This note was spurred by some thinking I’ve been doing lately about my job/career. Questions ranging from granular specifics of how i should upskill and continue getting better, to how much i should even “work” in the first place. The more specific questions have their own hub note at Hub on Career, Craft, SWE, etc.
There’s something i felt was immediately amiss about the starting point of the analysis. A “job/career” is a strange unit of analysis:
- I don’t care (non-instrumentally) about my “job”, nor do i care about my “career”. I care about the ends (instrumental and final ones) which those things can/do contribute to. What are those ends? Well, they’re simply all the things that i consider to be Valuable, Good, Desirable, and so forth. It’s long, but fairly typical, everything from knowledge to relationships to faith to simple pleasures to being liked to moral virtue, and so on. A job is simply a specific activity/implementation in pursuit of those ends.
- Furthermore, a “job” is just some set of actions that I’m engaging in. It’s just an amount of time that you are spending doing something, like anything else. There is some Value that is associated with that time based on how well that time serves the ends that i care about, just like with any other time i spend doing anything else.
Both these are horribly banal and obvious, yes. And also exceedingly vague (sort of by design when you zoom out this much), yes. But i’ve found these to be useful framings to intentionally adopt and deploy cause otherwise it’s easy to get stuck optimizing within some myopic constraints borne out of whatever associations I have with a “job”, rather than the actual ends that i care about.
- I “need” a “job” (laughs in destitution)
- I need “career” “growth” cause that’s what you do at a “job”.
- I need to “work” at X,Y,Z companies
- I need a “job” to make at least “X amount of money”. I need a “job” to be making progressively more money.
- I need a “job” for financial independence and security
- The “job” should take X amount of time out of my day. I should be “working” more or less.
If “jobs” were “important”, let alone “necessary”, why is this crackhead so JACKED
It’s part of a general class of issues where you end up optimizing some instrumental thing, having lost sight of the final ends that it’s supposed to be in service for (if it even was in service of those final ends in the first place!) and/or not recognizing the full diversity of instrumental methods at your disposal to pursue those final ends. The classic example is with money, the most easily recognized instrumental good: X person earns money for some final end, say, to give their family a better life, but they end up getting lost in optimizing for how much money they’re making, at the detriment of their family (maybe they’re always stressed and that hurts their relationships, maybe they don’t have any time to spend with their family, etc).
Other examples abound. The salient point here being that a “job” can be one of them. It can take a life of its own, obscuring final ends, constricting your perception of the full breadth of ways available to you to pursue them, leading you to optimize for value solely internal to it, and other failure modes.
Using the framings above and abstracting things helps keep the final ends in the picture, along with the myriad ways that they can be pursed rather than obscuring the final ends and/or constricting the ways to pursue them. It’s not about a “job” or a “career”, it’s about maximizing the value of my time, by pursuing the ends i care about, and that can be done in innumerable ways, within, outside, or orthogonal to a “job”.