What If You’re Not Off Track? (And Never Have Been)

There is consolation in the fact that missing out is an inexorable side effect of the richness of human life.

— Kieran Setiya, Midlfe: A Philosophical Guide

I recently tore through Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky, the latest installment in her White Space series. The main character is an “archinformist.” She’s like an archeologist but for data and information. Instead of piecing together a culture from the physical artifacts it left behind, she analyzes and draws inferences from its digital artifacts. The work she does combines quantitative analysis, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, semiotics, and sociology. 

This field doesn’t exist yet. The Folded Sky is far-future science fiction. When we scour data for cultural insight today, we do so with direct connections to the culture that created that data. And when archeologists use digital tools, they do so to gain insight into civilizations of the past that didn’t make digital information. But a thousand or more years in the future, when Bear’s story takes place, it’s easy to imagine how the field of archinformatics would be an important one.

There are many aspects of what I do for a living that would not have surprised the 18-year-old version of me in the slightest. I write; I teach; I speak. Sure, these things take a form that I wouldn’t have anticipated—email newsletters, online courses, podcasts—but I could have easily predicted the basic mechanics would be central to my future career. And as a ‘90s teen deeply in love with computers and the internet, it wouldn’t have been a stretch to imagine the future forms those mechanics would take.

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A whole swath of the career options available today didn’t exist 25 years ago. If someone from the 1960s or 70s were to peruse the job listings on Indeed or ZipRecruiter, they probably wouldn’t recognize a good 50% of the jobs on offer. Many others might have familiar keywords (e.g., nurse, sales, assistant), but their form and responsibilities would be utterly foreign.

The breakneck pace of change in the world of work began with the Industrial Revolution, gained momentum with the shift to a consumption-based economy, and further accelerated with the digital revolution. It’s unlikely to slow anytime soon.

As someone who thinks about work all the time, this ever-evolving landscape provides endless fodder for curiosity and analysis. 

As the mother of a 17-year-old who is considering her college and career choices, this presents quite a challenge. What direction or advice can I offer that could possibly prepare her for a future I can’t predict with any level of confidence? 

I’ve opted to tell her exactly that—the options available to you in 2030s, let alone the 2050s, will likely be very different from what they are today. I recommend you stay curious and learn how to think critically, creatively, empathetically, and systematically. Please don’t major in a job—you have no idea what that job is going to look like in 10 years. Oh, and don’t think that what you choose to do in your twenties has to be what you do in your thirties, forties, fifties, or beyond.

In his book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, Kieran Setiya describes how we become aware—often uncomfortably so—of the “progressive reduction of possibilities” for our lives. Biologically, there are certain things our bodies can no longer do. Financially, there are limits to the choices we might make or the risks we might take. Temporally, we may not have the time to explore certain paths.

Objectively, Setiya is correct, and facing this reality head-on is clarifying. But narratively, we often exaggerate the limits on our possible futures. We foreclose on choices prematurely because we’re told a story about when and in what order they can be made. One benefit of my quarter-life crisis is that, during midlife, I can see just how long and full of possibility 25 years of adulthood truly are. By looking back on the things I thought I didn’t have time for at 21 or 30 or 35, I can imagine still having time for them at 45 or 60. 

On track?

The prevailing message that I received when I was my daughter’s age was about getting my life on track. Or rather, keeping my life on track. Get good grades, go to college, get a good job, and do that until retirement. Boom, boom, boom.

This is the same message she gets today from most people and institutions in her life. I want the message I send to be different, because the world she’s entering is different from the one I entered 25 years ago. And that world was already different from the world that “stay on track” advice was based on. After all, there is nothing “traditional” about the “traditional” model of success that some fear is being upended.

You can’t be “off track” for a life that doesn’t yet exist.

I tell my daughter…

You won’t be able to do everything you want to do in your life—but you’ll be able to do more than you think. The choice you make today won’t limit your future choices nearly as much as you fear. The path you take into the next stage of your life is one of many paths you’ll be on. Limits are real, but far too often they are self-imposed.

There was a time when this kind of advice would have been viewed as eccentric. Today, it seems pretty practical given the facts (rather than the feelings driving the higher education panic). If you squint and look between the hot takes about what beliefs universities indoctrinate their students with, how AI is going to steal all our jobs, or why English degrees are stupid, you’ll find plenty of folks are willing to recommend a well-rounded liberal arts education that can act as a stepping stone into any number of as-of-yet-uninvented careers.

As work goes, so goes our relationships

What’s less common is the acknowledgement that as our modes of work go so goes all of our socialities. The First Industrial Revolution dramatically changed where we lived and how we formed communities. The Second Industrial Revolution changed our expectations of family and gender. The Third Industrial Revolution changed how we relate to ourselves through the advent of mass marketing and consumption.

None of these preexisting social frameworks was exceptionally stable. How we live, who we care for, and what we know about ourselves are formed in context. When the context changes, our personal and social relations change. 

Bear’s novel also imagines how space travel beyond our solar system might change our social frameworks. How might interspecies relationships alter our domestic norms? The archinformist, Dr. Sunyata Song, is married to a member of a different species, and they’re raising two human kids together.  How might we relate to our bodies differently if we spend most of our lives in microgravity? Spacefarers typically have their feet modified into “aft hands” so they can function better on space ships. How might we tinker with our consciousness as we augment our brains with artificial memory and transmitters? Bear’s story even includes a human character named Chive, composed of five networked bodies. 

These narrative choices are provocative, but logical within the world of the story. And because the setting is so far removed from our current time and place, it’s easier to suspend disbelief in the viability of such social relations.

Research shows that, as expected, our social context keeps changing right along with our work context. The living arrangements that made sense after the Second Industrial Revolution made less sense after the Third Industrial Revolution, and those living arrangements make less sense in the 21st-century economy. I have no doubt that Millennials like me will create new living arrangements in retirement and that Gen Zers will create more and different ways to form families. And who knows what kind of wild ideas Gen Alpha might have about how they want to live?

As of now, my kid doesn’t have a firm vision about what her life will be like after college. Thank goodness. She’s not dreaming of getting married or starting a family—nor has she ruled those things out. Currently, her preference is to live in a city—Washington, DC or New York City—with a spunky mutt and rent an apartment with a great view. She’s thinking about working in politics, or public interest law, or journalism. Not that she needs to choose.

I don’t get the impression that she feels the kind of rigid pressure to press on through one life stage to the next in some sort of orderly or deadlined way. And good golly, there’s so much freedom in that.

Two years ago, I spoke with sociologist and political economist Mauro Guillén about his book, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society. In the book, he lays out demographic facts, sociological analysis, and cultural criticism that suggest this less rigid approach to moving through life is not only fine, but it’s better adapted to today's and tomorrow’s reality. 

I think about this book and my conversation with Dr. Guillén all the time—perhaps more than any other interview I’ve done in the last ten years.

As I told him at the time, this book would have changed my life at 18 or 25. I’m trying to let it change my life now in my forties. Most importantly, the book is my steady guide as Lola and I talk about the next few years and beyond.

Since my kid is now right on the precipice of her next stage of life and given current events (she says euphemistically), I thought it was a good time to revisit this conversation. Instead of replaying the episode as I wrote it two years ago, I wanted to share the bulk of my conversation with Dr. Guillén. I hope it brings you the kind of hope and direction it’s brought me. And, if your situation is anything like mine, I hope it will help guide your conversations with loved ones—young and old—about the glorious possibilities still available to them in their lives.

This interview below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

• Interview

  Tara McMullin: So let's start with a definition. What is a perennial?

  Mauro Guillén: A perennial is someone who doesn't think and doesn't act their age. In other words, it's somebody who is not making decisions about what to do based on age. Because, for the longest time we've been classified into age groups and then we were supposed to do certain things that were appropriate for those age groups.

  So we were supposed to learn at some stage in life, but only that stage, we were supposed to work at another different stage and we were supposed to retire another stage. And that's what I challenge in this book that maybe that rigid way of orienting our lives is no longer good.

  Tara: Do you consider yourself a perennial?

  Guillén: Well, yes, in the sense that I'm not planning to retire. Because I love to work, but also, given my job as an academic I’m always learning something new. So I must admit that if I were doing something else, like if I were a lawyer, maybe I wouldn't be as much of a perennial. But for academics, it's easy because it is an occupation that lends itself to the perennial mindset.

  Tara: I want to talk about some of the specific changes that you see leading to this postgenerational revolution at a high level. What are some of those demographic, political, and economic changes that are creating the need for this perennial point of view?

  Guillén: Two things are going on, and they've been going on for quite a while. The first is that a number of trends are converging and presenting us with this new situation in which we need to be more flexible. First, we're living longer, so therefore we have more years to decide what is it that we want to do with our lives. Second, we stay healthy far longer than before, and therefore that means that we can pursue an active lifestyle far longer. You can still do lots of things at age 60, at age 70, at age 80. So both of those things are important. 

  And the third is technological change. You may not be able to work on the same thing, to have the same occupation, to pursue just one career in your lifetime; you may have to switch.

  So all of those things are essentially inviting all of us to rethink the way in which we think about life, and specifically, about when we learn, when we work, and when we retire. 

  But then there's a second very important reason to rethink these things. There are a lot of people who at some point don't make their transition when they should. For example, teenage mothers, or people who abuse substances, or high school dropouts, and so on and so forth.

  And then those people have a really hard time with the current system because our current system has been thought for people who essentially make progress on a steady basis, right from one stage to the next. 

  Timing is everything. And the last 20 years have been really bad in terms of one crisis after the other.? We had the internet crash, followed by the global financial crisis, and then, more recently, the pandemic.

  So the younger generations have had to go through two or three crises in their very short lifetimes. Many of them, of course, are having difficulty. We've never had so many young people in the United States, for example, still living with their parents. It's completely inconsistent with the so-called American dream, right? The American dream is that you would get out of the house, and have a job, and take it from there.

  Tara: There are some really interesting statistics in the book about the changes in our how households are constituted. 

  Guillén: What we have is we've been assuming for a long time that the ideal household should be what we call the nuclear family. So that's two parents, one or more kids, one refrigerator, one washing machine, one dog or cat, and one car, and so on. And that used to be 45% of American households in the 1970s.

  But today, believe it or not, it's down to less than 20%. We have a lot of people living alone. We have an increasing number of LGBTQ households. We also have single mothers, women who have decided to have children on their own or they divorced.

  Another interesting category is the multi-generational household, where two or more generations live under one roof. That used to be less than 5% of the American population. But now we have, depending on the survey, up to 15% of all Americans living in a multi-generational household.

  And it's not because they don't have money, because in fact, poverty rates among people who live in multi-generational households are lower than for the general American population. The median income for multi-generational households in the United States is about $90,000, which is way above the average. Some people are doing this out of choice, not out of necessity.

  Tara: Let's talk about the sequential mode of life because, as someone who has had multiple false starts on the different parts of the sequence, I found that fascinating. What is the sequential mode of life? 

  Guillén: So, it came into being about 120 years ago. It happened because we introduced two major innovations. One was universal schooling, which then effectively separated the first two stages of the sequence—early childhood and schooling.

  Around the same time, we also introduced pensions. That also created a boundary between our working years and our retirement. 

  So those are the four stages. When we're very little, we play. Then we go to school. Then we work, and then finally we retire. Those are the four stages or stations in life.

  And for the longest time, we've been essentially telling people you have to go through those stages at the right time. And it's your problem if you don't go or you don't make the transitions when they're supposed to happen. Everything is prepared for you to succeed unless you deviate from that pattern.

  Tara: It seems that there are a lot of structural and economic obstacles that people face when they don't make that transition at the right time. What are some of those obstacles that people might run into?

  Guillén: Let's talk first about women—women who, for example, didn't have children because they wanted to pursue a career. They may find themselves in a situation in which they don't have as many children as they’d like. And again, we should blame men for that because we don't do our fair share of household tasks. But women at the end of the day are the ones who get pregnant and who give birth to the baby. 

  However, we haven't changed careers or jobs in a way that would make things easier for women. 

  Another good example is children who don't belong to a nuclear family. So they go into the foster care system. We have about 15 million Americans who have at some point in their lives been in the foster care system. They have much, much lower graduation rates. So again, we don't give opportunities for these people who may be 35 or 40, and they want to get a college degree or they want to do something really exciting.

  We don't have programs because everything revolves around the 16- or 17-year-old who wants to attend college.

  Tara: In the book, you note that, because we’re living longer and our health is lasting longer, we might start to think about our lives in terms of three careers. I'd love to hear more about how you envision we might think differently about our career years or our professional years.

  Guillén: Let's just keep in mind something really important: It's not just out of choice that people are thinking about switching careers. It's also sometimes because technological change can drastically reduce the need for entire occupations.

  But this new concept, in which you may have two or three careers in your lifetime, releases a lot of the pressure that we put on teenagers and people in their early 20s to make up their minds as to what they want to do for the rest of their lives.

  That's wild. How can you ask somebody that young to make that decision? And of course, what we see is that there are a lot of people who then have a midlife crisis, because they didn't choose the right thing. 

  This is as relevant to a 45-year-old who loses their job as it is to somebody in their 20s trying to decide what to do in life.

  So if you're in your 20s, you don’t have to make a lifelong, faithful decision. You can think about what you want to do in the next 10 or 15 years. Again, if we switch gears and we ask companies, we ask the government to think about workers in a different way and to help facilitate those career switches. 

  It's also highly relevant, of course, to people who are about to retire. Well, maybe they feel they're still young and they're still healthy, and they don't want to retire. Maybe they want to switch on to something else, because they don't want to do manual work or physical work any longer.

  So we should be facilitating those transitions there, to something else that would be appealing to people at that age.

  Tara: What exactly does that look like? How do jobs need to change? How does compensation or retirement plans need to change so that we can facilitate more of this sort of fluid way of looking at our professional years?

  Guillén: Most employers tend to hire at the entry level—people who are relatively young. So this has to change, and this will change because companies are having a lot of trouble hiring younger people. Remember that the younger age cohorts are smaller and smaller. So they need to replace workers because they've been retiring, but there are not enough young people (unless we have immigration, which is unlikely on a grand scale). So I think it's going to happen because companies will need to compete fiercely for talent. 

  And maybe what employers should do is think about older workers differently. Older workers have the key advantage in that they have experience. They have this know-how that is very difficult to learn—you need to be working for 20 years or 30 years to get it. We're essentially wasting all of that talent now that those people are healthier, and they're living longer, and maybe they would like to stay occupied.

  Tara: I noticed that cultural literacy played a really big part in the book. Why is understanding different cultures from our own so important for the future of work?

  Guillén: You know, somebody once said that, if you know only one country, you know no country. In other words, you don't have a perspective. How can you really understand what Texas is if you don't know another American state? I mean, you could well assume that everyone in the U.S. is like people from Texas, who are unique just as everyone from different states are. Unless you have that perspective, it's very difficult to understand even your own country.

  So cultural literacy is a good way of actually training your mind as to what's going on in the world. To think about all of those issues and how they spread throughout the world, as well as local reactions.

  Tara: The book also includes a bunch of pop culture references. Many more than I was expecting! Why? 

  Guillén: I referenced to at least 25 movies or so, because I wanted to demonstrate how deeply ingrained the sequential model of life is in our culture and our minds.

  So for example, I make a reference to Rebel Without a Cause, which is a movie about how people reach adulthood right or fail to do so. Also Peter Pan. The best way to reach my audience is to demonstrate to them that the sequential model of life is part of American culture—first you play, then you study, then you work, then you retire. 

  And I want to change that because I think this is not serving as well. So by referring to movies and popular culture, I think I can drive home the point that this has become the normal state of affairs. And I want us to move towards a new normal.

  Tara: Let's talk about education. You lay out a number of policy ideas and potential solutions in the book. How has the prevailing job-focused education model failed both students and the economy as a whole?

  Guillén: There’s a mismatch between the skills that the economy requires and the skills that we teach either at school or in university. You hope you're educating people for the jobs of tomorrow. But what we're doing is essentially training them for the jobs of today. It's very difficult to anticipate what the jobs of tomorrow will be. People will be working for 20 or 30 years, in some cases 40 years or more, and the job situation changes all the time.

  So this is the fundamental issue that the educational sector faces everywhere in the world, not just in the United States. 

  Tara: My daughter is 15 and starting to look at colleges, and I desperately want to tell her, please do not choose a major that is a job, because that job may not be around forever. I think you do a fantastic job of identifying the change-oriented skills that we need to focus on.

  Guillén: Let me preface my comment by saying that we will have important jobs out there for which you need training that is specific to the job—doctors, pilots, etc. So there are some exceptions to this, but in general, employers want to train their workers.

  What they want is people who are very good at understanding what the situation is, understanding the context, absorbing information, learning. But more importantly, they want people to work socially. Social skills have become increasingly important. And we barely teach them. You're not born with social skills. You learn them—things like the ability to work in teams, the ability to collaborate with others, the ability to communicate, the ability to negotiate., emotional intelligence, all of these things. 

  When companies advertise jobs these days, they're saying that they’re looking for somebody who has the social skills in addition to whatever technical skills are required.

  Tara: I'm curious what the perennial perspective and some of these broader changes that you're looking at might have to say about what's been called the loneliness epidemic among, well, really all of us. What kind of changes or trends do you see unfolding as we become less generationally siloed that might improve that?

  Guillén: Let me answer first for relatively young people, and then for those in their fifties or sixties. 

  So for relatively young people, there's all of this pressure to popular, and to do this, and to do that—to be an overachiever. And the perennial mindset essentially is telling you that you don't have to achieve everything by age 22 or 23 in order to make that transition from being a student to being a worker. What you need to do is think about your life in the longer term, and maybe you would want to pursue two or three careers.

  I think that takes pressure off younger people.

  Now, for people in their fifties or sixties. It's the same thing. When people retire, they find that it's not paradise. Everybody has been telling us that retirement is like what you should aspire to. You should be miserable and work for 50 years, because then you can retire. So you're not supposed to enjoy your job. Just save money. Don't spend too much. You will be rewarded when you retire. 

  And then when people retire, they find thatthey get disconnected. They feel lonely. Also, their health deteriorates because they're no longer as active. Plus, it puts a lot of pressure on people because it seems as if the younger the age at which you retire, the more successful you've been.

  Some people would like to retire relatively early, and there are some people who just for whatever reason don't want to retire too early. But people don't figure out exactly what they want to do until they actually do it, right? For example, 43% of Americans who retire go back to work. They may not return to work full-time, but they do return to work in some capacity.

  And 53% of those who retire early go back to work. So what I'm proposing is that we provide people with more information and more options so that they can avoid those kinds of difficult transitions.

  Why not have a different plan to begin with. There should be specific government programs for those in their 60s or older, so that they can learn something new, whether for pleasure or so that they can switch jobs careers. That's one thing that they should do. 

  But more importantly, the government should set an example for companies to follow. The government is the biggest employer in every country in the world, including the United States. They could begin to help us with this change by changing their own employment policies. The government, like companies, prefers younger workers. That's a problem. They're not supposed to discriminate by age, but you always come up with an excuse for not hiring somebody who has applied for the job and who is in their late fifties.

  So I think the government can both implement new policies to facilitate this, but also, as an employer, it can show the way.

  Tara: Mauro, this has been fantastic. I loved the book. I think it's so important. I really do wish I would have had it at 22. My life would be very different, I think, in all sorts of positive ways. 

  Guillén: Well, let's, let's focus on your daughter's generation.

  Tara: Yes. I'm trying. I'm trying!