Careerism vs Community

On the virtue of commitments

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

—Soren Kierkegaard

I was born and raised in the Portland area. My family moved once during my childhood, before I was old enough to remember. From my earliest memories to age 18, I grew up in the same town, the same neighborhood, the same house. Adolescent friendships came and went, but the basic social milieu remained. I made it through childhood without ever learning “how” to make friends, because any time one social circle waned, I could simply latch on to one friend and follow them to a new group.

The broad network of loose ties can be a curse when everyone remembers how big of a loser or jerk you were a couple years ago. It can also be a blessing when someone you vaguely know for years suddenly becomes more important to you. I met my first real girlfriend four years before we dated.

In childhood, perhaps because I never learned how to make friends, the notion of ever moving away felt apocalyptic to me. I was even quick to veto the possibility of ever skipping a grade when my mom brought it up—I felt I couldn’t leave my friends behind. So this desire to be loyally enmeshed in an enduring community, and this fear of the difficulty of making new friends, two sides of the same coin, has been an enduring anxiety of my life.

Where to live might just be one of the most important decisions one can make in life, and being enmeshed in a community for the long haul is one of the most powerful investments there is. Just as one thinks of the power of compound returns in financial capital, I think the compound returns on social capital are a powerful predictor of well-being later in life. The life strategy of sticking out a career in a place you don’t like, so that you can eventually afford to move away from all your community to retire somewhere nice, makes no sense to me. I want to build my career in a place I’ll be happy to stay for the long haul.

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In his book The Second Mountain, David Brooks argues that enduring commitments are the antidote to the dizziness of freedom. Under a cultural regime of individualism and careerism, we must make commitments that curtail those freedoms in order to live a life of meaning and purpose. He also acknowledges though, that under the capitalist meritocracy, commitments can be a hindrance to the individualistic success which can earn us economic stability and the respect of our peers, which are also essential components of well-being. Hence we must climb the first mountain of individualistic success and accomplishment, before climbing the “second mountain” of commitment and meaning. Single-mindedly pursuing career success while young is arguably the appropriate and correct strategy to be in the strongest position to commit to community and other higher values later in life, when the time comes to “settle down.”

It is perhaps one of the best things to happen to me, then, that in adolescence I made a commitment to my vocation of classical music. I’ve written before about how the disproportionate reward of a “dream job” is a powerful but risky enticement to work hard and achieve something in life instead of lying flat. I’ve always said to colleagues in my field who don’t understand how isolated Portland is from the broader world of classical music, “if a kid in Oregon wants to go to a great music school, they either have to go to California, or head east at least until they hit Texas.” So at age 18, I did not go along with most of the kids from my high school to Oregon State or University of Oregon. I selfishly left my friends and family, broke up with the aforementioned girlfriend, packed my life up in a couple suitcases, and landed in Ohio for the next four years of music school.

One of the crucial and healthy things about leaving your place behind in young adulthood is the ability to grow and change. As I said, one of the curses of being enmeshed in a community is that everyone remembers who you were. People who have known you to be one way for a long time will have a hard time seeing you in a new light as you change. Getting away from people clinging to outdated impressions of who you are enables you to try on new ways of being, to grow, to improve. I wish this blessing upon all young people, and it’s a big reason why I think going away for college is a vital rite of passage in the contemporary aspirational class.

A commitment to a community is one of the most important things in life. But a young adult needs to embark on a journey, to be exposed to the broader world. “Go West, young man.” Or, I suppose, if already West, go East.

It is for this reason, among so many others, that I do not look at the incentives of individualistic capitalism as a problem that needs to be solved. Community is deeply important, but The Hero’s Journey must come first. Careerism is the real life “Call to Adventure.” Feeling my calling to this silly little world of classical music is one of the best things to happen to me simply because I needed a powerful force to enter my life in order to overcome the inertia of 18 years of attachment to my beloved Pacific Northwest.

Cal Newport writes and speaks on his podcast a lot about what it means to live a “deep life.” Well before he achieved the fame of Deep Work or Digital Minimalism, he wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is essentially a manifesto on the value of establishing a commitment to your vocation. Work satisfaction, he argues, is derived not from pre-existing passion, but from mastery, autonomy, and making an impact. To derive meaning and purpose from your work then, you need not to change careers to a field you find more intrinsically meaningful, but instead accumulate what he calls “career capital.” Not only is mastery inherently satisfying, but it is also crucial to making an impact, and makes one indispensable enough in the workplace to negotiate workplace autonomy with one’s employer.

Climbing the first mountain requires your first commitment—to your vocation. As long as your current career path offers the possibility of mastery, autonomy, and impact, just commit. In committed pursuit of your vocation, of course you will study at the best school you can, work hard, get the best job you can, and hone your skills to work your way up the career ladder. Once you have chased opportunity, seen the world, gained perspective, and become valuable, only then comes the right time to move past careerism. That’s when instead of accumulating “career capital,” you spend it down on autonomy in order to turn your attention towards those second mountain pursuits.

Careerism in its pathological extreme crowds out the other important commitments. If you just keep trying to climb the ladder, you will fail to make space in your life to climb the second mountain. At some point, you have to acknowledge that you have won the game, in order to stop playing. If only the line were clear. It’s hard to know if you’ve really “won the game” enough to move on, when you could always keep going to get just a little more status and a little more financial security. “Enough” is a moving target.

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As a West coast native and lover of the West, I’ve always been touched by these lines from

Gabriel Kahane

’s song Union Station:

Is there defeat in a train from LA

When Manifest Destiny brought us all this way?

In my personal mythologizing of my relationship to the US, there is something Edenic about the west coast. There’s something tragic about leaving paradise behind after so much history brought us here. But I believe it to be a necessary tragedy. Even if you grow up in Eden, you must leave and come back to see it, and yourself, more deeply.

After studying “back east,” in Ohio and then New York City, my own little hero’s journey has taken me back home. Not back home to Portland, but back to my spiritual homeland, my Eden, the west—to San Francisco. My little New York City sojourn did inculcate in me a love for the traditional dense urbanism of the northeast, and I often describe my new beloved city as a synthesis of my loves, as “the most east-coast west coast city.” I mean this not just in terms of the traditional urbanism, but in terms of a moderate dose of that east coast ambition and drive that much of the rest of the west seems to lack. And yet, if I were all in on that east coast drive, I wouldn’t be writing this piece. In this synthesis between east coast drive and west coast chill, San Francisco seems to be divided against itself in the same way that I am.

Shortly after moving to SF, I took a short three-month contract with an orchestra in New Zealand. In the days before leaving, I already felt a vague longing to return. I felt like I had finally found where I was supposed to be, and now this trip to New Zealand was just a final adolescent detour along the road to my finally settling down into the meat of my real adult life. And in a sense I was right—in the year and a half since returning, I feel happier with my life than ever before.

In the little book The Reasons of Love, Harry G. Frankfurt tries to set forth a practical philosophy for living a meaningful life. He argues that love is not a source of meaning in life, but the source of meaning. His model for defining love is more based on the love of a parent for their child, than on romantic love, and it goes something like this:

1) One must love the object of love as the end in itself, not as a means to some other end

2) Love is personal, meaning that loving someone or something else with similar qualities is not an adequate substitute. You don't love all kids who are like your kid, you love your kid.

3) One identifies with the beloved, in the sense that one take's the beloved's interests as one's own—one could say that to love is to also love what the beloved loves.

4) Love is not under our direct, voluntary control—you don't rationally and voluntarily choose to love your kid more than other kids, you just do.

I truly love San Francisco. The connection I feel to this city is partly rational but largely irrational. Other cities may share various similarities, but none capture the exact combination of factors that made me fall in love with this beautiful little city at the edge of the earth—those other cities aren’t my kid. I want to stick around and do my little tiny part to help San Francisco continue to bounce back from its post-pandemic malaise, to grow and thrive. To plant my roots here and slowly build the kind of community that only comes with patience. I don’t see any reason why this love of place shouldn’t be just as much of a driving force in my life as careerism.

Sunrise in my beloved city

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In the classical music world, people are obsessed with crossing the threshold of “winning a job,” meaning winning an audition for a tenure-track position with a full-time orchestra that offers benefits. This is held up to students as the holy grail of “making it.” But despite being a freelancer, I think it’s a reasonable assessment of my career at this point to say that I’ve “made it.” By the numbers, I’m doing better than a lot of people who have “won a job” in respectable mid-tier orchestras around the country, and certainly making more than all but the very most accomplished classical musicians make in any other country¹. I may lack the job security and stability of a tenured orchestra job, but I’m financially prudent enough that a lumpy income from month-to-month is no real problem. It’s no tech salary, but it’s enough.

Freelancing in a city with a big enough classical music scene (NYC, SF, LA, etc.) is a great path to incognito success in this field. I know that public attention and fame (even micro-fame) is pretty much pure downside. And yet, I still have that irrational desire to be a little bit famous in my field, to have people in my little career bubble who think of me alongside the players we all admired when we were in music school.

After being a finalist at an audition for the San Francisco Symphony earlier in 2024, I cancelled all my other auditions, and didn’t apply to any others for a few months. With that decision to commit, so much anxiety about these decisions disappeared. My commitment brought peace. Finally, I could settle into my life in San Francisco and stop worrying, “but what if I move next year?”

And over the next few months, I gradually cracked open the door to the possibility of moving again. Even though I feel at home here, my life is good, I have enough… the siren’s call of job postings has called again. Here at the end of the best year of my life, I find myself preparing for a far-away audition, for an opportunity to throw it all away and start from scratch in a new city again.

I initially applied for the job after some friends moved away, and many others were traveling, and my community was feeling a little sparse. Then people returned from their travels, my social life became more full again, and I thought, “why am I doing this?” Then more friends were out of town again when I received my audition invitation, so I booked my non-refundable flight and lodging. I seem to have sunk-cost-fallacied my way into going take this audition. But I wouldn’t have slid down this slippery slope if not for the part of me that wants to.

In each short chapter, of his book How to Live, Derek Sivers goes all-in on endorsing a particular life path, leaning in to complete contradictions between chapters, and giving good-faith arguments for even the pathological extremes of certain life strategies. The chapter titled Master Something, speaks to the teenaged part of me that was head-over-heels for this career, that wants to keep moving, keep striving:

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it.

You can only earn it through hard work.

Mastery is the ultimate status.

Striving makes you happy.

Pursuit is the opposite of depression.

…

Most people fail in life not by aiming too high, but by aiming too low.

If you aim high and miss, you don’t actually fail.

We tend to identify most with the parts of ourselves that have been around the longest. We tend to be skeptical when newfound beliefs threaten to undermine parts of our identity that are longer-tenured. But in fact, the parts that have been around the longest are in all likelihood the most childish, the most immature. The piece of my ego that is caught up with pursuing capital G “Greatness” and won’t be satisfied until I “win a job” is a dumb teenager. I know better now, and I owe him nothing. But he’s been around for a long time, and convincing him to quiet down might take a while. I have to acknowledge that piece of my ego is just trying to protect me from the perils of aiming too low. And maybe he’s right. Maybe a bigger income and tenure and more prestige would all be worth one more move, and maybe in time I’d come to love my new city just as much.

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In the last section of The Reasons of Love, Frankfurt argues in favor of self-love, saying that to love oneself, truly, means to take one's own interests seriously. He returns to the analogy of a parent's love for a child, and points out that a loving parent, taking the child's interests as one's own, does not mean an indulgent parent. A young child may not yet be capable of love at all—a baby doesn't yet meaningfully love anything. At this point, the parent taking the child's interests as one's own is to hope that the child finds meaning in life—in other words, that the child grows up to love deeply. Analogously, to love oneself is to care about finding meaning in one's own life.

Just as loving another is to love what the other loves, to love oneself is to love what you love. One of the main barriers to finding meaning is to love ambivalently—to be divided against oneself as to whether the objects of your love are worth loving or not. While previously he asserts that love is involuntary, here he complicates things by asserting that when part of us loves something and another part rejects that love, we can assert our will to reaffirm or reject that love. To love oneself enough to care about finding meaning in one's own life is therefore to root out ambivalence, and choose to love wholeheartedly that which is in our true interest (provides meaning), and not that which is self-indulgent.

Or as Sivers puts it in the chapter of How to Live titled Commit :

If you’ve ever been confused or distracted, with too many options…

If you don’t finish what you start…

If you’re not with a person you love…

… then you’ve felt the problem.

The problem is a lack of commitment.

You’ve been looking for the best person, place, or career.

But seeking the best is the problem.

No choice is inherently the best.

What makes something the best choice?

You.

You make it the best through your commitment to it.

Your dedication and actions make any choice great.

This is a life-changing epiphany.

You can stop seeking the best option.

Pick one and irreversibly commit.

Then it becomes the best choice for you.

Voilà.

…

You think you want more choice and more options.

But when you have unlimited choice, you feel worse.

When you keep all options open, you’re conflicted and miserable.

Your thoughts are divided.

Your power is diluted.

Your time is thinly spread.

Indecision keeps you shallow.

Get the deeper pleasure of diving into one choice.

The English word “decide” comes from Latin “to cut off”.

Choose one and cut off other options.

To go one direction means you’re not going other directions.

When you commit to one outcome, you’re united and sharply focused.

When you sacrifice your alternate selves, your remaining self has amazing power.

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In this piece thus far, I think I’ve laid out a pretty clear case that I should not even bother with this audition, and should stay in SF. That’s how I feel today, and probably a majority of days, if I average out my sentiment from the past year. But my broader point is that the line is blurry, and on another day I might lay out a similarly compelling opposing argument.

Every time I’ve moved, I’ve settled in and found myself loving my new place after a year or so. I’m confident this other job is in a city I could grow to love, and I’m suspicious that all that Manifest Destiny/Hero’s Journey stuff I wrote earlier is nonsense that doesn’t actually matter at all. There’s still that careerist part of me that yearns to keep climbing the first mountain for acclaim and status. That says as long as I’m “foot-loose and fancy-free,” I shouldn’t be settling in my career. That says 27 is still too young to stop striving, that I shouldn’t be worrying about these big commitments yet. That worries about the work drying up as I get older if I don’t lock down a tenured job. I would rather leave SF sooner for the sake of tenure and benefits than get priced out 10 years from now. There are legitimate arguments to be made for persisting higher up the first mountain.

I think earlier in life, careerist ambition is obviously correct. At some point later in life, it becomes obviously preferable to settle down and commit. And in the blurry middle, it’s very hard to know if you’re just bullshitting yourself. I might be using all these to lofty ideals to convince myself to stop trying, just because preparing for auditions is hard work, and I’m tired of moving. I don’t know.

1. 🇺🇸USA! USA! USA!🇺🇸