My last day at the Press was on Friday, and, while I’m naturally sad about the closing of another chapter in life, I find myself thinking about how inevitable this moment was. The marketing department at the Press had notoriously high turnover, to the extent that I’d estimate an average duration of about two to three years for each marketing team member. After two and a half years, I’m right on target for this average. 

The trick with a small company with a very specific mission is that there’s not a whole lot of room for individual evolution. The people integral to the mission of the organization are sort of professionally synonymous with the organization — meaning the tension, however nuanced, that I felt between myself and the work of the Press was bound to reach a breaking point at some point. Within larger organizations, this sort of thing can be mitigated through movement between departments, onto different projects, etc. But, at the Press, I was always going to have to be a role player with a particular role to play. 

The point here is probably less about the Press than about the nature of work more generally. I think room for evolution is pretty central to the concept of professional meaningfulness for a lot of people. It’s a tall ask for someone to spend forty hours a week, multiple years in a row, doing the same thing. Growth after a while in that situation slows to a crawl, and it becomes hard to stave off the bleak feeling of being a programmed human, who has been taught to execute particular tasks to perfection, or something close to it.

I think this is one reason academia is valued highly as a profession. While the title changes are mostly a question of what word(s) precede “professor,” the actual role being played by the person holding that title evolves immensely over time — and largely at the individual’s direction. Even within academia, though, there seems to be the tendency toward standardization. This seems to be the tendency everywhere: viewing individual identities and idiosyncrasies as a threat to productivity rather than a a dynamic source of creativity. 

People need to get paid more and have more security through benefits, yes — but even more than that, I think people need to be able to envision a future at their jobs, where they can explore new depths of themselves with every passing year. I know that was a big motivation for me in moving on to something new: the avoidance of stagnation and a step toward a version of me that doesn’t yet exist.