Getting a Life: Running Away From Careerism
Not to do the thing where you start off a piece with a definition…but that’s what I’m doing. Careerism is the “policy or practice of advancing one’s career, often at the cost of one’s integrity.” Others adjust the latter part of that definition slightly—career advancement comes “at the expense of other passions or duties.” I cannot claim to speak for everyone, but as a millennial I received some heavy, damaging socialization around the pursuit of a career. I was taught, through various influences over time, that you need to find the career that allows you to be put to your “highest and best use.” You must work to discover your “zone of genius” and then relentlessly occupy it without remorse. If you aren’t working in a job that marries your talents, passions, and purpose (no matter how nebulous that concept is), you are ungratefully wasting your precious time on Earth. Indeed, the best way to enact change in the wider world is to discover the occupation that perfectly aligns with the issues you care most about and do whatever it takes—including incurring mountains of student debt—to get into that industry. Network your socks off. But beware: taking breaks will break you! You cannot let up or pause because somehow, everything relies on you and the work you do. I believe attorneys are extremely vulnerable to this line of thinking—your advocacy is your power. A perverse, exhausting Goldilocks tale with a dash of obnoxious hubris.
I’ve spent the last three years or so trying to deprogram myself from this line of thinking. It took a meandering set of career choices to get me there, to be honest. It took pursuing the roles I assumed I should want (the roles that “made sense” and seemed poised to practically become my identity), entering those spaces with sky-high hopes, having traumatic and/or abusive workplace experiences, and eventually becoming deeply disillusioned with the working world. I have seen some of the most toxic human behavior play out in movement spaces where we are fighting for the futures of our communities. Even when entering corporate roles with tepid hopes—knowing I was there for strictly utilitarian reasons—I still found the grind too merciless and the relationships too mercenary for me to survive. I tried all of the remedies that careerism would suggest are logical. Hopping from place to place to find what’s Just Right. Nonetheless, I became discouraged and, frankly, hurt.
I am now in a season of experimentation. I am implementing a mindset that some of my wisest friends have held for a long time. I won’t delve into all of the details, because my business is mine. However, one of the most rewarding and freeing parts of my experiment has been me trying to get a life. For the first time since I began working full-time in 2016, I have been purposely pouring into and focusing on my personal life. Not just my relationships with friends and family, or health, or exercise. But in particular, I have been returning to hobbies I loved as a child or teenager, or pursuing interests I assumed I had no time for. It has brought me joy and relief beyond comprehension. I am prioritizing exploring activities I love, even if I am truly terrible or just mediocre at them. I am not doing any of these things in the pursuit of excellence. I am doing them because they are simply worth doing. I am creating things for their own sakes. Because I want to, full stop. My life has become primary; my work is secondary or even tertiary. What’s beyond the back burner?
I am striving to get to a place where I am consistently operating as though my work facilitates my life and not the other way around. I often revisit a short essay called The Work You Do, the Person You Are by Toni Morrison for The New Yorker, published in 2017. She says:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
So I repeat the mantra as many times as I must, until it sticks. My work and my career are not my life. I seize my real life in my two hands and I make it beautiful. Work is a tool to help me do that; it does not determine the value of the life I create nor does it fill in the gaps of my identity. My job need not tell you everything you should know about the person I am. I will always do excellent work, and perhaps at times my work will help people I care about—my people. But my career trajectory will not be engraved on my urn; my employment will not dominate my obituary. The dash between 1991 and whatever year I leave our world will be full of the food I made or ate and the laughs I laughed and the songs I sang and the flowers I arranged and the plants I cared for and the pictures I painted and the people I loved fiercely. That is more than enough.
