Career vs Vocation

 I'm going to assert there's an idea out there, floating about society, and I leave it to you to decide how plausible my assertion is. The idea is some version of this:

"In the future, anything you don't want to do will be done by robots, leaving everyone free to only do what they want to do."

There is certainly, some history that supports a future hit by this trajectory - for example the washing machine largely automated what was previously a gruelling, time consuming task greatly diminishing the domestic workload such that it is possible to have two adults in a household both work 40 hours a week somewhere else, and get the laundry done without paying wages to someone to do it for the household.

In my lifetime, I can vaguely recall at one time garbage trucks doing weekly garbage collection used to employ crews of three, with two men running behind a stinky truck tipping the contents of bins into the compactor. Two of these jobs have been replaced by a robot arm, though I've lived in countries where it is still a manual exercise.

I open with this, because the idea that we are approaching some future where people do not do things they don't want to do, only things they want to do while explicitly promising an end to dirty jobs, shit jobs or whatever, implicitly promises an end to careerists.

At which point I have to define my terms. A vocation is a calling, you want to do the work. A career is more like a game, you do what you must to get what you actually want.

For example, being a volunteer worker at a mental health crisis line - someone who speaks to people who call in distress, is more likely to be a vocational calling - someone wants to do the work because it means a lot to them to do the work itself. There are examples of people who work such a job to some other end, than the job itself, Chris Voss, founder of Black Swan Consulting Group and a former hostage negotiator for example volunteered at a lifeline call centre in order to get a job as a hostage negotiator, youtuber Theramin Trees tells the story of a client who worked at a call centre for unhealthy self-serving reasons.

Similarly consider a sales team that sells pharmaceuticals, as has been portrayed in recent movies about the US opioid crisis. Here is a career that probably selects for careerists. People who don't particularly care about the work they do in and of itself, just what the work can obtain for them - high commissions incentivising "gaming" the regulations. For them, a highly addictive expensive drug is great as compared to a cheap non-addictive drug that resolves the same problem for the patient.

I would point out, that people have real needs for which, often, working is a reality. David Graeber distinguished between "bullshit jobs" and "shit jobs" where the former are jobs that are often well compensated but leave the people who have them with a strong suspicion that the job does not even need to exist. Shit jobs are jobs that need doing, but are not a great experience to have. 

To be clear, I have no problem with somebody working a shit job as a careerist. It might be hard to think of say, getting up at 3am every day to turn on all the deep fryers and ovens and grills so they are ready for a 6am breakfast service at a fast food restaurant. Or sitting in a booth policing a road boarder between the US and Canada for the night shift, checking passports, asking stock questions and pressing a button to make a boom gate go up and down. Or being a baggage handler at an airport. These are jobs people may feel no passion for, but they do them because they have rent to pay and children to feed clothe and send to school.

Further to the point, it's not like people with a true inner calling to be a veterinarian or field surgeon or civil engineer, don't also need to obtain food clothing and shelter. People who are more vocationally inclined may still desperately need the coincidence of being compensated for what they produce.

Then there's vocations, like in the arts. I am convinced that people actually need art. Whether it is observing that hunter gatherers used their downtime to paint on cave walls figurative representations of themselves and the animals around them, maybe deities and supernatural beings since 30,000 years ago or something, thru to people who get cranky when you interrupt the netflix show they've been streaming on demand and can pause and resume at anytime.

But, while society needs art, they don't need as many artists as society has, resulting in to some degree a style of toxic vocationism where people persist in roles that most people are indifferent to them doing. The problem is, how does an unpopular artist determine whether they are Joe Nobody or Vincent Van Gogh? There are multiple candidates to explain any artists lack of success, though probably it will be a lack of talent.

Alas, investment plays a role. Consider the following list: The Cruel Sea, Machine Gun Fellatio, Something For Kate, Spiderbait, Regurgitator, Silverchair, Grinspoon, Jebediah, The Living End, Powderfinger, Custard.

Compared to: Saskwatch, Eagle And Worm, Hiatus Coyote, Blackchords, The Bombay Royale... 

Those two lists comprise largely of Australian Indie Rock Bands. The first list are bands that toured and recorded largely from the mid 90s through to 00s. At the time, Nirvana had happened and the 90s saw a brief implosion of manufactured pop acts between like 93~94 to 97 when the Spice Girls dropped. I was too young, but the impression I have is that record labels literally walked into bars amid Nirvana induced confusion and gave record deals to gigging artists of the time. 

Triple J and Recovery were state funded institutions that were developing artists in the 90s and early 2000s with programs like "Unearthed" that discovered acts like Silverchair most notably, but many other acts that managed to top charts, sell out venues, tour profitably and like, buy houses and have a living as a musician. 

The later lists are like some of the biggest acts I was aware of by 2010. By that stage, if you signed with a record label, it meant they put your cds in some shops. Before you signed, you had to gig enough to get good, build a big social media following, pay to record and mix your own album, launch your album and sell enough copies to impress a label, crowdfund enough money from your fanbase to go tour a festival like SXSW or Glastonbury, then the label turned up and gave your seventeen piece multi-instrumentalist arcade fire inspired band a deal that meant they'd pay the cost of producing more copies of physical cds and you'd get royalties from sales. 

I don't think that early to mid 90s Melbourne was producing more talent that 2010s Melbourne. Music had changed, synths were back on stage, vocalists pounded on floor toms, men wore skinny jeans, but it's not like the population stopped producing talented artists who want to pursue a career in Music. Nor did live venues disappear despite a brief issue with retirees moving into the city and making noise complaints. I know Regurgitator are from Brisbane, Silverchair are from Newcastle or something and so on... my point would be in any given year of the 90s when I lived in Ballarat and went to exactly 0 live concerts or performances, I could name ten Australian indy bands, and my friends be they erudite culture vultures or meatheads with frosted tips and globe skateshoes would know who I was talking about.

I struggle to name 10 Melbourne bands from the 2010s when I lived in Melbourne and for three years or so was going to 3 gigs a week that I could expect anyone but a gigging muso from the period to recognize. Hiatus Kaiyote are probably the biggest act, and I would never expect anyone to recognize the name. They supported Erykah Badu when she finally toured Australia, they are multiple Grammy Nominees and have had their songs sampled by some pretty big names in hip-hop. 

Similarly if we consider the names: Leonarda Da Vinci, Donnatello, Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Fra Angelico etc. I don't think anything mysterious happened to make the High Renaissance take place in Florence conveniently where most of all the greatest artists of the time originated (with the notable exception of Raphael from Urbino) in Florence? 

I think the simplest/parsimonious answer to the mystery of why all the greatest artists in the world were born in the same place at the same time was because they weren't. Rather, that's where the money was to invest in art, so artists became excellent. 

It is probably the same with the 90s, we got so many great indy bands because there was money in being an indy band. I'd make a slight concession that there might have been a lot of money for indy alt-rock acts because the beginning of "The End of History" was more disorienting and more interesting than 30 years into "The End of History". 

So all that said, whether careerists or vocationalists are preferable is somewhat going to rely on context.

What's the meat though? What's the beef? 

I think the difference between careerists and vocationalists is likely the actual division that is tearing our world apart. Vocationalists can destroy themselves, and if grossly incompetent technically someone could be so passionate about performing a role that they could destroy an institution. But generally, I predict that if you investigate the slow decline and failure of once pride-worthy institutions, we will find a careerist fucking it up.

Someone who had to be King, but had no interest in ruling. 

Careerists are I suspect, the far more numerous of the two broad populations. Being a vocationalist may even be seen as being somewhat defective in most working contexts. Think of the detective or soldier in a movie that refuses to take a desk job, preferring to be out in the field, or volunteers for more tours because the theatre of war is their home. These characters are often viewed by the others as abnormal, some kind of freak, though useful. Movies are not generally made about a detective who refuses a promotion in order to continue to fuck up cases and let criminals go free, but I'm sure it happens.

Many people, are likely a subtype of careerist I might dub passive-careerist. These are people who may end up in middle management, because they took a promotion because it was a promotion, not thinking that if they became assistant manager of a two person department (say a logistics department that mostly just calls up warehouses and asks where packages are) they have stepped off the path to much higher positions had they remained in the sales department with a lesser title and lower wage.

I would also hedge against any "Great Careerist" theory of history. I don't think the damage is just done by individual careerists getting into critical positions of power, with former British PM Liz Truss being a notable example, trashing the UK economy in a matter of weeks and serving the shortest tenure of any British PM. 

Careerists being numerous can quickly create a careerist culture, for example - gamefying the work. For example, a chef at a fastfood restaurant is told that his performance is measured by minutes-from-order-time. This metric is meant to encourage him to respond to orders quickly and efficiently, instead he grills up and prepares a bunch of burgers before orders start coming in, so that when they do, they are ready to go. His manager gives him his monthly numbers and says something like "way to go you're getting orders up in under a minute! That's phenomenal!" The chef gets promoted to a management position supervising other chefs that work the grill because his numbers are so good. He wants to look like a good manager, so he actually encourages the chefs that work under him to start pre-cooking food before orders come in.

Meanwhile, though never investigated, because the fast food restaurant went out of business, around the time this careerist started gaming his job, Yelp reviews started to drop in average score, and comments about their food being overcooked, or having got their order fast but it seemed soggy or had gone cold etc. start appearing. Also, the administrator responsible for stocking the pantry and fridges notices that they were ordering more from their suppliers, and that they also had to start paying for additional garbage hauling because the kitchen's waste output suddenly increased. Due to a lack of communication between management, the business didn't realize that these were the product of a line cook gaming his stats. So costs went up as customer satisfaction went down. The only positive comment left in reviews was how quickly customers got their food, and tragically this meant the chef-cum-manager was actually encouraged to keep making the problems worse, while the dilligent quartermaster trying to keep costs under control, was blamed for the increased expenses.

I've always liked the heuristic "What gets measured gets done." because it's more instructive than first glance. The first glance leads one to intuit it is advice - if you want something done, start measuring it. The second glance might reveal that it is also a caution - if you are measuring something, people will do it. Mindlessly.

My beloved NBA is heading toward disaster, and I suspect it is largely due to careerists. Perhaps it is no more poignant than to look at recent All-Star games. For those out of the know, and from different countries (as I am) to the US, in US sports-codes there's an almost bizarre tradition of an All-Star weekend, this is where fans, players and journalists get to vote on who the best players in the sporting code are, and teams are made up of the highest vote getters, then those teams play eachother in an exhibition match.

Perhaps most bizarrely, professional athletes used to take these games really seriously. You can see videos on youtube of the All-Stars sprinting up and down the court and trying their hardest to win the match. There have been few serious injuries, but Dwayne Wade did break Kobe Bryant's nose one all star match, and he had to wear a protective mask in regular season games while the bones healed. Kobe Bryant once called the All-Star Game "The Greatest Pick Up Game In The World" and the award given to the best player in the All-Star Game is now called "The Kobe Bryant Trophy".

In recent years though, the game is a poorly rated farce. Nobody plays defense, the scores are absurd, you can literally watch players standing around as they just watch someone run up for an uncontested dunk or to shoot a wide open three-pointer. Even coaches, bestowed the owner of coaching the Eastern or Western conference teams, have called recent All-Star Games "the worst" games of basketball ever played, and absolutely disgraceful, in their victory press conferences. I believe current plans, are to simply scrap the All-star game.

The other mainstay of the All-Star Weekend, was the Slam Dunk contest. previous winners include Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Domonique Wilkins, Spudd Webb, Nate Robinson, Dwight Howard, Blake Griffin...big names. 

Admittedly, it is hard to keep a slam dunk contest interesting for half a century. At some point the creativity got ridiculous, with choirs and cars driven onto the court to be jumped over. But the last two slam dunk contests were won by Mac McClung, who doesn't even play in the NBA, he is on the development team roster. He is a great athlete with creative dunks that deserved to win, but the big issue is that star players no longer compete.

This is careerism 101 - you want to get paid, but you don't want to do the job. Except it isn't. The All-Star Weekend is not the job, its a bizarre thing that interrupts the regular season and competition and though it distributes a recognition of sorts, it if anything jeopardizes the ability of pro athletes to do their job, as they could injure themselves in a contest that doesn't count towards what gets them paid the big bucks.

There probably is some cash consideration paid to the athletes that make the All-Star teams, in order to fly out and play. They are unionized. (I looked it up, players on the winning team get $100k in prize money, losers get $25k, you wouldn't know that losing the all star game just cost you $75k before tax though to look at recent games, an amount substantially higher than any fine the league levies against players for criticizing refereeing etc.) 

Admittedly, only relatively recently did NBA players start earning Michael Jordan mid-90s Chicago Bulls money for playing. Rules were put in place so no one team could pay one player so much money again. Inflation basically allowed Steph Curry to be the first player since Jordan to earn such money. But overall, most NBA players earn way more than 90s counterparts. 

Sadly, it seems, that is why they are there. This current season, the NBA had to implement a rule stating that a player was not eligible to win awards like "MVP" if they played less than 65(?) regular season games. Playing all 82 games of the season used to be considered a badge of pride, athletes played through injuries, no doubt sometimes foolishly. Now, a practice emerged called "load management" and the results have been dubious. 

I mean, there's actually so many factors contributing to the NBAs current relevancy crisis, that I could get bogged down in it. Suffice to say, I believe it to be a highly visible example of an institution destroyed by careerist tendencies. Almost everyone involved wants the results of a pro-athlete organisation - Accolades, Esteem, Sponsorship, Money etc. but there has been a sharp decline in playing competitive basketball. 

This divide has come to inform my brief history of humanity - someone does something of value and gets recognized, then the next generation comes along and tries to recreate the recognition without recreating the value.

Most people don't create, they surpass. They see what someone else has already done, and try to do more than that. So they try to beat a sales record, they don't generally create new products and services. 

Vocationalists tend to think about why the job exists, and with deep enough introspection can lead to innovative solutions. Careerists don't, their creative act is often gaming the proxies by which we try to determine that value is created, that jobs have been done.

Alas, we live in a careerist world. Careerists aren't going anywhere and I'm not advocating a careerist genocide. I'm advocating that this divide should be discussed, because it creates real problems.

I might conclude this post, this thought, this sketch, by circling back to David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs", that article created an immediate impact because Graeber an anthropologist described something all around us that wasn't really discussed. It still is inadequately discussed, the discussion has in my opinion barely evolved.

This is likely because bullshit jobs are a product of the inherit inefficiency of trying to organize society. We wind up with these situations where nurses earn hourly wages close to the minimum required by law, yet a few blocks from the hospital is an office building, where someone spends their day browsing real estate websites not because they are a realtor, but because they don't really have any real work to do but are paid enough that they can borrow funds to buy superfluous housing to their needs. 

I defy anyone who has worked in a workplace with more than 8 people, to have never wondered if one of their coworkers would create more value if they didn't turn up to work at all. An easy target is middle-managers of course, but in my experience this can be true of kitchen hands, waiters, technicians etc. 

Perhaps distinct from bullshit jobs and shit jobs, are people who are simply shit at their jobs. For example, for all the supposed efficiency of the market, in economic downturns when firms are forced to downsize their payroll, it is incredibly rare for an efficient firm to go out of business because they can simply no longer afford to pay their 100% efficient and necessary staff. No company, I have ever heard of, runs that lean.

There is always fat to be trimmed, and careerists can be the biggest victim of this, as often their career path has involved becoming quite expensive while producing dubious value. 

I once worked for a company, where I often got into quite chaste arguments about the jobs priority with a supervisor. We both had the same goal - protecting people's jobs. However, he felt that the way to look out for everyone's jobs was to, for lack of a better expression, play the game. Try to be as productive as possible in accordance with what was measured. I did not, I argued that we should question the game in order to ensure we were doing what we were actually paid to do, so maybe do the work instead of play the game.

At one point, I was delegated to head upstairs to the suits who had questions about why certain jobs weren't being done. I somewhat incredulously explained that the reason was that those jobs took a long time, which meant our jobs per hour rate dropped and people got punished based on that, so that nobody wanted to do that job because we were, simply put, punished for doing it.

This was my first inkling, that the company I worked for was dysfunctional, predicting a trend of decline, long term collapse.

At another point, the guy I used to argue with received a promotion to the next tier, literally a few weeks later he was made redundant, along with everyone else on that tier of management. I felt no schadenfreude, to see someone's philosophy so spectacularly refuted. It was a tragedy of myopia, a fundamental lack of understanding that corporations don't exist in a vacuum, but in an environment. That "what gets measured gets done" is also cautionary. 

What was worse, was that level of management, was the level of management that actually managed the department. Making them redundant resulted in sudden and collosal brain-drain regarding how things were done. Near as I can piece together, the manager the company thought ran the department had some years ago persuaded them to let him hire an assistant because he was swamped or something. That assistant was supposed to do his job, meaning he could now take home his pay check without doing any work. I literally cannot imagine what he did all day for years upon years.

The thing was, his new assistant followed his lead - delegating almost the entirety of their job to the next level of managers down. They were very hands off. I infer this because on the few occassions I witnessed them stepping in to "run things properly" it quickly became clear they had no idea what they were doing or how things worked. And I mean no idea. 

Fucking careerists. These two had hit the jackpot finding a way to generate minimal value for maximum return. Then unfortunately, some higher ups fired the entire level of management that actually managed the business. After this, it was too late to win those managers back, they quickly discovered the assistant manager was useless and fired them, leading to the discovery a short time later that the manager of the department was also utterly useless.

I feel somewhat comfortable about writing this, because after a long dysfunctional decline, that company no longer exists. 

The question that remains is, does all of human society operate more or less like that company?