by Waqas Ahmed
I’m a loose cannon. According to the press I used to be a musician. Now I’m not allowed to be a musician, I’ve got to be an artist. I’m a ‘former musician’ even though I produced 7 albums last year alone! The British Art Show wouldn’t allow my paintings in, it had to be my poems. And exactly the same time my poetry was put up as art, the Poetry Society asked if they could use my paintings as cover of their magazine! The art world would regard me as a musician, the music world would consider me a painter — it was like, ‘you have him . . . we don’t want him pissing in our yard.’
This barrier is faced by all multitalented or multi-ambitioned people, whether it be fashion models who try to transition into acting, singers who start a business venture, or when scientists try their hand at art or literature. Publishers want to ‘brand’ a writer as a certain type and will encourage this; art dealers want artists to continue working in ‘their’ style in order to become recognisable; investors would prefer their entrepreneurs to ‘stick to their sector.’ It is not specialised enough to be a novelist alone; you must be a genre-specific novelist who sticks to a specific style. Versatile authors of the calibre of Stephen King have written under multiple pseudonyms in an effort not to be pigeonholed. Employers themselves are too nervous to hire multitalented people.
This tendency, which is both a cause and product of the brain’s schematic organisation process, is based on the assumption that (at least a perceived) single-minded focus equals better productivity, efficiency and therefore greater financial reward. So a perpetual compartmentalisation of society creates a vicious circle, in which everyone keeps to their own ‘field bubble’ — lawyers, investment bankers, athletes and musicians each either envy or condescend to the other; neither can relate to the other. Each lives, eats, sleeps, drinks their field, it becomes their way of knowing and being, it starts to define them and their consciousness and they each develop their own language, own jargon, social circle, even their own sense of humour.
This bubble-creation is being further promoted by the new technology of predictive analytics, employed by almost all online businesses in establishing a sort of ‘digital colonialism.’ We’re happy to give away masses of information about our behaviour through digital and social media platforms, but in exchange our data is being collected and eventually used to formulate algorithms that tell us what we want or need faster than even our own instincts. Take YouTube, for example — if you’re signed in then only those videos related to your existing viewing habits are recommended. Similarly, Amazon recommends only those books related to your existing interests (demonstrated by your searching and buying habits).
These sophisticated algorithms based on machine learning might give the illusion of a system of efficient recommendation, but actually advertisers are constantly looking for their ‘target market’ and therefore will request that digital marketplaces and social media platforms have a clearly categorised customer base to allow them to devise a very targeted yet discrete advertising campaign. In doing so, even our digital presence is being pigeonholed. So while we claim to have the world at our fingertips, all we actually end up doing is closing ourselves off to it. This is the era of Big Data and psychographics, which like the Enlightenment project, is an attempt to bring order and codification to vast amounts of information, and is thus placing knowledge (and individuals) into convenient boxes.
The Modern Education Crisis
The current education system is clearly not working, at least according to esteemed British educationalist Ken Robinson. This is because it is grossly outdated; it is still based on a model that Victorian Britain installed, which fostered a culture of ‘linearity, conformity and standardization,’ whereas today we are faced with a different world, one that is ‘organic, adaptable and diverse.’ This incongruence affects the students’ intellectual and professional prospects. So treating children like robots doesn’t even suit the twenty-first-century job market. Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute says, ‘Educational institutions don’t need to train people to be cogs in a machine like during the industrial age — machines will be much cheaper . . . they ought to train people to deal with more complex, ill-defined jobs.’
This supply-demand mismatch in the education system explains why the thirst for real knowledge and understanding is left unquenched at school and students thus feel an urge later in life as adults to revisit the basics by reading elementary-level popular history or popular science books on their commute to an (already unfulfilling) job — indeed this explains the recent rise in the popularity of such books among the so-called ‘educated class.’ But adults ought to have been educated (or ‘entertained,’ even) by these popular books as children rather than sleepwalking through their childhood and then suddenly as adults awaking from a somnolent state to the fact that there are fascinating and important aspects to life beyond their practical and professional toil. Most do not even wake up. Research at Bristol University by educational psychologists Shafi and Rose showed that many mature students did not feel that their initial education instilled any excitement or even understanding of education; they had to wait to experience ‘life’ before realising the value of education and consequently returning to it later in life.
This clear disconnect between the student and the modern education system is a result of what Whitehead referred to as ‘inert ideas’ — compartmentalised, fragmented information thrown at students at school without any unifying framework. As a result, students are not only less able to make sense of how these fragments of knowledge transmitted to them in various classes are relevant to each other, but more importantly, how they are relevant to their own lives. There is simply no context and therefore no internalisation. This predicament continues to this day. Children are sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures and reading books wondering what relevance geometry or medieval history or plate tectonics has for them. Is it going to help them get a ‘respectable’ job as a corporate executive or government clerk? Or is it simply a torturous initiation ceremony that one must undergo before coming of age?
This disjointed education, based as it is on the model of a factory, is then exacerbated by a process of pyramid specialisation as they move through the system. Students worldwide are being encouraged, often forced, to specialise too early. As a result, multitalented children are often being faced with what psychologists refer to as ‘multipotentiality’ — a condition of frustration, confusion and anxiety suffered by multitalented pupils as a result of the compulsion to specialise (that is, choose between multiple passions) too early. Many child prodigies with an exceptional general intelligence are rapidly encouraged (almost forced) to channel their intellectual capacities exclusively into one specific field. Parents and teachers convince themselves this is completely natural. Consequently, polymathic prodigies (or ‘multipotentialites’) often face the same fate as child prodigies in general — they seldom fulfil their potential and often fall short of expectations as adults. It is also a major cause of child depression. Cognitive scientist, educationalist and developer of the Cognitive Flexibility Theory, Rand Spiro, confirms that schools are complicit in suppressing a child’s polymathic nature:
Kids are very cognitively flexible; it is school with its multiple choice tasks, regimental learning, and compartmentalization of subjects that has scorched that flexibility, that creativity, that inherent ability to see the world outside of single disciplinary boundaries . . . see it polymathically.
It is no wonder that these children, ill-equipped to make vocational choices, get swept up by a system that treats humans as mere cogs in the corporate machine.
Employee Disillusionment
The vast majority of the world’s population is compelled (or involuntarily driven) into an occupation that does not fulfil them personally or financially. Most become slaves to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Free will, it seems, is just an illusion. It is one of the most unfortunate realities of our times; a tragic
blow to human dignity and a criminal suppression of human potential.
One of the reasons why lifelong specialists become so is that they make a particular professional choice early on in life — either because it was of interest at the time but most often because of various social and financial circumstances — which they are then obliged to continue because it has come to define them. It’s an unbreakable cycle; whatever your original skill, you will be typecast (both by society and ironically your own self) and thereafter entrapped. For example, an employer will identify in an employee’s application what appears to be the closest thing to a ‘core skill’ or field, usually in the form of an academic qualification or work experience. The next employer does the same, as does the next, and so on. The chances of getting a job are thus highest when the applicant demonstrates an exclusive and unfaltering focus on one specialty.
This is a deeply entrenched culture, an invisible force pulling one deeper and deeper into a narrowing hole, which after a while becomes almost impossible to climb out of. It is a kind of slavery, an unspoken human bondage. At best this instils an acceptance in the employee’s mind that this lifelong specialisation is the only way of surviving and progressing, but often creates a sense of total disillusionment with the system.
This disillusionment, perhaps ironically, is arguably greater in the ‘developed’ world today than in the poorer societies with which it is most commonly associated. The division of labour, what Marx referred to as the ‘tying down of individuals to a particular calling,’ is still the status quo, trapping people inside what Weber called the ‘iron cage.’ Although the work landscape in the West has changed significantly since Studs Terkel published conversations with disenchanted workers of various fields in the 1970s, the general feeling of discomfort, dissatisfaction and disillusionment remains among the general populace. Due to the relatively recent exportation of manual or blue-collar work to developing countries, much of the workforce in developed countries are now either unemployed or in white-collar (desk) jobs.
While the emergence of this desk-job culture has in some ways been beneficial for individuals and economies (as apparently reflective of societal progress — the notion that sitting behind a desk appears somehow to be more respectable than physical labour), the truth is that it has created a mentally and physically frustrated workforce. ‘Sitting is the new smoking,’ according to Professor Steve Bevan, director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at the Work Foundation. ‘The more sedentary you are the worse it is for your health.’ Not only does this constrain a natural human urge for physical movement (as stressed by the physical training philosophies of Ido Portal and Edwin le Corre), it also has consequences for the economy at large.
In the U.K., for example, almost thirty one million days of work were lost last year due to back, neck and muscle problems, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS) — very few of these were a result of an injury obtained from physical activity. It is staying put, it turns out, which causes more absences that are more prolonged than any other ailment. It is not surprising that very few (if any) polymaths over history lived such sedentary lives — even the intellectuals; most were in fact dynamic scholar-adventurers.
Perhaps more importantly though, the desk-job culture, which the great spiritualist Jiddu Krishnamurti called a ‘monstrous rat-race’ and an ‘intolerable imprisonment,’ has serious psychological effects on employees. The majority of people today are clearly frustrated and unhappy with their current occupation. According to a recent survey in the U.K., only 20 percent of people are happy at work (Roth and Harter, 2010), a figure that has fallen dramatically from 60 percent in 1987. This dissatisfaction has a lot to do with the level of stimulation people get from their jobs. In a 2008 survey, over half of the U.K. workforce admitted they lack stimulation at work, with only 10 percent stating they experience a high level of stimulation. Over 60 percent of workers are not truly engaged in what they do (Towers Perrin/Gallup). Employee engagement has hovered around the 30 percent mark in North America for a while, and with a notoriously disengaged millennial workforce (87 percent of whom put personal development as top priority as a work objective), employers are struggling to understand how to retain and maximise employee potential.
Indeed, ‘employee engagement’ (or lack thereof) is now becoming a worldwide phenomenon, and frequent surveys are being done to measure this. While most of these studies are conducted in Europe and the United States, there is evidence to show that this is a worldwide trend. According to a recent study by Accenture which surveyed a sample from 36,000 professionals from 18 countries across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, North America and Asia, almost half felt they were not being significantly challenged in their current roles despite most being confident about their skills and capabilities.
This frustration has to do with the monotony of one career as much as with the job or employer itself. According to a study by the School of Life, some 60 percent of employees would choose a different career if they could start again, 20 percent of us believe we’ve never had a role that suited us and 30 percent of employees feel their strengths would be better suited to another career.
When companies downsize, they often use the services of ‘outplacement consultants’ to provide redundant employees with counsel and guidance on next steps. As part of some outplacement programmes, psychological experiments are done to reveal the person’s inner career dreams with a view to ascertaining his or her next career steps. What is often found, rather unsurprisingly, is an enormous disparity between the person’s real career and desired career. Accountants wished they were magicians, web-designers wished they were musicians, office managers wished they were professional athletes, and so on. There is a sense of bitter regret; that they have been swept away unwillingly by a relentless current into the futility of the open sea, to which they must ultimately resign themselves.
Yet the innately human desire to learn, to grow, never quite leaves us. People are yearning for the opportunity to contemplate matters other than their jobs. Oxford philosopher Anders Sandberg, who recently did a project with an insurance company certainly found this: ‘My experience when talking to people from the skyscrapers in the City is that they’re so delighted to be able to talk philosophy, they don’t get an excuse to think outside their daily work . . . even things like what are we doing, why are we doing it?’ Indeed, the world’s biggest open-source encyclopaedia could be the manifestation of this. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, suggests that the growth of Wikipedia is evidence of the fact that people who are considered ‘specialists’ in their jobs often have multiple other interests — they just need an opportunity to be able to pursue them:
One of the reasons why Wikipedia works is that a broad, multi-disciplinary talent is not extinct. One of the things we see quite a lot is that people are doing amazing work outside their professional realms; the archetype is the bearded maths professor who’s writing about Elizabethan poetry or world war history. It turns out that despite the fact that in academia there is so much pressure to specialise we still have well-rounded intellectuals and in fact one of the reasons Wikipedia has flourished is that it provides an outlet for that.
While Wikipedia certainly does provide an intellectual outlet for many erudite multitalented people, the reality is that most feel compelled to dedicate their time exclusively to work, even if deep inside they know they have much more to learn, to contribute, to express.
Work-Life Imbalance
A recent LexisNexis survey of the top 100 newspapers and magazines around the world revealed a dramatic rise in the number of articles on ‘work-life balance’ — from 32 in the decade from 1986 to 1996 to a staggering 1674 articles in 2007 alone! This disillusionment with the twenty-first-century employment system and the consequent void in fulfilment has forced people to desperately seek variety and stimulation elsewhere, outside work, often setting themselves different challenges, whether that be ‘white-collar boxi
ng,’ running a marathon or triathlon, or joining a cooking or painting club, or even signing up for the reserve army. ‘People are yearning for the opportunity to regain some balance in their lives,’ contends Richard Donkin, author of Future of Work, ‘but governments and companies seem blinkered to this daily struggle.’ The general dissatisfaction with the standard 9-to-5 corporate work lifestyle is also evident in the phenomenal popularity of bestselling self-help books that encourage alternative work lifestyles, such as the Four-Hour Week and How to be Everything.
Yet despite the lip-service paid to the need for extra-vocational activities, most jobs in reality encourage a dedicated specialisation and inhibit the natural human urge for variety. This is probably why Aristotle said that ‘all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind’ and Ibn Khaldun observed that conventional employment is one of the most ‘humiliating ways to make a living.’ Was the development of technology not supposed to reduce human labour hours, freeing up time for other pursuits so as to produce better, more rounded human beings? Somewhere along the line this has been forgotten, overlooked, or simply withheld from our consciousness.
While the obsessive pursuit of ‘progress’ (or more accurately by its current definition, monetary and material gain) has indeed driven an unprecedented advancement in technology, it has in many ways come at the expense of human freedom and variety. Human labour hours have increased significantly, arguably to record levels compared to any period in human history. The ‘work from anywhere’ lifestyle, which has become very popular thanks to the internet and mobile technology, had the potential to enhance the work-life balance but instead has exacerbated the encroachment of work on personal life and leisure time. Despite their basic material needs being met, people are actually working more and living less. As media and technology writer Douglas Rushkoff put it: ‘Instead of offering us more time, technologies are always on, drainers of our time and energy in order to serve the market.’
