What Are You Doing With Your Life?
words & artwork by
Harriet Barton
Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, which made the Booker shortlist last month, follows one weekend in biochem PhD student Wallis’s summer. The book covers race, sexuality, friendship and anxiety. I read it a few weeks ago now, but Taylor’s deeply emotional and realist prose stuck with me, a handful of quotes lodging themselves in my head and circling round to the forefront every once in a while. One such line: ‘Decisions were made every day about what sort of life they wanted, and they always answered the same: Only this, only this. But that was the misery of trying to become something, misery that you could put up with because it was native to the act of trying. But there are other kinds of misery, the misery that comes from other people.’ Wallis is struggling through his PhD, through microaggressions in the lab, is demotivated and facing the looming spectre of The Future with plans that are falling apart. I’m at a place in my life when I’m thinking increasingly about Real Life. The pandemic has given me, like many others, pause for thought – what do I want? What makes me happy? When older people talk about the ‘real world’ they’re talking unambiguously about taxes, mortgages, a 9-5 job, a Career Path. If that’s the case, that reality is equal to some kind of orderly misery, it would make sense that I’m thinking about it now – when the rules of normal life have been temporarily suspended. Not only that, but the pandemic has coincided with my reaching the end of academia, for the moment: like around 600-700,000 other under- and postgraduates this year, I finished my Master’s degree and was flung onto the pitiful job market. Do we begin life now? What have we been doing until this point?
The truth is, I was aware of this division between ‘real’ life and academia within weeks of starting my degree. Or, to be more accurate, my first run-in with mental illness and my quick decline forced me to re-assess the narrative that’s burned into us from being children – the shining, yellow-brick Career Path. I was eighteen and a month into a Law degree at university. Law is so far removed from who I am as a person (so black and white, little room for interpretation, dull) it begs belief that I chose it in the first place. But I did, because it’d almost certainly get me a good job. I was sowing the seeds early, securing the next few years. Nearly everyone I knew would ask me, why law? I had no passion for it, had never studied it, had historically excelled at English Lit… but that wouldn’t get me a job, would it? I figured that I’d just turn my hand to Law like I had with other subjects at college. Spoiler: you do not ‘turn your hand’ to Law. I only needed four weeks and an ‘Introduction to Law’ lecture to tell me this – you’ve got to be in it, entirely. So I’m eighteen, miserable, stood in the university campus bookshop with a friend I’ve made from the law course to pick up some statute books. The bookshop’s centre piece is a table of pre-packaged bundles of the texts on the reading list for the English course. Dracula, Persuasion, Milton, Shelley, The ABC Murders, all neatly wrapped alongside other combinations for second- and third-year modules. Something switched in me – what the fuck am I doing? It was as simple as that – the contrast between the awe and passion I felt at seeing these texts and the emptiness staring at me from the statute books was enough to make me change courses and forego the whole career plan. I had no idea what I’d do with an English degree, but I knew it was more important at that time to be happy, and I had the next three years sorted, at least. Before I had to think about Real Life.
Traditional capitalist rhetoric expounds that the purpose of one’s life is self-development and making it. This latter is fuzzy, but the generally held consensus is that making it looks something like financial security, a steady and reliable income, property and prospects for future growth. Entire lives are built around this trajectory, this dogma so ingrained as for us not to be able to imagine an alternative. This lack of other conceivable forms of living in the present moment recalls all too easily Thatcher’s infamous ‘There is No Alternative’ oratory, regarding the triumph of capitalism as the dominant political system following the fall of the Soviet Union. The Thatcher/Reagan legacy, neoliberalism, obsessively valorises self-responsibility and individualism so as to relieve the state of any intervention into the social or the economic. If an individual believes in and follows the idea of the Career Path, always aiming towards and hungering for that golden pinnacle of making it, the state will not feel the financial strain of people needing assistance to keep their family above the poverty line: they’ll be doing it themselves, will be being aspirational. I hope that my tone here is explicitly clear, but if it’s not: neoliberalism is an enduring plague on contemporary government, and its principles not only damage human interaction but also critically ignore systemic and class injustice that prevents the social mobility of millions. The Arts, my chosen field, simply does not accompany neoliberal theory because career paths are stunted, jobs few and far between, and the middle-aged men in Parliament don’t see artistic endeavours as benefiting the economy enough. Lest we forget the government’s baffling ad last week (Oct 12), showing a picture of a dancer wrapping her ballet shoes with the caption: Fatima’s next job could be in cyber. (she just doesn’t know it yet). Jesus. Artists need to re-train and re-skill, go back to that point in the road where we all choose our Paths and instead of picking one, pick the other. Of course, our lives are our own, but… pick the right trajectory for the benefit of the whole, crumbling economy. Forget about silly artistic impulses, matters of the heart, spheres which connect people and create culture, because the government doesn’t have the money to support Real Life whilst you’re drifting anymore. Your life, in this rhetoric, is your career, and your career better contribute sufficiently to the economy or it’s valued less. And if you don’t have a career, well…
For the past four years I, like many young people, have been excused (to some extent) from the misery of the Career Path due to being in academia. Everything is on hold whilst we get our degrees – we’re playing at life, no longer children, not really adults, wandering around cities like odd hybrids who don’t pay taxes. Older people resent us because of this period of time, because we don’t have to be as miserable as they are. There’s little more condescending and disturbing than the real delight some gammon takes in sneering, wait ‘til you get in the real world. What the fuck is that?! We’re resented, but most jobs with career prospects now demands a degree, and a 2:1 at that. It’s necessary for a lot of us to put off living like adults of old for a few years just to ‘get a foot in the door’ (gross corporate speak, forgive me). But the odd thing for many is that this flux is lasting longer and longer. It’s true that some graduates fall immediately into the 9-5 routine, but a quick census will also pick up graduates who are travelling, taking ‘gap years’, working abroad, working part-time. Many graduates that I know started (and have now completed) Master’s degrees purely to delay making career decisions. No one has a clue. Mine is a critical age bracket, about 21-24. Do we keep up with the status quo, and like Taylor’s Wallis, ‘try to become something’? Or do we stop, bide our time, explore something else? It’s important for me to note here that I don’t mean not working completely – what I’m discussing is an abandonment of the Career Path. I can acknowledge Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism – life is such that we cannot imagine an alternate way of living, and society does not allow us to try. Without income, we cannot survive. What I’m interested in, is a life that isn’t a career, a life that one can enjoy whilst earning enough money to get by. Graduates like me may feel suspended between one trapeze and the next, university and Real Life, but what I – and writers like Taylor – am saying is, what is such reality? Mental illness figures in young adults indicate that this pressure to know ‘what to do with (your) life’ weighs heavy in a decimated job market. Up to a million young people are likely to face a crisis of unemployment within weeks as the government’s furlough scheme ends. It’s bleak that to even get on the bottom of the property ladder, where the rope’s fraying and the rung is a bit dodgy, many of us have to commit to the 40-hour week. That can’t be living, can it? Renouncing the unbridled pressures of the Career Path and refusing the embedded narrative of constant self-improvement makes, I’ve found, for a much happier existence. Be it a mediocre existence, but one that refuses work as a totalising phantom dictating our aspirations and goals. Part-time, or non-demanding work (the work you don’t take home with you, sweating over at 9pm at the dining room table) should be enough. Of course, this is an incredibly ethnocentric line. Millions of people have no choice but to push themselves to be enough, let alone exceptional, because of incompetent state support and systemic inequality across the globe. What I speak of is less a practical and pressing issue than a theoretical one, a crisis of spirit, the reality of a generational malaise and the start of a new decade. Self-actualisation is a far-off, near-impossible goal for many young people when faced with the entirety of their adult life being swallowed up by the 9-5, yet it is what they are being perpetually told to aim towards.
If my Dad could read this, I know he’d be disappointed. No career? So what, you’re just a drifter? No legacy? What do I tell my friends? Annoyingly, he’s one of the lucky few who was given the opportunity at just seventeen to join a training scheme at the bank – literally handed a job with no qualifications – and worked his way up to setting up his own business and selling it at the beginning of this year for a sum that will see him and my Mum living comfortably throughout retirement. Everyone can just do that with hard work and the right attitude, according to him. Imagine the disappointment when neither me nor my two siblings showed any interest in taking over his business, or going into finance (sturdy, reliable Career!) more generally. The neoliberal narrative of self-improvement and aspiration works because it’s worked for him, apparently. I had to fight for the legitimacy of my PhD plans by saying they were a steppingstone in my ‘career’, even though everyone in academia knows you cannot embark on the PhD for that reason. It’s for the passion – something I still have but am doubting within the context of work. When it becomes work, when your Real Life interests and passions are haunted continually by deadlines, demands for publications, new ideas… it ceases to be organic. I wish I could explain to people my parents’ age that what I speak of just isn’t as radical as it might’ve seemed in their day. Not knowing what career I want or even if I want to commit my entire life to work doesn’t mean I’m running off to live in a commune. It doesn’t mean I’m unambitious or unmoored. It means that I want to breathe – I want my real life to be the one I’m living now, making enough money at a job that doesn’t demand sleepless nights or a crisis of my mental health. And I believe that is my real life. Life that allows me to connect with people rather than compete with them, to nurture my interests and passions rather than hollow them out and capitalise on them. Real Life shouldn’t be the looming figure, promising the miserable rat-race. The daily commute and ‘as per my last email’ can’t be the standard. Taylor again summarises this, saying: ‘Eventually, [we] are all just people going about [our] lives, shopping and earing, laughing and arguing, doing what people in the world do. This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.’ Is that not closer to the truth that any ‘reality’ we’re pulled into by tradition and expectation?
Someone I met recently said, off-hand, ‘I wish I could just pause everything for a minute.’ He meant slow the wheels of the system, remove himself from its innards and re-group. Decide what he wanted to do, take a break maybe. Be able to take a minute without falling hopelessly behind, having a potential position filled by somebody else, having to catch up. Being able to take a month to do something new without having to pay bills and keep on top of stuff. He’s an acting student on Universal Credit, working to make ends meet. The government’s swiftly removed ad campaign has just told people like him to ‘re-skill’. My sister is fourteen years old and got an email from school last week about ‘Careers Advice’: the path-plotting begins this young. People like my new acquaintance are exhausted because they get to their early twenties from being as young as my sister and are struggling on the Career Path. Nearly a decade of pressure on oneself, targets, deadlines, and still barely having enough money to pay rent. Something isn’t working. Real Life shouldn’t be gasping for breath, it should be wholesome and fulfilling interaction with others. Work should be breathing, not fighting to push your head above the surface every weekend. It shouldn’t be your whole life, but a way to earn money happily. There’s a growing trend in literary fiction like Taylor’s towards the abandoned Career. Writers like Hilary Leichter, Naoise Dolan and Sayaka Murata chronicle young women just-getting-by. And they’re happy – their lives enriched with whatever they want, labour being a necessary but non-oppressive prospect that allows them to live comfortably. They aren’t crushed by the need to do better, be more. We shouldn’t glamorise transient, temporary work or the zero-hours contract, but we should explore work boundaries that aren’t as consuming. In our editing of the narrative, work should be the subplot.
Harriet Barton