AI will presumably accelerate these implosions. The lesson must be: avoid narrow vocational training for a doomed job and prepare to keep adapting all your career.
Passion v security
The big choice many people face at the outset is whether or not to pursue their vocation. Doing so is a class marker. Few people from poorer families can afford to spend years trying to become, say, a furniture restorer or a novelist. When I canvassed opinions, one woman wrote that career guidance at her state school had “pushed us to pursue what we were ‘passionate’ about, without giving the full picture of the precarity involved with certain careers”. She and others had unwittingly taken high-risk paths: “I signed up for a film degree, genuinely believing that I could viably become a full-time director or producer.”
Still, if you do have a vocation (many people don’t) and you can take the financial risk, I’d say pursue it. Otherwise, a career lasts a long time. Many of my peers are now well-off, bored and disappointed.
The magic number myth
When I covered the City for the Financial Times, I saw young bankers sidestep the vocation-or-security choice by embracing the fiction of “hitting my number”. They told themselves (and everyone else) that once they’d made their preassigned sum, before age 40, they would quit and become painters, winemakers, etc. Eventually, an older banker explained to me that this was a fantasy.
He said that with age, marriage and children, people become used to their income, draw identity from it and cannot give it up. They also come to realise that they’d be unlikely to become decent painters or winemakers if they start without any training aged 37. Anyone genuinely serious about those jobs would have a 20-year lead on them.
There’s a reassuring simplicity in shaping your life around income maximisation. “Looking after the family” absolves you from worrying about meaning. But I’ve noticed that there is a way around the mortgage trap. The key variable in most people’s financial standard of living isn’t their salary. It’s where they live, along with whether they ever got seriously ill or divorced. Given regional differences in house prices and the rise of remote work, young people today might be smart to take a job with a working-from-home future, then move to a cheap region when possible. A caveat: this strategy could backfire if you ever need to change careers, because the best place to do that is the big city.
Identity trap
Something else I’ve seen along the way: so much of career success is knowing how to behave at work. The usual advice is, “Just be yourself.” But this only applies if you’re a member of the dominant demographic in your workplace: a working-class man on a building site, a middle-class woman in a teachers’ staff room, a young white man in a tech start-up. Anyone else needs to learn the dominant group’s codes of dress, humour, eating, etc and put them on like a costume every morning.
One day the career will end, probably either sooner or later than you wanted. Don’t kid yourself that your institution cares about individuals. The point of an institution is that it can function without any particular individuals. The end is harshest for people who draw their identity from their job.
Written by: Simon Kuper
© Financial Times
