Our Worst Strength? Imagination
Is our worst strength as human beings our imagination?
I still believe it’s our incredible, potentially unique, animal skill, all the bizarre hypotheticals our brains can conjure. It fuels innovation, problem-solving, social organization, religion, and more.
Yet, it’s also a dangerous animal super-power. Individuals can imagine themselves right into genuine tragedies. We can lose ourselves in catastrophic, anxiety-fueled delusions. We can imagine the worst of our colleagues with no evidence. Fear can hijack the imagination engine.
Schizophrenia has always struck me as uniquely human disorder dependent on a brain capable of fantastic and dark imaginings.
How Imagination Can Go Wrong: A Tale of Two Cultures
When I lived in India from 1997-1999, I routinely bumped into village refugees in the city in which I lived and worked. These were young adults were trying to do anything to survive in urban Madurai, a city of 1.5 million or so, anything but stay in that damn natal village.
They often dreamed of setting up a shop since most of these ‘kids’ were not well educated.
I used to hang out with one of them. I’ll call him Selvam. He was selling cheap rubber sandals on the street. He bought them wholesale and marked them up minimally. They weren’t good enough to mark up high. I have no idea where this kid slept at night. I think he slept under a blanket next to his shoe inventory. Many vendors did this. Selvam had to bribe the police every month for the ‘right’ to sell on the sidewalk (or they would beat him and throw out his inventory). I saw the beatings of another vendor once myself, so I knew the threat wasn’t idle.
Indian social scientists have long noted that most poorly educated villagers who come to the city with these entrepreneurial imaginings wind up either a) living in poverty or b) returning, humiliated, to their natal village. The daily cost of living in urban India is something they often don’t consider. Because their relatives are generally village-bound themselves, these individuals may not have accurate access to the reality of what they’re walking into.
Or, as is also the case, they engage in willful denial in favor of an imagined future. I would go farther and call these wild, speculative imaginings what they are: fantasies.
I can offer no more significant evidence of the dark side of human imagination than young people’s career imaginings in most parts of the world.
For Selvam, the problem was very basic - he didn’t understand business finance or the cost of living where he would operate. He picked his retail category because it was the cheapest product he could get wholesale. His imagination was pragmatic but ill-informed. This kind of income fantasy is very common in cities of the developing world.
In America, there is a much more pretentious career problem at worm, but one affecting many young adults beyond the working class, those primarily with a college degree or more. I call them what they are: career fantasies.
And boy did I have one of those: becoming a professor.
I quietly ignored the multiple warnings that cultural anthropology had no jobs for its current grads, let alone those like me who would appear on the job market in a decade. At best, they were warning me not to take out students loans to finance a PhD in a field with limited commercial application, which I didn’t.
I stubbornly clung to my dream, in part, because I assumed it was the easiest way to get paid to be a writer. I had no interest in the freelance path as it looked in the 1990s. As I alluded to in another post, I was never one of those ‘suffering intellectuals’ who thought I should have to sacrifice my upper-middle-class lifestyle for a life of ideas. If this offends, sue me.
In the end, when I received my PhD in 2002, my personal life was in disarray. I was depressed, living alone and dreading interaction with my annoying colleagues in a field whose politics and ‘key debates’ bored me to tears. There were also even fewer jobs available than in 1994. And no one in the department had a plan to help any of us get them. It was all a mystery to them.
What I learned about career fantasies the hard way was experienced by millions of older Americans who went to school for one thing that, for many reasons, did not directly lead even to a related job, let alone a career. Or, personal events got in the way of pursuing the original career fantasy.
Then what?
America has literally no organized, professional system at the local to help the educated American get retrained for a new career. There are plenty of training resources, but not mature career guidance.
And so, most of us just read books, and explored alternative career paths on our own with little-to-no meaningful mentorship.
Yes, I did informational interviews with folks in potential non-academic careers, but this is not how to figure out if a career is a good fit for an individual. This would presume someone is willing to talk objectively about the downsides of their career. And most do not want to do this or do it effectively. They want to rationalize their career to themselves and to you.
Older Americans who chose to switch careers in mid-life have had to figure this out on their own with an array of highly biased information sources. There’s a reason that books like “What Color is Your Parachute?” have sold millions of copies over multiple editions. In our highly individualistic society, with so much absolute career choice and many exogenous forces pushing us out of one into another, millions of folks get lost, stuck and confused somewhere along the way to retirement.
If you think that the ‘free market’ magically aligns labor needs with human capital, look no farther for your rebuttal than the Baby Boomer generation. They actively re-aligned themselves, sometimes poorly.
In my case, I can tell you that market research was my best guess as to where to land, but, in hindsight, it is clearly NOT the best use of my brain. Wasted years transpired. Too many.
Individual humans did not evolve to stand in front of massive choice, alone, and make isolated decisions. Yes, we admire those who can do this in a perverse, cowboy-worship kind of way. But, in reality, individuals make better big decisions in the context of supportive communities.
A challenge arises when those communities are weak or they simply have no received wisdom to help modern individuals make decisions. This is often very true for mid-life career changers. Hence they have turned to the media and self-help for guidance. They have no other social audience to turn to.
But it is also true for any young adult fantasizing about a new career or a massively changed, yet well trodden, career path.
Individualism plays into our capacity for fantastic imaginings detached from empirical information. We even romanticize the naive entrepreneur who just figures everything out, even though, the evidence about entrepreneurship is that most fail because they didn’t possess enough foreknowledge.
In a rapidly changing world, with a rapidly changing labor market, it’s very hard to know if the degree you obtain will carry you to retirement any longer. Instead, we need better, nonpartisan resources than generalist books or informational interviews to help folks retrain and adapt during their lifetimes.
This is how we wound up with far more overly aspiring college graduates than our society needs and can’t fill jobs that have huge vacancy issues.
This is so on point. I think the distinction is that imagination is good when you see steps you can take for things within your own control. Here is my example. When I first considered writing on Substack, I am imagined how nice it would be to have a creative outlet to share all the ideas rolling around in my brain. I imagined myself into regular writing. What I did not do was imagine the part that depends on others. I did not let myself imagine others flocking to my work because that was out of my control. All I could do was focus and imagine myself into the writing life with no expectations of how others would respond.
This is good. career fantasy is definitely a seldom talked about phenomenon. Now that you bring it up I see plenty of examples. Thank you for the awareness. Maybe a part two on serial career fantasies. I know people.