There is a sequence that Western societies present as the natural shape of an adult life. Leave school. Get a job—a proper one, with an employer and a title and a place in an organisational hierarchy.
Form a partnership, raise children if that is the direction, purchase a house through a thirty-year debt arrangement, remain in the vicinity of the house while the debt is repaid, accumulate savings against the retirement that concludes the working portion of the sequence, and manage the final years without placing excessive demands on the aged care system.
The sequence is presented not as one arrangement among several but as the shape that a life sensibly takes—the path that reasonable, responsible, adult people follow when they are getting things right.
I have never followed it. Not as a deliberate act of resistance, but because the sequence did not describe my situation accurately and the alternatives it was designed to foreclose seemed more interesting than the sequence itself.
The proper job is the sequence’s first gate. The phrase carries more ideological freight than it appears to carry. A proper job is legible—it has a recognisable institutional form, an employer, a contract, a consistent title, a place in a hierarchy that other people can locate and understand. Legibility is what makes it proper, not value, not contribution, not income.
The freelance work that produces more income than the equivalent employment, that is sought after by the organisations that commission it, that demonstrates a level of professional competence that the commissioning organisations find difficult to replicate through employment—this work is not a proper job. It lacks the institutional form that the phrase requires. It substitutes autonomy and uncertainty for predictability and hierarchy, which the cultural framework of the proper job reads as risk rather than as flexibility.
I was told repeatedly, by people who considered themselves to be offering useful perspective, that I did not have a proper job. The people saying this were not hostile. They were operating from within a framework that equated institutional recognition with safety, and they were concerned, in the way that people who care are sometimes concerned, that I was placing myself outside the safety that the institutional recognition provides.
The income I was generating did not reassure them, because income that arrives from multiple sources irregularly is, in the framework’s logic, less secure than income that arrives monthly from a single employer, regardless of the total amounts.
The framework was not assessing my situation. It was assessing my resemblance to the model it was built for.
The model was built for conditions that were more prevalent when it was developed than they are now. The thirty-year employment with a single organisation, the pension that accumulated reliably over the career, the housing market that appreciated predictably, the geographic stability that the mortgage enabled and the career reinforced—these were real features of a specific economic period in specific Western economies, and the model made sense within those conditions.
Conformity to the sequence, in those conditions, did often produce the security the sequence promised. The conditions were more stable than current conditions. The sequence was a reasonable wager on their continuation.
The conditions changed. The wager became less reliable. The sequence persisted.
This is where the cultural lag becomes consequential. The institutional framework that judges people by their adherence to the sequence was built when the sequence was more likely to deliver what it promised. The framework continues to operate, continues to make its judgments, continues to treat deviation from the sequence as imprudence, in conditions that the sequence was not designed for and does not reliably navigate.
The person who followed the sequence in 2008 and found their mortgage underwater, their employer dissolved, and their pension fund depleted did not fail to follow the script. The script failed to account for the conditions. The conditions had changed in ways that the script’s designers had not anticipated and that the script’s cultural prestige did not acknowledge.
The distinction between institutional safety and adaptive safety is the distinction that the sequence obscures by presenting one as safety and the other as its absence. Institutional safety is the safety of fixed structures—the mortgage, the career ladder, the pension, the routine.
It is real when the structures are stable. It is fragile when they are not, because it depends on the conditions that produced the structures remaining sufficiently similar to the conditions they were designed for. When interest rates rise globally, the mortgage that was a fixed point of security becomes a variable cost that the household did not budget for. When the industry restructures, the career ladder that provided the route to retirement turns out to have ended three rungs from the top.
Adaptive safety is different in kind. It is not the safety of fixed structures but the safety of the capacity to navigate when the structures change. The transferable skills that can be applied to different problems in different contexts. The low attachment to single organisations, single locations, single income sources, that makes reconfiguration possible when any of them fails. The tolerance for uncertainty that was developed by operating within it rather than being protected from it. The adjustment muscles, as it might be put, that were built by having to adjust.
The adaptive person is not protected from difficulty. They are practiced at responding to it. The difficulty that collapses the person who has been protected from it by the sequence is the difficulty that the adaptive person has already encountered in smaller doses and learned to navigate. The protection that the sequence provides is real when conditions remain stable. It is the same protection that a greenhouse provides to plants that have been grown inside it—comprehensive, effective, and something of a liability if the plants are subsequently required to grow outside.
The mobility question runs through the housing argument in a specific way that the ownership mythology does not acknowledge. The market that determines when houses are worth buying and when they are worth selling does not coordinate its movements with the personal circumstances of the people who need to move.
The person who needs to sell because their employment has ended, or their circumstances have changed, or the opportunity they want to pursue is elsewhere, sells in the market that exists at the moment they need to sell. The market at that moment may be favourable or it may not. The gains that accrued over the period of ownership may be realised or they may not. The asset that was supposed to be the foundation of the household’s financial security may produce a significant return or may return less than the debt that was used to purchase it.
The person who rents does not have the appreciation potential of the owner. They also do not have the asset immobility. The rent that rises is a cost. It does not tie the renter to the location in the way that the mortgage ties the owner. The renter who finds that their circumstances require them to be elsewhere can be elsewhere without the transaction costs, the timing risk, and the emotional weight that selling a property involves. The mobility is a cost in some circumstances and an asset in others, and the circumstances determine which.
The sequence treats the mobility of renting as a transitional state on the way to the fixed security of ownership. It does not accommodate the possibility that for some people, in some circumstances, throughout some or all of their lives, the mobility is the thing that makes the other things possible.
I can get by. Not because the resources are now sufficient, though they are, but because the capacity to reconfigure was developed before the resources existed. The years of navigating uncertainty without the institutional structures that the sequence provides developed a relationship to change that the sequence does not develop, because the sequence is designed to minimise change rather than to navigate it.
This is not a claim that the adaptive approach is superior. It is a claim that it is different, and that the cultural framework that presents the sequence as the universal optimum does not acknowledge the difference. The person for whom the sequence produces the stability it promises is not wrong to value it. The person for whom the sequence does not describe their situation, whose income is irregular, whose interests are varied, whose capacity for mobility is the thing they are most unwilling to sacrifice, is not imprudent for declining it.
The sequence works for the conditions it was designed for and the person it was designed for. The conditions have changed in ways the sequence does not accommodate, and the person it was designed for is not the only kind of person.
How dull is not exactly the right phrase, though it is the one that comes most readily. It is not boredom with the sequence that other people have chosen. It is the recognition that the sequence presented itself as the only possible shape for a life, and that the shape, examined closely, collapsed the available possibilities into a single authorised path. The authorised path has its merits. It also has its costs. The costs are not presented as costs. They are presented as the reasonable price of the safety the sequence provides.
The safety is real within its conditions.
The conditions are not guaranteed.
The sequence is a wager on their continuation.
The wager has been presented as certainty.
The weather has not cooperated.
The Vorpel Foundation