If your job disappeared tomorrow, how would you feel? Hopeless? Terrified? Overjoyed? Existential? Regardless of which way you lean on the spectrum of i-feel-like-i-just-escaped-a-toxic-relationship-get-me-to-the-beach-now to i’ve-lost-my-identity-and-my-living-overnight-leave-me-to-grieve, I’m willing to bet you’d have a pretty extreme reaction. You’re not alone. We are obsessed with work.
For centuries, work was a means to an end. All we strived to do was to meet our subsistence needs. Today, the distribution of material abundance (in some parts of the world) has raised our expectations of how we spend our precious hours on the planet. In other words, the desire for fulfilling, purpose-driven work is a modern invention.
As Annie Dillard famously said:
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
Yet history has also never witnessed a time where meaningless jobs proliferate at such a great rate. The late David Graeber argued that there are millions of people across the world who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs - what he terms “bullshit jobs”. Worst of all, they know that their roles have little utility in the world, but they still exist, for the sole purpose of justifying the careers of the people filling those roles. This has contributed to a massive mental health crisis fuelled by meaningless work.
“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”
Dostoevsky
When we combine the rise in bullshit jobs with the cult of specialisation ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, it becomes obvious that we are robbing ourselves of the most quintessential part of being human: our natural fluidity of character and multifaceted selves. Indeed, Buckminster Fuller, the famous architect, philosopher, systems designer and futurist, painted specialisation as the enemy of synergy and dreamt of a future where greater value was placed on wide curiosity and interdisciplinary knowledge.
In my short career so far, I’ve found that the most effective way to avoid descending into this void of meaninglessness and instead craft a career that embraces your multiple selves is to build a portfolio career. A portfolio career is the ultimate antidote to narrow specialisation. It empowers you to lean into multiple sets of experiences, toolkits and mindsets, while making a consistent commitment to diversifying yourself, your knowledge and your network.
From a financial perspective, a portfolio career is a more secure way to build security for yourself, rather than relying on the goodwill of a sole employer. It also enables you to blend work that provides you with financial stability with passion projects or voluntary causes that contribute to your quest for meaning-making.
On a more meta level, a portfolio career encourages you to embark upon a continuous journey of becoming, unbecoming and re-becoming. Giving yourself permission to be publicly multidimensional has the power to liberate you from the unyielding chains of specialisation and embrace your natural multifaceted self.
