Passionate About Your Career? Get Over It.

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Okay, I can’t really fault you if you’re passionate about your career. Or trying to be. Or want to be. Or are trying to find a career you can be passionate about. There’s been a lot of social pressure for decades to, you know, find and be passionate about your career. We’ll start with a story.

Long ago, and not that far away, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s initiated a sneaky plan to ‘make America’s heartland poor again.’ The idea, or at least the effect, was to make a lot of white Americans poor under the guise of making black Americans poor instead.

The plan worked and boatloads of white Americans in the middle of the country got poor and are still trying to figure out (and are seething with resentment) as to why they are poor and seemingly getting poorer and yet all anyone ever seems to talk about is helping Black Americans instead of them.

The answer to that question, dude, is that this is exactly what you signed up for when you bought into shit like ‘welfare queens’, union-busting, the Volker plan for battling inflation, ‘greed is good’, ‘trickle-down economics’ and all the other policies of the Reagan-era Republicans that were eventually co-opted by the Democrats as well. In the form of things like ‘welfare reform’ and the ‘self-reliance’ and ‘right-to-work’ laws, and lower taxes and free trade and a deregulation and all that capitalist shit you thought would save you and sink the Blacks that you wanted to feel superior to.

In reality what happened was that a rising economic tide sank all boats except the yachts and here we are today.

But the culture is still tossing out that ‘hustle culture’ and ‘passionate about your career’ propaganda and cutting food stamps and everything else not tied to work and generally talking up the value of work while beating up the people who actually, you know, work.

Way back in the 50s and 60s and maybe even the 70s, the US did not have such a work culture. There were lots of manufacturing jobs. And they were jobs. Not careers. You didn’t have to try to get ahead. You had unions and security and seniority and pensions. You had a good job and you lived your life and raised your family and hoped for better things for the future and you saved and you consumed and nobody expected you to ‘hustle’ or work a ‘side gig’ because you couldn’t pay your mortgage without one.

No one expected you to risk the fruits of your labor in the stock market and take a wild chance on when or if you would ever be able to retire or go to a doctor or any of the rest of it.

There were people on welfare certainly. And most of them were white. Because most of the people in the country were white. There were always waaaaay more white people getting government assistance than black people because there were always waaaay more white people in the country than black people.

So there were shit-tons of white people getting screwed by the welfare reform ideas of the 80s and 90s because there were shit-tons of white people who had been getting screwed since forever, especially in the American South, which has a long long history of screwing white people really badly and then claiming it’s not because it’s screwing black people worse.

So the Volker plan to tackle inflation took aim at the industrial heartland of American and pretty much KO’d anything that was left of the post-World War II manufacturing boom and changed the dynamics of the American economy significantly.

The change benefited the coasts (Wall Street and Silicon Valley) and the educated and the liberals….

and the people who didn’t vote for Republicans because the Republican way is to screw the people who vote for them (and the Democratic way is to tell the people that vote for them that they are helping someone who is not them – similar idea presented differently). If the Republicans keep going on the same track pretty much everyone who votes for them will be dead soon, which is basically what’s happening. But that’s another story.

Back to your career and being passionate about it. So getting rid of manufacturing jobs meant that many people had to get jobs that they trained for in order to stay out of poverty. They had to get educated to get them. Jobs that you have to get trained for are careers. It’s not just a job, it’s a career. Because you personally have to make an investment in order to get that job. You can’t just roll in to the Tyson chicken-processing plant, get a job, exhaust yourself working all day, go home, play with the kids and make a decent living.

You have to prepare to work. You have to have a career. Americans started having to have careers. They started having to have a college education. They started having to have student debt just to be able to work at all. Jobs, regular jobs, started going to immigrants.

And with all the immigration (lots and lots of it during the Reagan administration), those formerly well-employed white Americans (and black Americans too) who had good manufacturing jobs lost them, didn’t have unions to protect them, and there they are staring at immigrants getting the old-fashioned you-don’t-need-training jobs. No wonder they hated immigrants. Although what they should have been hating was Reaganomics but why hate someone who ‘looks like you’ when you can hate someone who doesn’t?

So long ago and not so far away the stage was set for you to be pounded with propaganda about careers. If you’re young enough, your parents are terrified (literally terrified) about your future because they know that the risk of poverty in the US is ever-present and you have to have a fucking career to survive.

And since you have to have a career that you have trained for at your own expense, then naturally the culture is going to tell you that you just loooooove having a career. A career is the greatest thing ever. Your career is your passion. You are entitled to and must strive for a career that is a passion.

So that you can devote your life to the career you’re passionate about and enrich other people at your own expense.

The expense not just of your student debt but of the rest of your life. Your relationships, friends, family, civic groups, hobbies, rest and relaxation, spiritual growth, mental growth, personality, etc. You must devote yourself to the enrichment of others because it is your passion.

It’s a strange system and if you’re not a senior citizen you probably have no idea that it’s not the only system. But it’s just a system. It’s not the ‘way things ought to be’, it’s just the way things are.

And the way things are can change. And they are changing. Partly because there are limits to what people can do, how much life they can sacrifice for the idea of work or career. Partly because people are realizing that no matter how hard they try, they cannot ‘get ahead.’ (The whole idea of capitalism by the way, if it is working correctly, is that no one ever gets ahead. The nation as a whole gets wealthier, but no one in it – save for a few true-blue capitalists – ever gets ahead.)

But it’s also changing because technology, the tools of work, change. And the next wave of technology, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and so on, does not require so much labor as the previous wave of technology. This shift has been going on since at least the dawn of the internet, and maybe longer. But nowadays, when the people who run big business think about the labor they don’t need anymore, they’re not talking about blue collar work. They are talking about white-collar work and ‘knowledge workers‘; in other words, the people who currently have careers.

The idea that you can find passion and fulfillment in a career is going to slowly and inevitably bite the dust for the next round of enthusiasm for something else. Because capitalism isn’t going to want you to work or have a career so much as it is going to want you to have some way to consume the things that the next wave of technology will produce.

Capitalism will want you to find your passion elsewhere so that you won’t whine about not having a career or meaningful work. Capitalism will want you to think that no one in their right mind wants meaningful work when they can have a meaningful exercise routine instead. Or whatever.

Capitalism will want you to start spending more time finding your passion in your women’s group, your walking group, your running group, your whatever group that is connecting through technology and leaving the technologists alone to do their innovative things and invent things that promise the hope that no one will ever have to do anything again.

This was the dream of the 1950s. That the technology of the future would give people more leisure not less. That you could do what you please or do nothing at all.

Now I’m not saying that entrepreneurs will suddenly cease to be passionate. Or that starting a business and making lots of money will suddenly go away as a dream.

But the idea that you can build your identity, your personality, your passion, around a career – that’s going to run smack dab into the economic realities of the future.

And the truth is, you know, you can have passion for your partner, your children, even celebrity gossip or entertainment news for all I care. You don’t have to have passion for a career or work to be a normal human being.

There are alternatives. There are so many alternatives that if you’d told someone in the US in say 1949 that you wanted to have a passion for your career they’d look at you like you were stark raving lunatic mad stop-talking-like-that crazy.

Again I’m not saying that no one will ever be passionate about what they do ever again.

There may well be passionate teachers. Seems like there always have been. Passionate carers who are passionately good at the human touch. Passionate stay-at-home moms. People will probably still have a passion to do good things for other people.

It’s just that the kind of passion that comes naturally to people is not the kind of passion promoted by the career culture. The passion that actually drives the career ambitious is not a passion for their career, but a passion for status. That’s a normal human passion. Not everyone has it but plenty of people do.

People want to look successful at whatever the culture values. So if the economic culture seems to value a career people will want to look successful at their careers and as though they revel in that success and that it is very rewarding to them even if, in fact, it isn’t.

If you think the culture rewards you for passionate displays of affection in public, well then if you have the normal human craving for status you’ll go out of your way to engage in such displays even if you greatly dislike the person you are supposedly showing affection to. That’s just human nature. People, by and large, don’t want to look like losers to the people around them.

But gradually people figure out that whatever the status marker of the time is – is not as rewarding as it’s made out to be. And then people get cynical.

And people are starting to get very very cynical these days. Or maybe they haven’t just started to get cynical. Maybe they are so cynical that the horse hasn’t just left the starting gate it’s traveled around the track two or three times. At any rate, the time is soon to replace the propaganda about careers with a fresh set of propaganda about something else.

Because the future is not going to be about your career. And the future is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.

So, you know, get pretty fed up with the idea that a career is even something worth getting passionate about.

Tags: AI, careers, Overwork, trends