What's in a job anyway?

Or, why I think that the idea of a "job" isn't fit for solving the problems we need to solve.

It’s January and a lot of us have just finished our first week back at work after the festive period. The memes are rolling in and one in particular has come across my feed multiple times: 

“I come back [from a holiday] with the taste of freedom, still fresh in my mouth, a renewed hatred for work, and a strong suspicion that this is not what I should be spending my life doing.”

This year, the memes have hit me a bit differently. Because I’ve done something a bit wild. I’ve quit my full-time job with no clear plan of what to do next. 

A big part of the reason for doing that was so that I could actually dedicate time and energy to this Substack. To date, I’ve managed to put out three posts in five months, two of which were just me saying that I had plans to put out more posts...

So, I want to introduce you to what will be my central theme this year in everything that I do: 

Every single one of us has a unique contribution to make to improving human and planetary health. I want to help as many people as possible to find and make that contribution. 

I fundamentally believe that there is nothing more important than improving human and planetary health. And I don’t think that the way to do that is through traditional forms of employment in organisations: public, private or not-for-profit. So here I am, jobless, terrified and ready for an adventure.

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We need to find a way to reorganise how human creativity, energy and time is spent on solving problems. We also need to make sure that it’s harnessed to solve the right problems. And we need to do this very rapidly. 

The way I see it is this:

• Our species is facing a series of unprecedented, complex and incredibly urgent problems. 

• People are inherently curious; they like to solve problems and feel that they are having an impact on the world. 

  • The fact that our school, higher education and employment systems tend to beat that out of us doesn’t change the fundamental fact. 

• An awful lot of people are working on solving problems that shouldn’t really exist in the first place or do not need to be solved whilst we neglect the ones that do.

There are two important figures who have impacted how I think about what we might do to recognise people’s need for purpose and to get them working on the truly important problems facing us. 

The first is Mariana Mazzucato and her concepts of “the entrepreneurial state” and a “mission economy”. Whilst I’m not personally convinced that any form of capitalism is sustainable for civilisation in the long term, the concept of empowering the state to solve problems based on clearly articulated missions is one that holds a lot of potential and one that I think is a necessary segue into a more radically reimagined version of society. 

The second is the late, great David Graeber. As he wrote in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs, “most people in the world today, certainly in wealthy countries, are now taught to see their work as their principal way of having impact on the world.” And yet, given that “huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not need to be performed”, he concludes that “the moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.” 

So: what do we need to do to address this ‘spiritual violence’ in a way that empowers everyone to find and make their contribution to improving human and planetary health? At a high level, here are some of the possibilities I’ve been thinking a lot about: 

• Elect a government willing to prioritise the long-term even where that risks undermining the institution in its current form

• Establish clear and ambitious missions, guided by direct citizen participation like Citizens’ Assemblies

• Radically reimagine our education system so that young people are taught how to learn and how to remain curious

• Provide continual and free education for adults, particularly in how to build and use technology to solve problems so that we can address the entrenched elitism of the tech sector 

• Overhaul public procurement and make it outcome-based

• Build citizen-owned data infrastructure accessed through a set of citizen-owned and governed APIs 

• Establish temporary task forces that are set clear and achievable missions

In a nutshell: we need to educate our citizenry such that we can collectively decide what we want to achieve and actually have the skills, time and resources to do it. 

We need to get ourselves out of a situation where half of the world is still doing backbreaking work just to get by while the other half stares at a screen wondering “is this all there is”? We need to move away from a system of jobs in companies and move towards a system where people can be doing meaningful, purpose-driven work every day.

We need to find a way to unlock the potential in every one of us. 

And it’s happening already. There are people thinking deeply about every single one of the suggestions I’ve listed. What I want to spend this next stage of my life doing is getting all of you thinking about them too. The more of us who start to understand and consider how we could make these suggestions a reality, the better.

Maybe this time next year we can all feel more confident that we are in fact spending our lives doing what we should be doing.

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This post actually started life as an entry to the TxP Progress Prize asking people to answer: “Britain is stuck - how do we get it moving again?”. I’ve been pondering what to enter for this since it was first announced as I think it’s an excellent and timely question. However, in typical me fashion, I’ve left it to the day before the deadline. 

That means that I know I’ve not quite hit the brief: I’ve not followed the instruction to be focused on tangible solutions, rather than introspection (me!? never). I’ve also let myself get a little grandiose and not tied to the UK specifically. 

That said, I’m entering it anyway because I still think it’s relevant to the theme and because, as a wise person once said “Your instinct is to make things perfect before you share them with the world. But that’s not how creativity works. You have to get it out there, in all its messy glory.” And if that wise person happens to have been my daily Co-Star this morning then so be it. 

Here’s to a messily, gloriously, spiritually-nonviolent and exploratory 2024.