Careers Are A Tragically Lonely Pursuit

trust me: no one has your back

Photo by Gelatin: https://www.pexels.com/photo/young-female-blowing-huge-balloon-in-sky-6357184/

If what this woman is doing looks risky, welcome to pursuing a career. No one is helping her rise up, and no one will help you either. OK, they may try (or pretend to try), but the reality is that you are doing this by yourself. If you doubt the risk here, accept that you will likely be laid off or fired at least once. 80% of older Americans aged 45-74 have experienced either by this point in their lives.¹ Baby Boomers and Generation X are the first generations that came of age understanding that job security no longer existed for the competent worker. This is the primal alienation of the American worker regardless of social class. It’s sad, but it’s one of the great levelers - getting laid off.

Taxes. Getting Laid Off. Death. Three things we all have in common.

Except for my Dad. He never got laid off or fired. And neither have I.

Wait. My generalization! Is it breaking down? Hang on. Exceptions often prove the rule in social science.

My Dad spent his entire thirty-year career as a corporate attorney. He had three positions and applied only twice for jobs. Who sprinkled pixie dust on his crib? My Dad’s idea of career insurance was to accumulate three high-value specialties (SEC law, mergers and acquisitions, and healthcare/HMO law). But he never really once had to think about leaving the law profession. He would always be in demand.

Let’s unpack the unconscious logic of his work life: My Dad picked a highly regulated profession (law) and pursued a corporate legal career within that profession involving only three ‘jobs’ in thirty years.

A profession. A career. A job. The difference between these three terms is how you approach acquiring your income. Professions modify careers. Careers modify a string of jobs. You can easily string together jobs without having a career or a profession. Language is fun, isn’t it? Argh! Finally, we don’t view someone who has worked on and off as a waitress as someone with a ‘career.’ They are trying to survive. Tip these folks heavily. People doing minimum wage sh*t jobs don’t consider their work a career.

A career is a term we reserve for jobs that are a) modern and b) pay more than minimum wage + tips, even though plenty of minimum wage jobs have a wide bandwidth of skill competence (ever had a lousy wait person at a restaurant?). A career implies you believe you have options for upward mobility, which many Americans have had since WWII.

The professional route to employment remains the most secure (and expensive) way to do this income-generation thing. It’s like taking a rocket to orbit. My Dad rode the equivalent of a Saturn V (in the 1960s!). The problem for America is that very few of us will ever be professionals in anything. It’s a tiny tribe.  Among older Americans in my research, only 6% have an elite professional degree (MD, JD, MBA, or Ph.D.).² The architects don’t add up to many folks, so I left them out. That’s less than one out of ten folks with the career security of a professional degree. If ALL your friends have one, you now realize what a ridiculous social bubble you live in. Snob.

With or without a professional degree, many of us will try to find a ‘career’ because building on a consistent, compounding skill set over time (with or without certifications) makes us more employable and promotable over time. It gives our adult existence greater meaning and symbolic power in conversation too. A punchy career tag has more impact on our social lives - “Oh, you’re an anthropologist? Wow. How interesting.” Or, so we were once told.

“Careers” differ in the a) experiential knowledge sets accumulated, b) formal knowledge/jargon required to fit in, and c) categories of ‘job’ that fit within them. Switching both your job title AND your industry is the most extreme form of career change you can make, according to What Color Is Your Parachute’s 2023 edition. I’ve done it twice. So has my wife. It’s super stressful to take a degree from the past and some ‘transferable skills’ and pitch them to an unlikely audience. Monster.com is NOT how you do this.

I recently interviewed a 47-year-old woman from Kentucky who had wanted an office admin ‘career,’ so she wouldn’t be slinging burgers or standing in a soul-crushing factory line like so many of her high school classmates ended up doing. She grew up in Section 8 housing with a hard-working, 6th-grade-educated Dad and a Mom with mental health problems. Instead of a charmed secretarial career, Nancy got bumped around and only found 11 years of employment in her desired career, mostly underpaid and miserable. The rest of her work time has been anything she could find that involved a desk. She got trapped in white-collar hamburger slinging. Now, she’s unemployed as admin work has gone part-time and to younger people.

One of the modern behaviors signaling an upwardly mobile American has been pursuing a career instead of a) defaulting to the family business or b) stringing together unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Tens of millions of Americans do the latter their entire lives. Trust me. You probably don’t hang out with them. If you ask terminal high-school graduates with no certified skills (e.g., an electrician’s license) what their ‘career’ is, they will probably laugh at the pretense of the word when applied to their string of jobs. “Careers” are for individuals who don’t feel they have to view their lives as survival. I assure you the old-time family farmer saw his life as survival. He didn’t ‘retire’ to compose his memoir on how farming builds character, resilience, and grit. The latter style of memoir requires a self-absorbed careerist person as its author.

But, let’s get real: the entire notion of a career and upward mobility through pursuing one is a profoundly male-biased concept, as Micki McGee aptly puts it,

This model of human action, which emphasizes the individual’s independence or “agency” over the impact of the social milieu, was a profoundly masculine model….it was rooted in the values of a commercial sphere that had heretofore been dominated by men…³

I would go further than McGee and say that women have only recently had the luxury of planning a life entirely focused on their careers. Men have had that luxury ever since they abandoned the family farm or trade in the 19th-century kickoff to industrialization. They just dragged their families around with them. In patriarchal societies, individualism took off among urban men first. And not having children was also the critical lifestyle choice that made a pure career focus possible for modern women. All other working women have been tugged this way and that, battling guilt and resentment until the children leave home. That’s an 18-25 year emotional tug-of-war between two central identities: Mom and Career Z.

Another critical facet of modern career seeking is that, as McGee \ notes, a modern career is divorced from community commitments or obligations (unless the ‘job’ is tied to local government institutions). Or any responsibility other than contributing to the house ‘kitty.’ There is a frighteningly archaic, clannish-ness to how we pursue, manage, and reinvent our careers.

In our careers, Americans most easily believe that we are lone actors, battling for our sole survival first, secondarily for a family standing behind us with open palms (I wish! More like palms handing me a list of chores). Those of us who pursue careers find that work is the one everyday cultural domain in which we positively worship our individuality as cultural beings. This is true even when class privilege, gender privilege, and racial privilege (or the stigmatic inverse of each) are clearly at work behind the scenes of our journey.

The tragedy of this lonely thing called a career is that when we get laid off, or fired, or have to jump off a moving train that is slowly killing us, there is no ritualized process to help us through the limbo, the betwixt and between, the shadowy tunnel leading to our next position.

In closing, I’d toss out at least four reasons why career problems become so alienating for Americans:

1. We don’t tend to marry or partner with people in the same career or industry,⁴ so there is no domestic source of consolation and implicit understanding. You may not be in a relationship if you have never listened awkwardly to your partner vent about career problems you don’t understand. Check with your therapist. This wasn’t true for the 19th-century family farmer. Everyone in the family was a farmer. It was a shared lifestyle as work.

2. Throwing away the sunk cost of time/money invested in existing skills is emotionally tragic and devastating to the individual who acquired them. You have no idea how many Professors out there wanted to quit but couldn’t get past the sunk-cost barrier.

3. Therefore, only the individual can fully understand the emotional hell of remaining in their mainly messed up career situation.

4. Career satisfaction is the perfect storm of social science complexity. It exists at the emotionally charged intersection of career, personal fantasies and dreams, desired economic reward, and whatever drives your fulfillment in a work-first culture like ours.

It is more than possible that we invest too much of our identity in work when deciding to pursue a career. I’ve had this conversation with colleagues before.

Unfortunately, I’m a mad careerist from hell. There is no redemption for me.

May you be saved, perhaps.

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More on this topic and the awkwardness of work in a hyperindividualistic society…in my new book!

Available on Amazon in all formats (except audio)

1. Older Americans National Study, 2022, n=2,983 adults with a high school degree or more aged 45-74; The Social Awareness Institute.

2. Ibid.

3. Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. 2005, Oxford University Press, p. 38

4. I encourage you to visit a fantastic website - Flowing Data, and see for yourself how unlikely it is that you are married to anyone in your career or even in your career class. The careers where this is most common? Doctors/Surgeons. Actors. Professors. https://flowingdata.com/2017/08/28/occupation-matchmaker/ Accessed May 8, 2023; data is sourced from raw 2015 American Community Survey datasets collected by the US Census.