The Unremarked Days

You become, over the years, the kind of person your work makes of you.

This is not a sentimental claim about the dignity of labour, although there is something true under that phrase. It is a structural claim about how character is laid down across an adult life. The hours you spend doing your work are not neutral hours that leave you the person you were when you walked into them. They shape you. They lay down habits of attention you carry into your other relationships. They train you in certain kinds of small dishonesty or certain kinds of small honesty. They give you a sense of what counts as good enough and what does not, and that ‘sense’ carries over into the standards you apply to yourself outside the work, on matters the work was never directly about. By the time you have done a kind of work for ten years, you are not the same person who began doing it, and the differences between who you have become and who you would have become doing different work are not trivial, because the work has been working on you the whole time.

The most important thing to understand about this is that the work does its work on you not through what you produce — the spreadsheets, documents, lessons taught, patients seen, meals served, goods delivered or buildings raised — but through how you go about producing them. The how is the channel through which work shapes the worker. The same nominal job, done in two different ways, makes two different people of the doers. The hospital ward where the doctors take time to listen to their patients makes a different doctor of you, across the years, than the hospital ward where the doctors have learned to cut the conversation short. The classroom in which the teachers prepare carefully for each lesson, even the lessons no one will be inspecting, makes a different teacher of you, across the years, than the classroom in which the teachers have learned that the inspectable lessons are the ones that matter. The market stall in which the trader keeps an honest weight, even when nobody is watching, makes a different trader across the years than the market stall in which the weights have been adjusted to favour the seller. The work, by the way the work is done, is laying down in the worker a way of doing things that the worker will, after a while, no longer recognise as a way they have chosen. It will simply be how they work.

This is, in the language of the earlier chapters, how you continue your formation in adulthood. You do not stop being formed just because people assume you are all grown up. The mechanisms change — you will no longer absorb the air of your parents' household — but the structure will be the same. There is a place you spend a great deal of your time in. That place has its own three channels: what is said about how the work is done, what is felt about how the work is done and why it matters, and what is actually done. You absorb the air of the place. You watch what is rewarded and what is not. You absorb, below the level of decisions, the place's actual operating standards, which may differ considerably from its proclaimed standards. After enough years, the place's actual operating standards have become, in some measure, your own — and you are now reproducing them in your own conduct, sometimes against the explicit views you would offer if asked.

I have known people who would have laid odds on themselves to be the kind of doctor, or the kind of lawyer, or the kind of teacher, or the kind of engineer, that the dignified version of those professions describes. And I have watched what happened to them over fifteen years in workplaces in which the dignified version was not the actual operating standard. What happened is that they became, with great slowness and largely without registering it, the doctors or lawyers or teachers or engineers their workplaces produced. They did not become bad people. They became, in the small daily matters of their work, slightly worse versions of who they had set out to be — versions in which a certain corner was cut as a matter of course, a certain conversation was abbreviated as a matter of course, a certain standard was waived as a matter of course. The cutting and the abbreviating and the waiving did not feel, from inside their own experience, like compromises. The cutting and the abbreviating and the waiving felt like how the work was actually done in a real place, by adults who had grown up enough to stop being romantic about it.

This is the deepest danger of grown-up work, and you need to be told about it ideally before you have spent the decades inside it that make it invisible. The romantic phase of any vocation — the early years when you still hold the explicit standard up before you as the thing you are working toward — is brief. The romantic phase ends, in most workplaces, when you have been in the place long enough to discover that the explicit standard is not the actual operating standard, and that holding to the explicit standard against the actual operating standard exacts costs from you that the people who have stopped holding to it no longer pay. The discovery is one of the most consequential discoveries of any adult life. What you do with it determines, in large part, what kind of practitioner you become.

The people who have made it through this passage well have done one of two things. Some of them have found, or built, a workplace whose actual operating standard is close to its explicit standard, and have stayed there. The number of such workplaces is smaller than people who do not work in them realise. That number is not zero, indeed they exist. More importantly, they are made by the sustained work of the people in them, of the same materials all workplaces are made of; just that they take serious effort to maintain it that way. People who have lucked into one early and have stayed are not, on the whole, more virtuous than people who have not. They are just those people who recognised what they had and refused to let it be eroded. Other people, not having found such a workplace, may have done something subtler. They may have kept, in their own conduct, the alignment they wanted the workplace to have, even when the workplace did not have it. They may have done their work to the standard they would honour if no one was watching, even when the workplace's actual operating standard would have let them off with less. They may have paid, often, the small daily costs of doing this, in the irritations and inefficiencies and occasional career setbacks that come from being the worker who does the work at the standard the workplace claims but does not enforce.

Both of these are forms of the same underlying choice: not to let the workplace make you into a worse version of who you had set out to be. The choice is not glamorous. It produces no result anyone will ever applaud. It is also, in my observation, what divides the people who arrive at fifty as recognisable to themselves from the people who arrive at fifty wondering when exactly they stopped being the person they thought they were going to be. The arrival at fifty is not a single moment or choice. It is the cumulative consequence of tens of thousands of small ones, each of them mattering far less in itself than they all together turn out to have mattered as a whole.

I want to say something about the figure of the master and the apprentice, because something is being lost in many places about how this kind of formation actually works. I think the loss is worth describing because it is a vanishing practice and only those who have experienced it in their time and place would even know such a thing is even possible.

Most of what a person learns about how to do a kind of work is not learned by being told. It is learned by being close to someone who does the work, watching them do it across enough situations that the watching becomes perhaps the most consequential aspect of their formation. The apprentice does not absorb a syllabus of rules from the master. The apprentice absorbs a way of being a doer of this kind of work — the way the master moves through the workshop, the way the master responds when something goes wrong, the way the master treats the materials and the tools and the customers and the time. After a few years close to such a master, the apprentice becomes a certain kind of practitioner. They do not need to consult the master in order to know how the master would respond, because the master is in them.

This used to be the way most vocations were learned, and in some places it still is. In many of the more credentialed professions of the modern world, the explicit training has expanded into years of school, qualifications, and rules and space for master-apprentice relationships have shrunk. These days young doctors are often shown the rules of medicine but spend less time close to an older doctor like whom they might become. Young teachers are given the techniques of pedagogy but rarely formed by years close to an older teacher whose way of being in a classroom they could absorb. Young traders are given the regulations of their trade but not closely watched by an older trader who would have set the limits the regulations cannot reach. The credential is supposed to do the work the apprenticeship used to do, and the credential cannot do that work, because the work is the work of absorbing a way of being and the credential transmits only the rules.

You have probably watched what happens to a profession that has lost its apprenticeship structure, without quite registering the loss - let alone be able to understand what was last or why. Often, this is because the proclaimed standards remain. The rules are still on the books. The qualifications are still earned. But the bend of judgement that the apprenticeship used to lay down in the young practitioner, such as the things the older practitioner would have done without thinking and would have corrected the younger practitioner for not doing, is missing. It is assuredly not the case that young practitioners are any less capable or lacking in temperament. They are certainly not, in most cases, even consciously cutting corners. They simply have not been formed in the way that earlier generations of their profession were formed, and certain kinds of judgement that the formation used to produce are not available to them to be seen, imitated and exercised.

If you are in a vocation that is being learned now mostly through credentials and not through close apprenticeship — the way most vocations are — you should be aware of this. The credential may seem real, but it is also most assuredly not enough. You will have to seek, with some deliberateness and a lot more discernment, the older practitioners whose conduct you would want to absorb. You will also have to find ways to be close enough to them, for long enough, that the absorption can happen. They may not be your formal supervisors. They may not even be in your own institution. But they do exist. In most fields, they may be less prominent than their less-formed contemporaries, because the conduct that makes them worth absorbing also tends to keep them out of certain kinds of advancement; and they are usually willing to be watched, by a young practitioner who shows up regularly and asks honest questions. Finding one of them is one of the more important things a person can do early in a career, and the finding is rarely accidental. It takes looking.

I want to say something about a particular pattern that operates in the apprenticeship-like phases of many vocations, because the pattern is one of the more common ways in which a vocation's deepest corruptions also get reproduced across generations, and the pattern often hides itself as part of the formation rather than as a deformation of it. 

The pattern is this. The young practitioner is, in the early years of their formation, subjected to conditions that the vocation describes as necessary to the production of a competent practitioner. The hours may be brutal, the casual cruelty of seniors may be pervasive, the impossible demands gruelling and rife with humiliations large and small that are presented as the rite by which the young become serious about the work. Young practitioners experience these conditions as suffering, which is what they are. But the young practitioner is, in many cases, also being offered the bargain — the one I named in Chapter Three, here taking a vocational form — that the suffering is an investment, that having endured it confers a particular standing that the vocation reserves for those who have endured it, and that the day will come when the young practitioner is the senior who is administering the suffering to the next intake of the young. The bargain is rarely stated in this language. It is shown rather than said, in the way the seniors carry themselves, in the small honours that the vocation extends to those who have survived the formation and in the casual remarks about how things were even worse in the speaker's day and yet how those who endured them are now all the better for it. Young practitioners are often amenable to absorbing this kind of bargain along with the suffering, and the absorption is part of what the formation produces — not only a competent practitioner, but a competent practitioner who has been formed to understand the brutality of it as a legitimate - if not necessary - part of their formation that they next generation should also be inducted into.

This is one of the structural mechanisms by which corrupt practices in a vocation reproduce themselves across generations. The reproduction is not deliberate, in most cases. It is the operation of what those who have been formed by it understand to be the way the vocation is properly transmitted. The medical residents who endure unsafe hours and humiliating treatment become, in due course, the senior doctors who supervise medical residents in unsafe hours and humiliating treatment, and they often do so not from malice but from the conviction that the practice is what produced them as the practitioners they are, and that to soften it would be to fail the next generation. The same pattern operates in the formation of lawyers, of engineers, of military officers, of academics, of clergy and many other vocations. The pattern is so well-established that the people inside it have, in many cases, never seriously entertained the possibility that the vocation could be transmitted otherwise.

There is a moment in the formation of every practitioner of such a vocation when the bargain has to be either accepted or refused. The moment usually comes some years after the worst of the suffering has been endured, when the practitioner has reached a position from which they can begin to inflict on the next intake what was inflicted on them. The acceptance of the bargain, at this moment, is rarely a deliberate choice. It is more often a slow drift into reproducing what was done, justified by the same justifications that were used on the practitioner when they were on the receiving end. The refusal of the bargain, at this moment, must be a deliberate choice. It requires the practitioner to do something for which their own formation has not equipped them, which is to break in their own conduct, the pattern that their formation has installed and to do so at the cost of a certain standing within the vocation that the bargain would have conferred. This is a very difficult choice to make and that is why that kind of refusal is uncommon. The few who make it are, in many cases, the practitioners whose conduct changes, slowly and across generations, what the vocation is. They are, in the strict sense, the people through whom a corrupted vocation finds its way back. They are also, in the present moment of their refusal, often criticised by their colleagues as soft, as failing to take the formation seriously, and as not preparing the next generation properly for the realities of the work. The criticism is the room's response to a refusal of the bargain that the room had accepted, and it is the same response the previous chapter described in the resentment that meets the truth-bearer.

If you are in the early stages of formation in any vocation, you should know that this bargain is being offered to you, and that the offer will become more attractive as you move further into the vocation and the prospect of being on the receiving end of it begins to give way to the prospect of being on the offering end. You should also know that you will, in time, reach a position from which you can either accept or refuse the bargain in your own conduct. The refusal is the work the vocation needs from you. The acceptance is the path of least resistance, and it is the path on which most of your contemporaries will move. The choice between them is one of the more consequential choices a vocational life contains. It is also one of the choices that is most invisible to the surrounding culture, because the surrounding culture has also been formed by the bargain and does not, in most cases, recognise the refusal as the moral act that it is.

I want to offer one more observation about the corruption of work, because in some places the question is not whether the workplace's actual operating standard is slightly below its explicit standard but whether the workplace's actual operating standard has become something the explicit standard would condemn. The hospital that is in the business of managing the throughput of patients in a system whose economics require throughput; while telling itself it is in the business of caring for them, or the journalism whose actual operating standard is the production of content for an attention market; while telling itself it is in the business of informing the public are good examples of this. They are not malicious institutions in the sense that the people in them are largely not malicious. But the institutions have been bent, by long pressure, away from the work they claim and toward work of a different character, and the people inside them are being formed by the work they actually do rather than by the work they claim to do.

If you have worked, or are working, in such a place, you will have felt the strangeness of it — the way the explicit story of the place does not quite match what you spend your days doing, the way the language of the place's purposes feels slightly threadbare when you say it aloud, the way the things you are proudest of in your work are often the things the place's metrics do not reward. The strangeness is not a flaw in your perception; it is the registration of the gap between the explicit and the actual that the place has settled into and that the people in the place have largely stopped noticing. You are not crazy; the place is in a particular condition, and you are in a position to register the condition because you have refused to allow yourself to be entirely formed by it.

What to do about this is one of the larger questions of any adult life, and I am not going to pretend the question has a single answer let alone a simple one. Sometimes the right thing to do is to leave; sometimes leaving is not available, or leaves the place worse than it was. Sometimes the right thing is to stay and do, within the place, the small daily work of holding to the standard the place claims to hold to, even when the place's actual operating standard is lower. The discrimination among these requires the kind of judgement the rest of this book will help you to develop, and the company of others who are exercising the same judgement under similar conditions. I want only, in this chapter, to make sure you have registered that the choice is yours, and that the way you make it is going to determine, over the long run of your working life, what kind of person your work has made of you.

Before we leave this chapter for the next one, on friendship and the company that makes the work of becoming a formidable person possible at all, I want to leave you with one observation about how to recognise a workplace, or a vocation, that is doing the work it claims to do.

Such places have, in them, a particular kind of patience about the long-term formation of their younger members. The older members of the workplace — not all of them, but enough — are visibly invested in the question of who the younger members are becoming, not only in the question of what they are producing. The older members make time, even when time is short. They tell the younger members hard things when the hard things are true. They are willing to endure the discomfort that comes with giving an honest assessment of a younger person's work, instead of the inflated assessment that would be easier and would keep the younger person more comfortable. They treat the younger members' development as part of the work, not as an obligation to be discharged after the work is done. The presence of these features is, in my experience, the most reliable signal that a workplace is one in which the saying and the doing are still trying to agree. The absence of them is a signal that the workplace has given up on its own reproduction, and is now in the phase of using up the formation that earlier generations of its members brought into it from elsewhere.

You can tell, with practice, fairly quickly which kind of place you are in. The next chapter is about what you do when you have found out.