Ways of moving
I HEAR SOME VERSION of this about once a week: “I’ve been doing this thing for 15, or 20, or 25 years, and I don’t think I can do it anymore. But when I think about what else I could do, I draw a blank.” One of the questions I am wont to ask when I hear this is, what would you do if money was no object? And often—not always, but often enough to be a pattern—the floodgates open up. I would teach high school math. I would make ceramics. I would paint or write or play music all day long. I would work at the library, coach youth soccer, open a café. I would bake the best bread, make the best arepas, open a noodle shop. I would be with my kids. I would take care of my elders. I would teach poetry or history or art to anyone who wanted to learn. I would grow vegetables in that abandoned lot. I would be a farmer, a journalist, a park ranger. And so on. Which of course frames up the blank wall that appeared in the first statement: the difficulty isn’t in naming something we would like to spend our time or energy on. It’s in finding the match between how we would like to be and what capitalism will permit us to do while still keeping a roof over our head, and food in our bellies.
I think this is important to remember: we aren’t faced with an absence of imagination. We’re faced with the constraints of a system that does not have our best interests at heart.
The bad news is there is no manual for making this kind of transition. There is no rule book, no 7-step process, no orderly path you can follow. Changing your work is tough, and it takes time and (usually) money as well as spirit and fortitude and the support of the people around you. The good news is you aren’t the only one who’s ever hit this particular point in your work (we all get there, one way or another) and there are broadly some patterns you can use to think with your own situation, and from where you can begin to experiment and explore where this moment might take you. These patterns aren’t exhaustive, and they aren’t exclusive of each other; take them as a starting point for thinking about your own journey, not solutions to adopt but prompts to play with.
Bend toward the light
Imagine a tree, happily growing in a nice sunny spot for many years. Its got deep roots and long, leafy branches, and a bunch of shade-loving bushes and vines prosper beneath it. Then a great big building goes up nearby, and all the gorgeous afternoon sun that it depended on is blotted out. It can’t uproot itself and walk a ways, but it can lean those long branches over to where the sun still shines and so continue to thrive.
Moving into the light means taking small step from where you are to someplace close by that just might be a little more fruitful. The laid-off federal worker finds a job in city government, bringing their skills to a work at a different scale. The university professor shifts into administration, taking what they know of their students to improve the application process. The nurse at a big city hospital takes a traveling gig and learns what it’s like to work and live in a small town for a little while. And so on. You’re not uprooting your work so much as reorienting it a few degrees.
Note that what counts as nearby isn’t always near to your industry but near to your network—that is, the people around you. The bank manager who coaches an adult hockey league meets the director of a company that sells sports equipment and happens to be looking for someone to join their finance team—and boom, the sun is shining. So when you think about your network here, think about your colleagues and comrades in your field, but also your friends, neighbors, all your kith and kin in all the communities you belong to. This is also a good excuse for making more connections within those communities: your future work is just as likely to emerge from a job application as from a book club, school bake off, or weekly game night.
Plant a tree
Maybe you’ve reached your branches as far as they can go and you’re still not getting enough light. Then you might have to plant a new tree where the conditions are better. This looks like taking the skills and experience you’ve gathered over all those years and building something new: the product engineer leaves the day job and starts a consultancy. The high school teacher starts a service connecting students to internship opportunities at local small businesses. The designer teams up with a friend who’s a chef to concept and open a new diner, in a neighborhood that’s been long neglected by restauranteurs. A group of journalists team up to launch a worker-owned magazine, covering the topics the big media companies have abandoned.
These last few examples are instructive: like so many things in life, planting a tree is best done with friends. You’re going to have to prospect different locations and you may have to plant and nurture a few trees before you know which one is most likely to thrive. By teaming up with one or a couple of people, you can bring more skills and energy to making it work. You can also create the kind of support system you need to be patient during the early days, when the tree is but a sapling and isn’t ready to bear fruit.
Walk a ways
Sometimes a long drought leaves the earth so famished, nothing will grow for a while. Sometimes the forest becomes a lake, the snow-capped mountain once covered with conifers is overtaken by grass. There are times when you can’t see any fertile land as far as the eye will take you, and then you have to get up and walk.
The civic tech worker goes back to school for a degree in urban development. The journalist signs up for a training program to become an emergency medical technician. The designer gets an internship at their local brewery. In each of these cases, someone is starting over in a new field, one in which they need some training or schooling to get up to speed. Obviously, this takes time, and some investment of money, as you may either need to pay for that schooling, or work for lower pay to start out, or both. But if the alternative is to stay in parched soil, the cost of moving may still outweigh the cost of staying put.
These moves rarely happen all at once. The designer started home brewing some years ago, and chatted with folks at various breweries, before deciding to explore it further. The civic tech worker had been reading about urban development for a while, and attending community engagement sessions. The journalist was on the healthcare beat and got to know folks in the local nurses union, and so on. The point here is you don’t make a decision to go back to school, or start in a whole new field, all at once. You explore the things you’re interested in, get to know some people, and then look for ways to experiment in a new direction.
However you move, this is not a moment to go it alone. You are not the only one who has arrived here, with the awareness that the work you used to do—perhaps the work you once loved—is no longer recognizable. Odds are someone standing very nearby you is asking the same questions, and wondering the same things. Ask how they are doing, what they’re thinking, what’s coming up for them as they contemplate their own moves. Maybe you can keep each other company for a while as you get underway. Maybe you can stay in touch when the time comes for you to each venture in different directions. Maybe your paths will cross again someday, under blue skies and amid green, fertile fields.