The science of career anxiety. (With Anne-Laure Le Cunff)

The Long Way Round. Walking interviews with people doing interesting work in careers and the future of work.

There is a practice Anne-Laure Le Cunff calls self-anthropology. The idea is that you treat your own life as a field site, the way an anthropologist treats a culture, something to be observed patiently before it is explained. You watch what you do, you take notes on your reactions, you notice which kinds of work leave you lighter and which leave you hollowed out, and you let the evidence accumulate over months before you draw any conclusions. It is patient, unglamorous, and almost the opposite of how most of us are taught to handle the question of what to do with our lives. It is also, more or less exactly, the thing we have spent the last couple of years trying to build a tool to help people do at Rumbo. The first time I came across her work I knew I needed to speak with her, and as luck would have it we had a mutual friend who had filmed a podcast with her and was happy to make the introduction.

For those who do not know her work, Anne-Laure is a former Google employee turned neuroscientist, the founder of Ness Labs, and the author of Tiny Experiments. The question I wanted to put to her is one I have circled a few times in my own writing, and one most of my writer friends keep circling too, which is why a job has such a strange and total grip on the way we feel about ourselves. I have mostly approached it from the outside, through stories and observation, and I was curious what a neuroscientist would do with it. Two themes stood out from the conversation.

The first is the nature of passion. It is a subject I have written about more than once, and many of you are probably tired of hearing the standard “follow your passion” line repeated as though it settled anything. The usual objections to that advice are practical ones. It assumes the passion is already inside you, fully formed, waiting to be located, when most people who sit down and honestly try to name theirs produce a list of weekend hobbies, none of which has an obvious route to paying a London rent. Anne-Laure went somewhere more precise than that. The trouble, she said, is that we use a single word for two completely different things. There is the passion you are told you have, the singular, pre-existing one that you find and then follow for the rest of your life. And there is the kind that develops in you over time, the kind she means when she says “you could become passionate about anything.” When you can see the work landing on other people, when you are stretching and learning and watching a skill sharpen in your own hands, the feeling tends to arrive on its own. We call both of these things passion, as though they were one phenomenon, and the confusion does real damage, because only the second kind is real, and the second kind is available to almost anyone in almost any sort of work.

There is now a fair amount of research demonstrating this. In 2018 the psychologists Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton published five experiments in Psychological Science under a title that was itself the whole argument: “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?” They found that people who believe interests are fixed and waiting to be discovered hold narrower interests, and give up faster the moment a new subject becomes difficult. In one study they showed students a gripping film about black holes, hooked almost everyone in the room, and then handed those same students a dense and frustrating technical article on the same topic. The students who believed passion is found lost interest within minutes. The students who believed passion is built kept reading. The advice to find your passion, the researchers wrote, carries a hidden and damaging implication, which is that once you have located the thing, pursuing it will be easy. It never is. And if you have been promised that it will be, then the first hard week reads as proof that you chose wrong, and off you go to look for the next thing.

The question Anne-Laure prefers is a much more manageable one. Not “what is my one true calling,” which tends to produce either paralysis or a confident guess dressed up as certainty, but, in her words, “what are you curious about?” She extends it a little when she describes it: “what is something that, even if it fails, you’ll be happy that you gave it a try?” Curiosity asks far less of you than passion does. It does not demand a lifelong commitment before you have collected any evidence at all. It just asks you to run the experiment and see what comes back, which is the only way anyone has ever found work they love, including the people who will later tell you they simply followed their passion.

The second theme was the job title, and why losing one, or never having an impressive one, tends to feel less like a practical setback and more like a threat to your standing as a person. The reasons for that run a very long way back. Humans are social animals, and for almost all of the time we have existed, being cast out of the group did not mean an awkward few months and a dent in your savings. It meant death. You did not survive a winter alone. The brain learned to treat the threat of social exclusion as a genuine emergency, and it did so, as far as we can tell, by borrowing machinery it already had. In 2003 Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues at UCLA put people in an fMRI scanner and had them play a simple online ball game that was secretly rigged so the other players would stop passing to them. When the exclusion kicked in, the regions of the brain that lit up were the same ones that register the distress of physical pain. Being left out and being hurt are not similar by poetic coincidence; the brain processes them through overlapping circuitry. Social rejection hurts in a much more literal way than one might imagine.

A job sits directly on top of that machinery. Work is one of the main ways a modern adult signals to everyone around them that they are a contributing member of the group, that the tribe is better off with them inside it than outside it. Anne-Laure put it more bluntly than I would have dared to: “being productive is a way to say, don’t kick me out. You need me, and we need each other.” For most of human history, though, there was no single label carrying that whole message. You demonstrated your worth to the people around you in a dozen overlapping ways at once. You were a decent hunter, and also someone who told good stories around the fire, and also a careful parent, and also the person who knew which plants to avoid, and also reliable when somebody needed help in the field. If you became a worse hunter as you aged, your standing did not collapse, because your value to the group was spread across many things and was visible to everyone directly, in the doing of them. The contribution was legible without a label.

Post-industrial modern society handed each of us a single title and asked it to do all of that work alone. Your worth to society now arrives compressed into one line, one role, one answer to the question people ask within thirty seconds of meeting you. When that line is missing, or unimpressive, or recently lost, the brain does not file it as a neutral administrative fact. It reads it as the early warning of exclusion, the same signal our ancestors got when the group began to turn its back, and it produces a fear that feels enormous because the machinery generating it was built for a matter of life and death. The fear makes complete sense once you see where it comes from. An ancient and accurate survival system is doing exactly its job, in a modern situation it was never designed for.

What used to be a local, occasional comparison is now a global and constant one. The old way of signalling your worth was to do the thing, in front of the few hundred people who could see you do it; a good hunter hunted, and the village watched, and that was the whole audience. Social media has replaced that with a permanent, public, quantified leaderboard. The job title now comes attached to a follower count, a salary band you can roughly infer, a company logo with its own prestige score, and the comparison is no longer against the few hundred people in your life but against everyone you went to school with, everyone you have ever worked alongside, and several thousand strangers the algorithm has placed beside you for contrast. As Anne-Laure put it, you are being scored not only against your immediate peers but against “every single person you’ve ever met since you were in school, plus a bunch of strangers.” The brain’s threat-detection system, calibrated for a small group where your standing changed slowly, is now being fed a ranking that updates every time you open your phone, and it is not coping with it well.

I have felt the pull of all this myself, recently and unmistakably. When Rumbo was new and people asked me about the team, I noticed a small but persistent temptation to make us sound larger and further along than we were. I would catch myself mentally counting freelancers we had worked with once as though they were permanent staff, and more generally rounding our progress up, presenting us as a stage or two beyond where we honestly were, even though the truthful version was already a good story, real and strong progress for a company of our size and age. It was the label-anxiety Anne-Laure had described, the background worry that the honest answer would not be impressive enough to keep me safely inside the group, operating even though I could see the mechanism clearly and knew better.

Anne-Laure spent the early part of her career at Google, where, she said, there was “a rubric that told you exactly what steps you were supposed to follow and what order.” She had a literal blueprint, a document that set out in advance what a successful career was meant to look like and how to assemble one. Both of the things she told me on that walk, the point about passion and the point about the job title, are in the end arguments against trusting a blueprint like that. The work you love and the worth you carry are things you build slowly, through evidence and experiment, and a document handed to you in advance cannot locate either one on your behalf.

That is the grounded, unsentimental promise of self-anthropology. It does not tell you what to do with your life, and it does not switch off the fear of an unimpressive title or shortcut the slow arrival of work you love. What it offers is a more honest relationship with both. You stop waiting to discover a passion and start running the experiments that grow one. You learn to recognise the old survival fear for what it is, and to weigh it accordingly when it shows up. The grip a job has on us may never fully loosen. But you can at least know what you are holding, and why, and decide for yourself how much of your life you are willing to hand it.

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The Long Way Round is a walking interview series. If you’re working on something interesting in the careers and future of work space, and you fancy a walk, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m building Rumbo, an AI career coaching platform that helps you understand yourself, the market, and the problems you’re drawn to, so you can make a career decision you trust. You can find it at rumbocareers.com.

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