It feels like all employers now want candidates who are obsessed with the role they applied for.”
Or they want candidates willing to role-play that obsession. This seems much more probable on priors, easier to access from any plausible naïve view of the world if you’re not unseeing adversariality, and at least as consistent with the data.
I implore you to consider that different times call for radically different sorts of work, and you now have sufficient evidence against the hypothesis that the right thing to do is try to contribute to the shared project our governing institutions are recruiting you for. John Adams formulated this very tidily:
The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts. I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
If you find yourself confronting not rule of law, strong property rights, and voluntary mutual exchange, but something more like Hobbes’s state of nature:
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
then you’re in the first stage of Adams’s developmental pyramid, and work on the later stages is only helpful in special cases, not generically.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
Or they want candidates willing to role-play that obsession. This seems much more probable on priors, easier to access from any plausible naïve view of the world if you’re not unseeing adversariality, and at least as consistent with the data.
I implore you to consider that different times call for radically different sorts of work, and you now have sufficient evidence against the hypothesis that the right thing to do is try to contribute to the shared project our governing institutions are recruiting you for. John Adams formulated this very tidily:
If you find yourself confronting not rule of law, strong property rights, and voluntary mutual exchange, but something more like Hobbes’s state of nature:
then you’re in the first stage of Adams’s developmental pyramid, and work on the later stages is only helpful in special cases, not generically.
Cf also Ecclesiastes 3: