Career advice

I have had more than a few people ask me for career advice over the years; but I have never been able to be much help, I don't think. I can think of many reasons why such a person should Not do such a job, but almost never can I give any positive advice, because I can seldom think of any job worth doing.

Most of my career I was 'an academic' - paid by a university to do some combination of teaching, research and scholarship. Initially this suited me very well. The university ethos was natural and spontaneous to me, I had very positive feelings about the institution and my subject(s); and the actual job offered greater freedom than any other I knew.

The situation combined hope, potential and a fair degree of actual encouragement. And I was good at it. This was fortunate, because I don't know what else I was fitted to get paid-for in life, other than be some kind of academic. 


By the time I retired from ill health; the institution and therefore the job had utterly transformed to the point that I was in constant danger of being sacked.

If I had complied fully with expectations, even from twenty years ago, academia would have been as unfree as any ordinary bureaucratic or office job. My chronic non-compliance had gone from being tolerated (even grudgingly respected as an assertion of principle) to impossible. 

That process took about thirty years - and over the past thirty years all jobs that I know of, of every kind, in all institutions, have undergone a similar trend. Pretty much all middle class jobs are now qualitatively the same - they are bureaucratic, under omni-surveillance and micro-managed - indeed all jobs are parts of the same, linked system of Global administration.

Everyone is - mostly - a managed-manager; and the distinctive element of the jobs is shrinking and becoming more routine, standard, procedural.


There used to be a fair bit of active resistance to this trend, but now there is none. Even passive heel-dragging inertial negativity is negligible.

So choice of career does not much matter, beyond counsels of expediency.


If you are seriously interested in anything other than being a manager, then don't expect to do it at work; do it as a hobby.

Indeed, it is better Not to try and make a job from your passion - from that which deeply-motivates you. Because then it will almost-certainly be corrupted into generic, externally-managed units.

It has been sad to watch this corruption happen to pretty much everybody in academia, mostly sooner rather than later; and if you try to get paid for doing what you love, then the same will almost certainly happen to you.