This four thousand-plus word article in the New Yorker – about considering the alternate lives we could have lived if we’d made different choices – is a good longread as this year comes to a close.
This bit interested me:
The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.
This is by and large true. I had held for a while that I’d have a career in computer architecture and operating systems, either designing chips or OSes that ran on them. Instead I’ve ended up working with early stage startups across a bunch of fields including in finance. And while I’ve stayed in tech, it’s no longer practical to switch to my earlier, specialised tech career.
At the same time, the growth of no-code tools that bring fixed costs down, the proliferation of distribution channels to build your own audience, and several alternate means of financing (one, two) means that know-how and technical skills as barriers to entry are falling every day.
Five years ago the quote from the article would mostly hold; your career would be a journey down an eternally narrowing funnel. But today there are an increasing number of wormholes out of that funnel. Curiosity and passion are now at least as valuable as tech kn0w-how and access to capital.