In eighteenth-century Germany, Goethe and Schiller both cared a great deal about making a good income (106). Honour was not the only thing they cared for, and being able to live in decent house or eat well did not seem irrelevant. They didn't feel, however, that every venture had to be assessed purely in terms of economic return once there was enough cash around to ensure some feeling of safety.
This message isn't going to be useful for everyone; most of the planet is still engaged in a basic struggle for survival. It is extremely important, though, for the overall direction of capitalism. The appetite for money shorn of moral value, which can be observed at the top of the commercial hierarchy, has been ruinous in its effects on society as a whole. Yet it doesn't stem from greed. It is caused by the fact the money has been left in sole possession of the field of honour; that it is the only standard that we know how to aim for and can reliably be congratulated for having attained. The good news is that most successful business people are already not working for money: they are pursuing money not for its own sake, but for the love and respect it affords them. They seem relentlessly focused on making money because they are competitive people, and because winning currently means doing so in the money game, the primary gateway to status and, to stretch the word a little, love. For everyone's sake, we need to make sure that we can give these competitive types a more diverse set of laurel wreaths to aim for.
A responsible society would recognize the strength of this hunger for honour and exploit it properly for the good of all. We will live in more beautiful, wise and humane communities when we have learnt to reorient the system of ambition, when the most driven and energetic individuals have the chance to win honour through work that taps into mankind's highest needs. We should ensure that the longings for beauty, truth and kindness which are innate in the human soul, but which currently emerge for plutocrats only in bursts of late-life philanthropy, have a chance to flourish across their whole career in everyday economic activities. In a nuanced version of capitalism, the rich would be happy with slightly lower returns on their money in exchange for acquiring more diverse and beguiling laurels, and in return ordinary citizens would be blessed with greatly more dignified places to work, live and shop for tennis rackets and toasters in.
Career Advice from Artists
As economies develop, so a troubling ambition arises in many of its most educated and driven workers. It is no longer enough that a job merely pays a living wage; it should also, ideally, prove to be meaningful. A search for greater meaning in work may be so powerful that it can lead us to make dramatic and apparently reckless swerves in our careers; it may make us leave well-paid and secure occupations in a search for tasks that more accurately answer to certain inchoate inner needs that we capture with the term 'meaningful'. There seem to be two elements required to make a job meaningful. Firstly, we want a job to give us a feeling that we are helping in some way, large or small, to make the world a better place, either by reducing suffering or else by eliciting delight, understanding or consolation in others. Secondly, and more challengingly still, a meaningful job should feel aligned with our own deepest talents and interests. It has to give us a chance to externalize certain precious capacities that lie within us, so that we can look back at our work and feel that it speaks to others and ourselves of our most sincere, authentic and valuable qualities. No wonder we can spend many years, especially early on in our careers, wondering what we should try to do with our lives.
In moments of confusion, the career of an artist can seem attractive, and, perhaps more often than is wise, inspire the hope that we could one day try to become artists ourselves. The ambition to be creative has taken many a young person by the throat and never let them go. The successful artist seems to live out the modern ideal of what work might be: Andrew Wyeth, for instance, would take his easel into the countryside, look at the fields, rivers, trees and clouds and translate his most intimate reactions into touches of paint on canvas. The market would convert the motions of his soul into money, in exchange for delighting and moving his audience. Anthony Caro could visit scrap merchants, pick up odd pieces of metal that interested him, weld them together following the dictates of his imagination and then, in the wake of worldwide exhibitions, receive large cheques from his galleries in London and New York (a knighthood was to follow). We admire blessed individuals who pursue activities that have a unique origin in their own personalities and then make a decisive difference in the lives of others; this is demonstrated by the money the audience is willing to pay for the effect.
Attractive though this may be, the prospect of an artistic career is hopelessly disconnected from what most of us are capable of, let alone what the world needs. Nevertheless, there are some important lessons to be drawn from the trajectories of artists, such as how one might discover
Building on what one loved in another painter's work.
107. Philip James de Loutherbourg. Lake Scene. Event tig, 1792
108. J.M.W. Turner. A Mountain Scene. Val d'Aosta. c.1845
a vocation, turn moments of inspiration into a career and commercialize one's talents, and these may be of use in cases that stretch far beyond the restricted and economically challenging realm of art.
Problems with careers often start with an unusual sensation: we know a hundred things that we would hate to do with our lives, but beyond vague longings we don't have a clear picture of where we should in fact direct our ambitions. We want to change things, to do something interesting and worthwhile, but we can't bring our interests into any kind of realistic focus. At this point, we tend to panic. We blame others for our woes, we declare the playing field rigged against us, we exaggerate our deficiencies or we leap into the nearest so-called 'safe' occupation that we know will not answer any of our inner needs, but which, we reassure ourselves, will at least earn us money and keep authority figures off our backs.
We would be wise to apply a little patience, realizing that confusions about one's direction are a necessary part of a legitimate search for an authentic working life. Rather than evidence that one is doomed.
feeling lost is the necessary first stage of a fruitful quest. In this process there are two signals to which we should pay particular attention: envy and admiration.
From a young age, we acquire so many compelling stories of envy being corrosive and damaging that we fail to identify its constructive and essential qualities. We don't use envy for what it can really help us to construct: a map of the future. Every person we envy holds out a piece of the jigsaw about our possible later achievements. There is a portrait of our true self to be assembled from sifting through the envious feelings we experience when we flick through a magazine, scan the room at a party or hear the latest moves in the careers of those we went to school with. We may experience envy as humiliating, as the confirmation of our own failure, but instead we should ask the one essential and redemptive question of all the people we envy: what can I learn here? Sadly, envious feelings tend to be confusingly vague. We envy entire people and situations, when in fact, if we gave ourselves the opportunity to analyse the targets of our envy calmly, it would turn out that it was only a small part of them that really held the clue to our ambitions.