Life has been busy this year, like last year, and nights-and-weekends writing becomes harder when the rest of life requires a little more out of a person. Work, chores, quotidian things, more work, it all means that momentum for outside projects becomes a reluctant visitor. Leisure is essential for creative and intellectual production; trying to grind your way out only gets you so far, so long, and beyond that you’re not likely to do your best work.
(For this reason, I have unfinished drafts and notes, lately, but nothing I feel happy to send out even in as informal a space as this. To say nothing of any “comment” I could add to everyone else’s about the recent deaths of Godard, Klein, and Tanner—all of whom I’d prefer to give my better thinking.)
Personal time management changes might free up more leisure for a person, and I’m not above thinking or talking about that kind of thing. But I’m more curious here about the bigger structural arrangements people can make for themselves: the ways to create a stable triangle, perhaps, of work, money, and the life of the mind. And I’m interested in these structural arrangements for a lot of reasons, too, including the sociology of knowledge and research, the relationship between social status and epistemology, and the many functions of amateurism. But first let me ramble a little about how I’ve come to conceptualize that work-money-life of the mind triangle.
The Internet thinker and “friendly ambitious nerd” Visa Veerasamy advises people to “do what you love, but solve for distribution.” Solving for distribution refers to one’s public, of course, but it also refers to the problem of compensation.
Personally, I first pursued doing what I loved by working to be a professor. This would have solved for distribution in the sense that, had everything worked out into a tenure-track position, I might have made a decent living spending a large amount of my time in endeavors for which I was well-suited, and which I found fulfilling. A lot of what I’ll say here will therefore orient itself to the academic humanities, but you might substitute or redirect the commentary to something larger and more abstract; maybe ‘institutions’ as they exist, in general.
After a few years of trying, I decided things probably weren’t going to work out for a TT position. (Those are the breaks with faculty jobs; there’s little rhyme or reason. I know brilliant people who’ve done well, and terrible people who’ve done well, and brilliant people who’ve struggled horribly, and so on, etc. Some people get three offers and a postdoc before they’ve finished their dissertation, others might be on the market for eight years before an assistant professorship arrives. The surest tip I can offer is that it seems to help if one’s parents are also professors.) So I redirected and sought a different path and I’ve eventually ended up all right. Truth be told I’m more optimistic about my professional future in my current, second, career than I have been any time since my early days of grad school.
I will say this: I’ve seen and heard enough even from professor friends to understand that the good career there still does not guarantee one a lively participation in the life of the mind. A lot of professors see much of their work (including perhaps teaching, service, and/or publication requirements) as “just a job,” almost as though they were managing retail or grinding lenses, and view their real work, their passion and vocation, as perhaps scholarly but still institutionally elsewhere: other projects, other discourses. In other words, they’re not that far away from a lot of us who left academia, or never quite entered it.
Overall, it’s not easy to find the job that, as a job, satisfies this impulse to think and create and share. This impulse necessarily exceeds the normal parameters of work for which one is likely to be compensated. I write these lines for myself but also for anyone who’s a bit of kindred spirit here. There are, simply, conversations and experiences one must be part of—and this has nothing to do with currency or status or FOMO as we currently use these concepts, and everything to do with streams of mind and sense and knowledge. You don’t feel fully right if you’re too far from these streams. So you problem-solve: how do you do the creative things, the intellectual things, the archival things, the community things, etc.?
If your career is not, roughly, coincident with your life-of-the-mind activities, I think of practical arrangements falling into about four very general categories. The categories aren’t rigid, nor mutually exclusive. Many people fall into more than one. These seem to me like the ways to “solve for distribution,” that is, to find your people and perhaps even be compensated to continue living:
(1) Remove yourself from the pressure of earning an income. This might mean “have money” (be born rich, win the lottery, make a lot and retire early, have a high-earning partner who supports you). It might mean, inversely, to have very little money, but to live as frugally as possible, to be resourceful and make the most out of what you do have, so that you can really maximize your free time and energy. It might also mean a weird combination of having a lot of money and having no money—for example, if you’re a younger person and you don’t go to school job or have a job, but you still live with your more financially secure parents or someone else, and you essentially benefit from them paying their bills. You could also try living outside of the money economy, and in the gift economy, to the extent that you’re able.
Each of these varieties could be explored in much more depth, and we could venture different judgments about the efficacy or even the morality of each one. But the point is this: whether from having plenty, or finding a way in having little, the demands of earning and managing an income are reduced.
(2) Work a day job. Your day job ideally subsidizes your nights-and-weekends pursuits without taxing your energy, your focus, and your resources too much. This might be a regular 9-to-5, or perhaps it’s more of a piecemeal, gig situation (like a skilled freelancer or contractor). But the day job subsidy approach should minimize what you’d need to invest of yourself in your remunerative work, and provide just enough to allow you to do the not-so-remunerative work you really love. Romantic examples of this include Albert Einstein at the patent office (non-fiction), or Will Hunting cleaning floors at MIT (fiction).
The downside? The day job, or jobs, might in fact drain you and underpay you, so that you’re just stuck barely getting by, or going deeper into debt and privation. You lack energy and focus to throw yourself into the things you really wish you could be doing, and you also find yourself gravitating to path-of-least-resistance consumption habits in whatever free time you have. The easy choice is to be passive and numb when the opportunity arises.
But you add up enough days like this and, if you’re the type of person who wants to do what you love, you will think, “wait, why haven’t I written a book, or shot my own movie with friends, or made some sculptures, or gone to my community garden, or started up that discussion group? That’s what I’d really like to be doing!”
We can point at “capitalism” and say that’s the culprit, and sure I agree, but my purpose here is not to regurgitate a diagnosis anyone can make. I’m curious about how one can nonetheless live in the compromises. I don’t have a simple solution for people in this position, but I empathize with it from personal experience and am always happy to trade tips, encourage, and commiserate.
(3) Have a career. By this option I mean something like a “day job” as above, except that it isn’t simply a day job—it’s something you grow into, it’s something more consuming and requires ambition. A distinct career that doesn’t “solve for distribution doing what you love” takes up a lot of that precious time and energy. One upside is that interesting synergies develop over time when you are competently and deeply involved in multiple domains; furthermore, an actual career path may be much more financially rewarding than just a day job. This, in turn, can provide some stability. Wallace Stevens is perhaps one of the most famous examples, here; known for his work as a poet, he was also of course an insurance lawyer and executive.
The downside? It’s extremely hard! A career in itself can be a very consuming thing; people will sacrifice other priorities to pursue it. So trying to have a successful career while also doing creative/intellectual work is a massive challenge. And if you want to have hobbies, if you strive to be a good partner, if you raise a family, etc.—all these other huge parts of life I’m not even touching on? Well, it’s not going to make anything simpler. It’s not going to make anything easier. (Like Toni Morrison said though, “All important things are hard.”)
(4) Bet on yourself. I grant this is vague, but this last category is the most heterogeneous and capacious. Basically, the first three options involve using some other source to provide money that can subsidize “doing what you love.” This option, however, involves ways of either monetizing doing what you love, or getting around the money/commodity lifestyle in some way or another. This might entail some entrepreneurial spirit, though many people who are inclined to the scholarly or artistic life are antipathetic toward that spirit.
Justin E.H. Smith’s book The Philosopher explores different “types” of living as a philosopher. Smith is a professor, of course, and thus has “solved for distribution” already, to an extent, but his example is instructive because he writes openly about the ways he supplements or expands his income. (I like this 2020 piece.) Academics are usually not supposed to speak too openly about money; those who have family money or a well-compensated spouse are helped immensely, but it’s not classy to foreground that information. Academics who themselves earn good salaries don’t often advertise that information. Or rather, it’s advertised subtly, perhaps in how one presents oneself, and through the kinds of things that one doesn’t worry about, doesn’t talk about.
But this brings me to my point, that a bit of entrepreneurial spirit, maybe “freelancing” in some fashion, or consulting, or trying to get “clients” and “patrons,” may strike the humanities scholar as a bit gauche, and perhaps even deeply politically suspect—but, if you earn a paycheck from a university, you are already deeply embedded in a suspect world. So, perhaps it’s actually better and freer to go into business for yourself. You might object: “but that’s, um, just the ideology of capitalism, forcing you to submit to grind culture and entrepreneurship,” and so on. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But we are all making decisions for our own lives and the people closest to us, and what I am saying is that one’s choice to pursue, say, a personal consulting business rather than a (vanishingly rare) academic appointment might make a great deal of sense for someone.
There are still academics who, I’ve found, get kind of instinctively defensive about their line of work, and by extension their institutions, if you provide any kind of criticism or alternatives. But I’m not attacking anyone here, certainly not my friends who’ve remained in that environment. I’m just thinking about how the world is bigger than all this, and there might be opportunities yet to exist beyond the most ingrained paths.
Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method, writes: “Today most researchers gain a reputation, a salary, and a pension by being associated with a university and/or a research laboratory. This involves certain conditions such as an ability to work in teams, a willingness to subordinate one’s ideas to those of a team leader, a harmony between one’s ways of doing science and those of the rest of the profession, a certain style, a way of presenting the evidence—and so on. Not everyone fits conditions such as these; able people remain unemployed because they fail to satisfy some of them. Conversely the reputation of a university or a research laboratory rises with the reputation of its members. In Galileo’s time patronage played a similar role. There were certain ways of gaining a patron and of keeping him.”
It’s important not to wait for permission all the time, or to wait for the ideal moment. (This is good advice I’m still internalizing. Like I said in my last letter, advice helps us form models and narratives, often after the fact.) What if you created your own art gallery, and did it informally before you figured out zoning or tax status or whatever? What if you taught courses directly to the public? What if you self-published or sold your own writing? What if you pursued private clients or some of the research that you wanted to do? What if you started seeking out grants and micro-grants for art or scholarship, maybe looking in unusual places, to fund some of your work?
Without the legitimacy and platform granted by accredited institutions, of course, this is not easy work. But that’s also where the problem-solving comes in. I might pick up this thread—legitimacy, access, and institutions—in one of the next installments …
As someone who has just left academia (law prof), this post really resonates. I found that academia sucked me dry and that I did not have the bandwidth (mental, physical, emotional) to think and communicate as I wished about my interests. Am hoping to cobble together income somehow, as I don't have the 'someone else funding my life and my children's lives' option. Will be interested to see what you figure out!
So good!
In my own (well-paying) career, I did not find any sort of synergy developing between my line of work and my interests outside it. This meant that there were no overlaps (apart from drafting emails) where I could play these two spheres of activity against each other.
But paradoxically, having a demanding career made it easier in some ways pursue what I wanted, i.e. to write, because my mind-bowl would be empty after a day's work, ready to be filled by things I was excited by.
Today, in contrast, I am "doing what I love" full-time, but the quality of attention and excitement has degraded. With the erosion of the work-passion compartmentalization, everything seems to meld into an inchoate "things to be done" list: writing an article, getting a haircut, going for a jog, fixing the leak, meeting friends, everything becomes a set of interchangeable tasks-to-do.