(2021-09-07) Warzel What If People Don't Want A Career?

Charlie Warzel: What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?' In all of my reporting on the future of work, one of the most interesting and potentially profound trends is the growing skepticism around ‘careers.’

Perhaps my favorite articulation came from YouTuber Katherout and the title of her May 2021 video: “I no longer aspire to have a career.” Aspire is the key word here. It’s not that she rejects all labor — she rejects how central it is to our sense of self and worth.

The piece, which ran with the headline, “Want To Work 9-to-5? Good Luck Building A Career” starts off with the writer firing her first-ever direct report.

what ultimately led him to the ax was his insistence on boundaries.” The dude apparently came in at the beginning of the workday (9am) and left at the end of it (5pm) and this was simply unacceptable

In this instance, the career is a device that businesses and managers can use as a motivation to get the deference and feigned enthusiasm that they want (and often feel they need) from employees

Katherout put it like this: "In reality, 40 years is a long-ass time…to pick something at 22 and stick with it. It actually concerns me to do the same thing for 40 years. Jt does not give me safety and comfort.""

In my own work life, I tend to have a hard time drawing boundaries. I often work way more than 40 hours a week

frankly, I want better for others.

What’s profound about the career rejectionists is that their guiding questions are simple. What if work didn’t make you feel awful?

The Rage of the Career Defenders

Two weeks ago, I published a piece entitled “What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?”

The career skepticism movement — honestly, it probably hasn’t even reached movement status yet

It is psychologically painful when a younger generation comes along, points out flaws in a system/set of rituals you were forced to tolerate, and then opts not to participate.

Here is an excerpt of an email I received (you can read all of it here but it was long) in response to the piece (emphasis mine):... Know that if you are average, you are 100% dispensable.

Even if you agree that a modicum of precarity and/or performative competition is a good motivator for workers and innovation, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about the deep inhumanity of that emailer’s argument.

There’s a cruelty to the “100 percent dispensable” line that reminds me of the premise of a recent column by Ezra Klein. “The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it,”

The piece is mostly not focused on knowledge work and I’m not trying to compare the indignities, outrages, and dangers of many low wage jobs to those of many office workers, but the ‘America runs on the threat of’ frame is helpful. Most knowledge work runs on the threat of your career being derailed by not giving enough of yourself to it.

this is generally how I see responses to criticisms of modern knowledge work culture. We treat the rise of worker power, not the encroachment of work into every area of our lives, as intolerable.

Here’s another bit from that reader email: If your boss fails to recognize above average performance, find one that does. (Change your Organization)

This was another theme running through the comments: the idea that, when we don't like the work we're doing, we are free to change jobs or careers.

That argument makes sense on the surface but, especially for the part of the workforce that graduated into and directly after the financial crisis (credit crisis 2008), that kind of freedom and flexibility is a true luxury.

These ‘you are free to leave and find a better job’ emails I got almost entirely came men who were late into their own careers.

While the older, small business owners were legion, the angriest people appeared to identify not as management but as regular workers. The commonality: they were also late in their careers

The reaction reminds me a bit of a previous newsletter I wrote about vaccine hesitancy. In the piece, sociologist Brooke Harrington argued that vaccine resisters were a classic example of a mark — and legitimate victims of a con. She said that, after realizing they’ve been conned, they double down

In the case of the angry late career workers, they are right to be mad. The system did fail some of them. At the very least, it abused a number of them

Before the comments section went to hell, a more reasonable reader offered this line in their larger critical review of the piece: "An employer only owes an employee two things: a safe working environment and the agreed-upon wages at or above the legal minimum." In terms of the status quo, he’s right. But what I'm arguing is that this is an unnecessarily cold way to approach our work lives. (values)


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