not seen as a climb, nor work as the main interest in it. There is still a respect for a good craftsman. But the man on the next bench is not regarded as an actual or potential competitor … ‘keen types’ are mistrusted.
The notion invades us that it is really only worth doing anything if it makes money or leads to recognition in the world. Mothers with children start to feel like their lives are being sucked up by childcare and domestic toil and that motherhood is not valued by their peers. You are only someone if you have a job.
Career is just posh slavery. And career is an institutionalized putting-off, a paradise deferred. We hold the abstract notion of a career in our heads as a kind of yardstick. Sometimes we are doing well against our self-imposed imagined career path; sometimes we are doing badly and other people’s careers seem to be going better. We use career as a stick to beat ourselves with. And always we have our eyes on the next rung up the ladder.
But what is the alternative? Can we go it alone? Become our own boss? The gloomy Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold was, like many, many others of his generation, appalled at the nineteenth-century’s elevation of work to a sort of religious faith. But it seemed to him that on the other path, the path of freedom, madness lay. The following extract is from a depressing poem called ‘A Summer Night’, where Arnold compares the two options:
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison-wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast;
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguish’d face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.
Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave, must man be one?
Madman or slave, must man be one? Today, freedom-seekers tend to be scoffed at and labelled cranks. With wild hair and staring eyes, the hardy adventurer can easily go crazy. And certainly, the odds seem stacked against the freedom-seeker. We might say: you don’t have to be mad not to work here, but it helps. We think of Nietzsche, of Kerouac, who went home to his mother, sad and bitter. We think of poor Coleridge, lost to laudanum, rejected by his former ally, Wordsworth. Indeed, Arnold’s poem seems to be saying that turning into a mad-haired loon will be your fate if you try to be free. Oh, woe, torment, eternal care, suffering!
It also helps to learn that today’s madmen were the normal ones in medieval societies. In the early days, Christianity had opposed careers. ‘Christianity tended to condemn all forms of negotium, all secular activity; on the other hand, it encouraged a certain otium, an idleness which displayed confidence in Providence,’ writes medieval historian Jacques Le Goff in Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages. Yea, verily, idlers are more godly than toilers. Lazy men did not work because they trusted in God to bring them their daily bread. The country was full of begging friars. Unlike the Elizabethans and Tudors, the medievals were idle-friendly. The non-working mendicants played a vital role in society by offering people an outlet for their charity. It was a paradise for idlers.
Striving in your career is essentially anti-godly: it means that you are possessed of enough vanity to attempt to take your fate into your own hands. Laziness, on the other hand, puts you up there with the saints. ‘The peasants’ mistrust of the merchant and the noble’s contemptuous haughtiness found a parallel and a justification on the ideological plane in the teaching of the Church,’ writes the historian Aron Ja Gorevich in an essay on the medieval merchant. Career, then, is a Protestant invention and an ideal for living that would have been impossible in the more fatalistic Catholic medieval society. Everyday life back then was about being creative and doing lots of different things. God was creative and so work should be creative. This is why gardening, baking bread and brewing beer were the earliest forms of work to be approved by the Church. And when life was lived around the seasons, before electric light came along to make everything boring, life was rich and full of variety.
Looked at from a Taoist or existential point of view, career is a complete waste of time and energy. If all action is futile, all is vanity, life is absurd, and the world is a big nothing, then why not laze around or do what you want? Career takes a potential source of joy and turns it into a duty, obligation, almost a penance. Do you really want to have written on your gravestone, ‘He suffered all his life’?
In the inelegant language of today, I would say that one answer is multitasking. Drink and smoke at the same time! But, seriously, you may have a vocation, a calling at the centre of your work life. In my case, this vocation, or my gift, if you like, is journalism. Ever since I was eight, I have been writing articles and producing magazines. But this central vocation does not mean that I should pursue this one area of endeavour and neglect other aspects of human activity. I also enjoy growing vegetables, spreading straw on the earth, keeping chickens, making things of wood, shooting baked bean tins with my air rifle, playing Pokémon with my kids, playing the ukulele. I don’t do these things for money or career. I do them for their own sake. I find that three hours of paid work each day is enough to keep the wolf from the door. The rest of the day is given up to unpaid work or unpaid play.
To return self-sufficiency and creativity to our lives, we might operate some sort of business from home, a cottage industry, a creative production into which we can put as much or as little time and energy as we like, as much as suits us at a particular time in our lives. ‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well. It is wise to reject utterly as a piece of bourgeois propaganda the oppressive aphorism ‘jack of all trades and master of none’. No: you can do lots of things. You can chop wood and carry water and write poems. You can combine smallholding with software design. One Idler reader is a classical tuba player who is also a trained plasterer. He loves both and both earn him an income. Why limit yourself to one small field?
One unhelpful solution thrown up by modern society is the dreadful aim ‘work–life balance’. Oh, horrors! Quite apart from being an ugly, awkward and vulgar little phrase, there is something rotten about the whole concept because it implies that work is bad and life is good. Well, make work good, make work into a creative pleasure, and you don’t have to worry about balancing the good with the bad; all will be good. The idle utopia does not seek, with the trade unions, simply to cut down on unpleasant work. It aims to harmonize work and life into one happy whole.
Careers don’t allow us to be fully ourselves; careers take as an index of success money and status rather than pleasure in work and creativity. ‘Vocation’, on the other hand, means ‘calling’, and it is a task that earns you a living and which you enjoy doing. In my case, my vocation is journalism; that is, communication. Eric Gill’s was as a stone-carver, Blake’s as an engraver, John Lennon’s was writing songs, and so on. The vocation at the centre of your life does not mean that you do not do other things. A stone-carver might well write poetry, clean the house, make things out of wood and weed the vegetable patch as well as carve stone. But stone-carving is at the centre of his working life and it is through stone-carving that he makes a living.
We have a duty to look into our hearts and discover our vocation, find our gift. Once we have done this, we will find that other parts of life follow quite naturally. If we put vocation at the centre of our lives and not money-making for its own sake, then we will find that money will come. According to Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the medieval Catholic ideology around work was: ‘Everyone should abide by his living and let the godless run after gain.’
Vocation is a community-based idea of work, it is a giving experience, whereas career is a selfish and competitive version of how to work. Vocation is steady and flat, whereas career is an upwardly sloping curve, stretching into infinity. With a sense of work as vocation, we can work steadily and happily.
A wonderfully positive notion of human work was given to me by the artist Joe Rush. In the 1980s, Joe was among the founders of a renegade artistic group called the Mutoid Waste Company, whose vocation was to create fantastic sculptures out of old bits of scrap metal which they found lying around. They would take an old beaten-up car and turn it into something magical and wonderful, a giant insect or a dinosaur, a skull or a bird. They lived the life of the mendicant friar, travelling to festivals and living in squats all over Europe. Their simple message was ‘Be creative.’ Joe’s notion is that we are all born with a gift, and that it is up to us to find that gift and then explore it. ‘You’re gifted,’ he says. ‘It is a gift to you … and if there’s anyone sitting out there getting jealous about it, it means they’ve not really gone out and looked for what their gift is.’
And how do you find your vocation, your gift? The answer is simply to do nothing for as long as you possibly can. In the same way that wise gardeners advise that the first step when taking over a new garden is to do nothing for a year, in order to see what grows there and only then to design your own unique, useful and beautiful garden, so I would advise taking a few months off, or even a year, if you can manage it. Most of the time we are too busy to step back and find out what we would like to do. Create some time for yourself and things will gradually become clear. Above all, stop trying. Career is a try-hard notion. The free of spirit have stopped trying and instead let things happen.
FIND YOUR GIFT