What if People Don’t Want 'A Career?'

The modern understanding of a career in most knowledge work fields involves a non-trivial amount of sacrifice. You are expected to pay your dues, work your way up, and ride out the rough patches. Endurance is key. If you stick it out long enough, there’s something great on the other side — primarily security. Even in jobs where management is less c

What if, instead of working toward something for decades and barely tolerating the day-to-day process, we created a different value system around labor? What if we built our working lives around a concept other than endurance and submission?

You devote the bulk of every day for 30-40 years in the prime of your life to various companies to make them and their shareholders money and then you get ten years near the end of your life to do what you please. Sounds like a bad arrangement.

even though I am incredibly lucky and love my job, many of my habits are still guided by a fucked up hustle mentality that is driven by fear and anxiety (of missing opportunities, of losing my job, of being branded as lazy or ‘mediocre’)

Aspire is the key word here. It’s not that she rejects all labor — she rejects how central it is to our sense of self and worth. Katherout’s idea is frequently misunderstood and dismissed as laziness, entitlement, and/or lack of ambition. That’s wrong. And I think we dismiss it at our own peril.