Risky business

It’s been a concern of mine for a while that society demands that we have one love; one interest. At school we are told by our careers advisors to do what we love: to pick a career that we’re drawn to beyond all others.

              When we start to build careers, we’re expected to devote ourselves to the one thing. Unpaid internships have been banned, because they so obviously require financial resources and mean that rich people can get a headstart in their careers. But it seems to me that society has still shifted to a recruitment model that looks for prior achievement, not potential. Instead of doing an unpaid internship, you’re expected to have devoted your life to a career instead: to have worked into the evenings, or already be doing the artistic endeavour you care about. The voluntary and hobby world has become not a way to relax or spend your leisure time apart from the demands of life, but has become wrapped up into the rat race. Your leisure time now matters for your career.

              This is the same pressure that has turned the tiring and tedious 9-5 of the 1950s into the ‘are you a slacker?’ 9-5 of the 2000s. Technology might have made people more productive, but they are expected to work at least as long and show far more dedication.

              Most job descriptions I see nowadays include a requirement to be passionate or dedicated. It doesn’t matter what the company is: reinsurance, property, banking, media… everyone wants someone passionate about the job. Isn’t that weird? Do these recruiters really believe that anyone passionate about accounting in the reinsurance industry is a sane and balanced person they should be employing? Accounting is famous for being a dull job for dull people. And the basic tasks of moving money around and checking it’s been moved, and allocating money and checking it’s been allocated… these are not exciting. Yet people are looking for passionate accountants.

              I am fairly sure that they mean someone who takes the job personally: who works long hours to get unreasonable demands met and who prioritises the job over their life. Someone immature and at serious risk of poor mental health.

              When I look at the jobs people dream of doing most: musician, writer, performer, politician – I see more careers built on buying hope with your life. You work hard at something for free, or on the breadline, and if the mysterious wheels of fate grind the right way you finally get what you were working towards. And then you can say you earned it, because you definitely worked really hard. But the question remains: do lottery winners earn their winnings? Does taking the risk justify the triumph? Did all the other people working to be rock stars, performers, politicians not earn it? And how exactly do those wheels of fate work? Are they really random, or are some favoured over others?

              I’m not immune to those dreams. I chose accountancy because it seemed dependable and reasonable, not because I loved it. I’d love to be a novelist, a scriptwriter, a composer, a politician, a media commentator or a high-flying researcher. In fact, that ‘or’ should be ‘and’. I don’t love one of these more than any other. I look at these jobs and I see that to get anywhere I seem to need to devote my life to them. I know people in what could be the early stages of each of these careers and every single career seems to involve self-sacrifice in the hope of future reward.

              That’s the nature of life: you plan for the future. But there’s planning along a likely path, as I’m doing with accountancy; and there’s playing a lottery with your early life being the price of a ticket. Every person who wins gets a media profile demonstrating to the public that they did indeed work hard for their dream job. No-one sees the hundreds or thousands who never made it: the ones who had children and had to spend a bit too much time on childcare; or the ones who had an illness, be it physical or mental, and missed opportunities and work time; or the ones with family or relationship trouble; or other unlucky ones whose bad luck can’t be pinned so easily on one problem.

              There are many people who would relish the chance to do these jobs, or start along those careers, but who cannot afford to take the risk. Many are too poor or have fragile lives. That’s what social commentators focus on: the way that inequality seems to be exacerbated by the way society has demanded ever more up-front investment in a career before any rewards or advancement is received.  Even in accountancy and clerical jobs, in-work training is fading. Employers are looking for people who already have the skills they need but not training up their own staff. Individuals are starting to arrange training for themselves in the hope that it’ll pay off; from small CPD courses all the way through to large career changes. The risk is shifting from employers to employees, a natural consequence of labour mobility and a working culture focussed on financial costs, not cultural incentives.

              This is foolish; from Harvard Business Review to the recent survey by Glassdoor, commentators are pointing out that employees value a good culture and a place that invests in them, and stay longer there… even at lower salaries. They do use the skills they’re taught for the benefit of the company that teaches them.

              There’s another aspect to it.  The most lottery-like jobs are those with the most cultural impact. This is an important point in itself: we think a lot about GDP and financial success nowadays, but human nature still returns to culture as the most important goal in life. People don’t want to die merely rich; they want friends, impact, fame… to have made a positive difference to other people. They want self-expression. The life-lotteries are most extreme where the most demand is: where people are most willing to risk great chunks of life in the hope of winning.

              It’s not just about desire, though. There’s another factor in making this decision: risk aversion. The more we make careers like lotteries, the more we not only end up with a disillusioned and unhappy underclass of losers, but the more our leading cultural lights are risk-taking personalities. Risk-averse, cautious people are hugely less likely to throw themselves at something in the vague hope that it will pay off. That’s for people who are desperate , foolish or risk-takers (if there’s any difference between those last two); or else for psychopaths and other people who live for the moment without worry about consequences. Society is weeding out a whole class of people from jobs with any influence, and doing it much better than it used to.

              Does it matter? Should we celebrate risk-taking? After all, risk-taking got us the financial crisis and Brexit. It is people who don’t worry about risks and don’t assess or judge them properly who have caused countless disasters. Leaping before we look is a timeless problem. From an evolutionary perspective it makes sense for young men to be risk-takers: a population only needs a few men to be viable, making the others surplus. So why not take massive risks on the offchance of achieving something spectacular and not being surplus any more? But for a whole society to be dominated by risk-takers, and for its culture to punish caution is damaging.

              Sometimes an article will talk about rewarding risk-taking. This is probably just sloppiness, but it’s telling. When we talk about entrepreneurs in markets, we think of people inventing something: they add value through their work, or through novel creations and ideas. It is work, or new improvements, that deserve rewards. Risk, in itself, doesn’t seem to me to be valuable. Quite the opposite, in fact. If the expected value is the same, most people prefer the less risky option… unless they have something to lose. People hate losing, so I suppose the precarious state most people feel in nowadays, just a moment away from poverty, makes them more risk-taking. But risk usually has a price. At casinos, bank always wins. The same applies to introducing risk to society. Some people become more wealthy than anyone needs to be for a nice life, and some people… well, even in modern ‘civilization’, many people live unhealthy, unhappy lives in poky boxes or on the streets.

              Finally, on top of protecting financial inequality and penalising caution, there’s the problem of dedication for our mental health. If you’ve put your whole life into something and you don’t get a reward, it can be disappointing to the point of devastation. And since our life-lottery society requires massive up-front investment, many people have put their lives into something. Some of them survive well enough, but simply have mid-life crises where they try something new in life. Others fall apart. Devoting ourselves to one thing is unhealthy, not just because it makes us and our lives fragile, unable to cope with a problem in that area of life, but also because it makes our minds and thoughts narrow.

              If people have tried a broad array of things, they’re better able to cope with novelty and challenges in whatever they are doing. Yes, specialists know one thing very well, and we are being pressured to devote our time to becoming specialists more and more. Specialists are at risk: when that job goes, they have nothing. They must start again. They can’t get promoted, because they aren’t familiar with the other areas a senior role must manage. Yet I see great numbers of jobs looking for someone to do just what he was doing before, only more specialised, with no route for broadening the employee’s horizons. Senior managers aren’t offering a route up; they’re looking for someone to slide between roles below.

              In research many great findings come from serendipity; not just from a novel finding in your own field, but from linking someone else’s work to your own, or from bring areas together. That needs broad knowledge of other areas. The same applies universally. Some of the most impressive music, writing and art has fused different genres or approaches.

              But still, we want people to specialize, and specialize early. If you’re the youngest to achieve something, you’ll be assumed to be far better than someone older who has also achieved that. That other person might have done many things, and then achieved what you did in less time, but society doesn’t even consider the possibility of breadth. You are both assumed to have been on a linear path from childhood to this point. The second and further dimensions explored by anyone else are a liability: a sign of a lack of dedication and passion.

              Perhaps that’s what we should really be looking for: cautious, dispassionate people willing to give it a go despite having experience of so many other things. People who don’t take risks, who don’t cause plane crashes or space shuttle explosions or financial crises, but who create and improve, rather than gamble. Perhaps employers should start to take those risks and recruit not people who’ve already done the job in their spare time, but people who look like they could learn the job… and then bring it something new.