This is a short piece for a writerâs website now long gone. Like water around a rock in a creek, the piece flows around the idea of direction in life.
WITHOUT DIRECTION there is only drift. Edward de Bono said that, or something very much like it. The statement gets at the desirability of setting goals to move towards, of having a destination.
Destinations. Having one avoids drift. You have direction. It is best when your path, your trajectory through time and space to that destination is only loosely set. That allows for adaptability because conditions are likely to change in the time after you set off in your direction. Adaptability retains the opiton to change destination and the means of getting to it when circumstances require that.
Adopting a destination and the means of reaching it that is too rigid risks our falling into the unachievers basket if we falter. It seems there might be a little anxiety associated with achieving goals.
Goal setting is ingrained in society. Business people talk of heading towards corporate goals. Individuals are exhorted to set life goals. People without goals are viewed as somehow deficient. That is not true. It is a myth. A misunderstanding of the goal-obsessed. What is mistaken for mere directionlessness leaves you free to take side trips, to venture in unanticipated directions, to invite chance and serendipity into your life. Along those side trips you can discover your purpose, your mission in life. Sticking too rigidly to some pre-imagined goal can keep you on the straight and narrow and miss those side trips. I have known people who were perfectly happy in not having goals, in drifting on lifeâs currents. Sometimes, serendipity intervened to lead them somewhere worthwhile, somewhere that they were happy. A destination, unplanned that it was. Others? They still drift in a life. They are content without a destination to strive for. Letâs turn it around: the unplanned life, the free-ranging life is their goal, their destination.
I wonder at times whether there is something intergenerational in this. Back in the time of my youth the anxiety over career, home ownership, rampant disinformation and the doom and gloom fed to young people today was largely absent. Largely, but not completely. Today, younger people have climate change, environmental degradation, the future of jobs in an age of AI, geopolitical uncertainty and economic instability to deal with. We had the Cold War that could turn nuclear hot at any moment. It almost did on a few occasions.
Goals. It is as if the world is somehow stable enough and conditions unchanging enough to make planning for long-term goals realistic. Thatâs something less and less likely in the social, political and economic conditions now emerging.
How come? Well, itâs like this. Back a half century or even less ago, those who were young adults then might recall that our societies in the West were a lot less dynamic than they are today. Sure, there was change but it came at a slower pace. There was time to adapt. The impression was, and this was certainly my impression, that in looking forward there was a firm expectation that things would continue to unfold as they had done since, say, the mid-1950s. There was a sense of stability and continuity.
Life? It was popularly imagined as a connected series of stages. There was childhood then adolescence, the teen years then adulthood, families and a home in the suburbs, working life then retirement. The expectation was that life would follow the same track that it had for our parents. We would move from school, via university for the fortunate few, into working life to eventually retire and do⌠something?
The dawn of technological salvation
But then came the 1970s and the computer revolution. That was the start of the disruption. We didnât know that then, knowing it would have to wait some years. Sure, we knew that something was afoot, that something was stirring amid those spinning tape drives hidden behind closed doors in air conditioned rooms. We knew that change of some kind was imminent. We were techno-optimists fed since childhood on the idea of progress, that whatever changes came along would be for the better. Sure, there was talk about how computers could take jobs. There was a real concern about that and although it was acknowledged, the idea that computing would make the world a better place was pervasive.
As the computerisation of society and the economy got underway, the notion of computer-driven efficiency raised the idea of a shorter working week. This stimulated a public discussion about what we would do with all of the free time that computerisation of the economy would make possible. This was not some techno-utopian fever dream. It was a serious social discussion at the time.
The conversation disappeared some time around the end of that decade or the start of that following. It just faded away, carried off by the realisation that the expectation of how computing would bring shorter working hours and more free time was not going to happen.
The realisation came with the dawning of the neoliberal economic era in Western economies. Neoliberalism turns all it can into commodities. Peoplesâ time is no exception. The notion of technology liberating people from the existing working week was anathema to the neoliberal order. Time was a commodity and it could be monatised. That meant doing away with the expectation that computerisation would free workersâ time.
Now, decades later, the computing revolution has segued into automation and roboticisation, and AI is eating away at the rosy anticipation of any sort of fixed, or semi-fixed future. Things will not be as they were. Now, the promise that the computer revolution will give us back time taken from us by the necessity of work, and the conversation around that, has been forgotten.Â
The expectation of careers, or not
Part of the imagined future back in that earlier time was the expectation of careers, of a lifetime spent in one type or work, of years, decades perhaps, spent in one career and probably with one employer. That happened. It was the pattern that a generation inherited from their parents. It was the social expectation. It too was swept away with the winds of neoliberalsm.
With the disappearance of the long-term job and the single career life, we have moved from the job security and long-term employment of the mid-to-later Twentieth Century to being adrift in working life. That is less so for professionalsâââso far. It is more so for the 30 or so percent of Australians (with similar figures in the US and UK) trying to make a living in the precariat.Â
The precariat? Thatâs the social sector occupied by those in precarious working conditions. The casual and parttime workers (many trying to juggle more than one part time job), those doing project work and others on fixed-term work assignments. Some prefer this type of work but a great many do not. They look back longingly to the days before the present drift to the times of a stable working life.
In the late-1990s there was an attempt to rationalise the decline in full time work and the increase in part time and casual work. Someone, maybe a business writer, rebadged what was starting to happen as âportfolioâ work. The idea? You have one main type of work that you do. That can be supplemented by a less-skilled, lower demand type of work. No work in your main occupation? Well, you have your fallback skills. So, rather than see yourself as having a career in the work you trained to do, your work portfolio consists of that plus those lesser skills. You could be a bookkeeper but you could also be a gardener and a taxi driver on occasion. This is how it turned out for many.
 So, in the span of less than a century we have gone from the stability in working life that came with the mid-20th century and after, and on to being adrift in working life and moving from job to job. The question is this: where to now for the precariat and their economically precarious working life in the new norm?Â
 A couple I know have the good fortune to still be living that stable life reminiscent of the Australia of the mid-century to the centuryâs end. There is a certainty about them. Not a smugness, more an assumption that things will continue as now. An expectation. They have secure jobs, careers with continuity and certainty. For now, anyway.Â
Another friend has passed through a succession of jobs since I met her at the start of the seventies. Work in a French perfume factory in Sydney, railway catering staffer, student, English teacher in China, journalist⌠thereâs more, but that list gets the idea across. Now, she is older and is on a part-pension that she used to spin out with modest earnings from her own one-woman catering business. Now, poor health has taken that away.Â
I mention her because her working life suggests something that those in their late youth or who were young adults when the seventies came around might relate to. This is a psychological thing and it marks those who experienced it as different from todayâs youth and young adults.
This is what I am talking about. For many growing up at that earlier time, the social pressure that drives young people today to focus on their career and on getting qualified for it was lacking. Not for all. The wealthier segment of the middle class placed great emphasis on its children obtaining a university degree. But it was the situation for many. Life was not a planned-out timeline for them. It was open-ended. They were more creatures of circumstance and opportunity than they were goal directed. Their lives were more spontaneous.
Jobs then were plentiful and it was not hard to walk into one when you needed an income, even if the work was dull. Inspiration, then, came more from life outside the workplace.
On being asked about their goals, some might say that they wanted to travel and live overseas for a while. In the late 1960s and over the following decade, going to the UK was a thing for young Australians. It wasnât just for the Swinging London scene. For some, it was to find a career and to search for opportunities that at the time did not exist in Australia.
For others, those with a with a sense of adventure, travel was an end in itself. Their search was for the experience of living in a different culture and environment. Some took off for India and Nepal. Others set off along the hippie trail across Asia and the Middle East, destination Europe and the UK. Some liked those exotic places so much that they settled. Theirsâ was a journey that is no longer possible. They were adrift in life in the sense that they sought sought experience rather than career. Experience was their destination.
My female friend I mention was one of that numerous milieu. She didnât follow the hippie trail across the continents, however her whole life has been spent seeking experience rather than career as a goal. She says that she has had a number of careers. That is true. Not lifelong carrers. Shorter term. But, careers all the same in that they were focused on skilled work practiced for a time.Â
Unlike other friends from the time, she did not go to university on leaving school. She went into working life. Sure, she obtained a degree as an adult student years later when she knew what excited her in life, and then a masters degree in creative writing. That was not a degree that opened job opportunities. That was not important. It was more one that filled her needs for one of the things she likes doing in life, which is writing fiction. It is difficult to turn that into a career and doing that would miss the point, for she is happy in a life where drift has washed her up on the shore of a small regional city in a distant state. There, she found home and community.Â
 In my first paragraph I said that lack of life goals, being adrift in life and happy to move from job to job, place to place, raises the risk of falling unto the unachievers basket. That is not my term. It is one that those on the straight and narrow life path level against the free-minded whose goal is experience. I think that term needs a rethink now that more people live in the new social class, the precariat.
Life pulls on one direction, convention in the opposite. Fortunate are those who can combine them. It is they who show us that being adrift is not such a bad thing after all.
jbbartram-illu
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk