Many people who can do many things nevertheless end up doing things that they really don’t want to do. They go to great schools, and opportunity cascades down on them like a fast rushing waterfall. They aren’t Bezos-level rich, but they are insulated from the demand of food on the table and heat in the winter. Why are these choice fruits of the meritocracy too often wilting on the career vine? Why is there so little boldness and such scant risk taking among those who can most afford it?
The setting is familiar. A group of the ostensible best and brightest sitting in a well appointed office: it could be a law firm, a bank, a consulting outfit, the open floor plans of the tech kingdom, even (and especially) grad school carrels. Everyone is vaguely dissatisfied: no one is entirely happy. Everyone is stressed, few are fulfilled. Everyone complains, nearly no one quits. All the boxes are checked, but to what end?
According to a 2016 Gallup survey, 71% of Millennials are “disengaged from their jobs,” and the polling company’s researchers note that They aren’t putting energy or passion into their jobs,” according to Gallup’s researchers. “They’re indifferent about work and simply show up just to put in the hours.” This case is pressed with specificity and force in William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, which paints a vividly macabre portrait of the misery of the best and the brightest, relentlessly pursuing gold stars and losing everything else along the way. His is a lost generation precisely because they’ve never gone off track, bent from the earliest ages to achievement and forgetting to wonder and wander along the way.
These are the peculiar and particular maladies of the meritocracy: excellence without direction. Heavy on hard work and light on purpose, all tactics and precious little strategy. Focused on destination and not on destiny. Penny wise and soul foolish. Hanging out in existing structures but lacking the sense of mission that would animate them or the fiery contempt that would topple and break them.
As the pandemic at long last seems to recede from view, or at least from the worst of its ravages, it is difficult to tease out whether this state of affairs will improve or devolve. The loosening of the relationship between work and geography opens up new possibilities, and the breaking of habit and routine, the fresh contingency of the commute, is something that should be welcome: what a job looks like is under rapid renovation. But for every story of reevaluation and fresh starts, there is one of endless days with little human contact, a blurring of the lines between work and life that cuts into free time and increases screen time. If work is everywhere and nowhere, where does that leave us, exactly?
The labor market as a whole is in the midst of tectonic changes that we are so close to as to not be able to see clearly. Data released just today showed over 4.4 million Americans quitting their jobs in September, the highest number on record. There are over 11 million open jobs in the country, an extraordinary figure that is both a political and policy conundrum and a cultural and social fact that is still unfolding.
While a numeric speck in this larger sea of discontent, the inconvenient truth is that the gilded aimlessness of the meritocratic class matters. It funds the lack of political and moral courage we too often see, the tendency towards the herd rather than the high ground. People who are unhappy at work are unlikely to summon the courage to think boldly outside of it. Outsourcing meaning during the day is a sure prescription for vaporizing it altogether.
My own path has been a blessed and bright one, signposted by the best schools and degrees that make people pause in conversation. But a credential is not a cause, and a degree is not destiny. I have been in too many environments where the talents of my peers were incommensurate with their own sense of fulfillment. Here are three maxims that have worked for me. I hope they do for you, too-
Live in the Tabs
We all know the scene. You arrive at an office or open up your laptop on your couch and enter the dreary landscape of Microsoft Outlook and Excel spreadsheets, databases and Word documents with an accusatory blankness. Maybe right away or maybe after a few minutes, the tabs on your browser start multiplying like mushrooms in a forest after a rainstorm. They are in technicolor, while everything else feels beige. They might contain several species: shopping, the news, The New Yorker, ESPN, Twitter, the endless temptations of the munificent internet. You turn to them guiltily, like a cigarette smuggled on the stoop of a party before entering.
This is the wrong approach. Your tabs are your clues, the breadcrumbs leading to doing something you actually love. When you linger in them, you are dipping a toe into other versions of yourself. It is worth thinking about whether hobbies and passions can grow up into a career. If you like reading The Ringer or The Atlantic, maybe you should write for them. If you look at dresses and pants all day, try designing them. Someone must: if not you, who?
It won’t happen over night, but the arc of a life should be towards the tabs, rather than away from them.
Pursue A Pull
Sometimes, a job can be so brutal that something has to give. To continue would be impossible: to quit, inevitable. But usually things aren’t like that. It is possible to soldier on, either for the paycheck, the stability, the sheer difficulty of transitions and swerving off course. Perhaps there is the sunk cost of the education that made the gig possible in the first place married to the judgment of friend or foe. In my experience, all of this really matters. Unless a push is nuclear, you are unlikely to generate the escape velocity necessary to leave.
That’s why a pull is so important. Everyone needs a North Star, the lure of a destination. Articulating what you want can be embarrassing, and it’s also hard. It means that you want to be somewhere other than where you are, maybe somewhere very different. But it is necessary. Whether it’s opening a bakery, teaching surfing in Bali, or writing the Great American Novel, to say it is the first step towards doing it.
My own experience is that people are galvanized when they hear about other people’s pulls and North Stars: it reminds them of their own gazing at the sky. Boldness is infectious, and making a leap is a flare in the night for others to do the same.
Live a Rough Draft of the Life You Want
The tabs are how you identify what you want. The pull is how you make moves towards accomplishing it. And the rough draft is actually doing a version of the life you want to live. Every writer knows that there can be no final draft without a rough one. You don’t have to achieve the platinum version of yourself today, and in fact you won’t. But it makes no sense not to at least be pointed in that direction.
The question to ask at any job is not what happens if you fail: rejection always bites, and missing the mark is always a sore and raw thing. But the more important thing to consider is whether you want the version of success on offer: if you got the promotion or made partner or manager, would you want it? If you don’t, you should be doing something else. Undoubtedly, every journey has moments of enlightenment and gifts of experience and grit. But to do the thing well, you need to do it poorly first. Thriving as an adult is less about becoming average at weaknesses than about maximizing strengths. Nobody gives extra credit for playing with one hand tied behind your back, or on someone else’s home field.
We sometimes think of courage and creative risk taking as virtues of the public square. But before they can live there, they have to be practiced and cultivated closer to home, in the course of a life and how it is spent.
There, in our private galaxies, the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher.
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