I am a student at an elite (top 3) university in the US. I find that the disposition towards work I have inherited from my father is inimical to my success here.
The true believer in the Labor ladder does not work for money. They do not seek to be extraordinarily rich or be free from the burden of work. They also do not work out of passion: living by “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is as unrealistic as waiting around for your One True Love to come along. Work is a matter of virtue and duty. You work because your work keeps the world turning. You work hard and take pride in the quality of your work.
At an elite college, the selection process creates two extremely distinct types. There are students who are world-class hoop-jumpers. The majority of them go into consulting and finance. They use the resources here as well as possible. My instinct is to write them off as grifters who do no Real Work, just translating network and credentials into more network and credentials.
Secondly, there are the students who attest to the quality of the system. They are either monomaniacal in their passion for one area or genuinely brilliant and prolific across many areas. I often wish I could be one of these people, because they do not need to strive or misrepresent anything to get employed. But that’s just a dream. I care about good work, I care about learning, but too broadly and not deeply enough to make things simple.
It feels like all employers now want candidates who are obsessed with the role they applied for. They want people from the second category, who dream about C++ or data analysis or mechanical engineering every night. But those people are rare, so they usually end up people from the first category who are good at pretending to care.
What happened to the people who don’t love the job, but can just do it? Who just want to do hard work without being expected to have an undying passion for it? I can’t stand misrepresenting myself. It makes me nauseous. It’s a constant battle between my disposition and my fear of squandering what I have.
In his autobiography The World of Yesterday, Austrian author Stefan Zweig writes of his father:
That he never asked anything of anyone, that he was never obliged to say “please” or “thanks” to anyone, was his secret pride and meant more to him than any external recognition...it is out of the same secret pride that I have always declined every external honor; I have never accepted a decoration, a title, the presidency of any association, have never belonged to any academy, any committee, any jury. Merely to sit at a banquet table is torture for me; and the thought of asking someone for something-even if it is on behalf of a third person-dries my lips before the first word is spoken. I know how outmoded such inhibitions are in a world where one can remain free only through trickery and flight and where, as Father Goethe so wisely says, “decorations and titles ward off many a shove in the crowd.” But it is my father in me, and it is his secret pride that forces me back, and I may not offer opposition; for I thank him for what may well be my only definite possession-the feeling of inner freedom.
This expresses my own sentiment, which I did not choose so much as inherit.
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?
I am a student at an elite (top 3) university in the US. I find that the disposition towards work I have inherited from my father is inimical to my success here.
The true believer in the Labor ladder does not work for money. They do not seek to be extraordinarily rich or be free from the burden of work. They also do not work out of passion: living by “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is as unrealistic as waiting around for your One True Love to come along. Work is a matter of virtue and duty. You work because your work keeps the world turning. You work hard and take pride in the quality of your work.
At an elite college, the selection process creates two extremely distinct types. There are students who are world-class hoop-jumpers. The majority of them go into consulting and finance. They use the resources here as well as possible. My instinct is to write them off as grifters who do no Real Work, just translating network and credentials into more network and credentials.
Secondly, there are the students who attest to the quality of the system. They are either monomaniacal in their passion for one area or genuinely brilliant and prolific across many areas. I often wish I could be one of these people, because they do not need to strive or misrepresent anything to get employed. But that’s just a dream. I care about good work, I care about learning, but too broadly and not deeply enough to make things simple.
It feels like all employers now want candidates who are obsessed with the role they applied for. They want people from the second category, who dream about C++ or data analysis or mechanical engineering every night. But those people are rare, so they usually end up people from the first category who are good at pretending to care.
What happened to the people who don’t love the job, but can just do it? Who just want to do hard work without being expected to have an undying passion for it? I can’t stand misrepresenting myself. It makes me nauseous. It’s a constant battle between my disposition and my fear of squandering what I have.
In his autobiography The World of Yesterday, Austrian author Stefan Zweig writes of his father:
This expresses my own sentiment, which I did not choose so much as inherit.
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: