Mid-career reflections - part 2: life and luck

Yesterday, one of my philosopher friends on facebook hosted a thread on the question, "Knowing what you now know, would you do it [i.e. seek a career in philosophy] all over again?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answers people gave were all over the map, with some saying of course they would, others saying of course they wouldn't, and others (including me) saying they weren't sure. Here is what I wrote:

I find the question undecidable. If I knew things would turn out the way they have, then yes - I love what I do, and find meaning and enjoyment in it that I don’t believe I would be able to get in any other line of work. I’m a philosopher at heart, through and through. But of course I could never know things would turn out the way they did. I struggled to finish the PhD, and then struggled to get a job—and I suffered greatly for years for both reasons...and things could have turned out very badly. In which case, no, I wouldn’t do it again. Hence why I find the question undecidable, even in retrospect. It’s a complete shot in the dark of the sort Laurie Paul has written about. The question itself is sort of like asking roulette winners and losers at a casino whether they would do it again. How are they supposed to answer?

In today's post, I want to explore in a bit more depth why I find the question undecidable: namely, due to the roles that 'life and luck' have over whether the choice turns out well--roles that I do not think can be rationally anticipated in any reliable way. Allow me to explain. 

A few years ago, I read the APA's annual Proceedings and Addresses, and was particularly struck by some things Charles Mills (CUNY) recounted about how a stroke of luck may well have been a determining factor between him leaving the profession before his career really began and the great career he went on to actually have:

Now it was time to find a job. While things were certainly not as bad on the market then as they are today, offers were not exactly flooding in either...[My] second year [on the market] I decided that I had to get serious. I applied for dozens of positions, and got APA Eastern interviews...with Notre Dame, the University of New Orleans, Miami (Ohio), and California State College Bakersfield. As it turned out, none of these interviews resulted in a job offer, and since I was reluctant to spend a third year on the market, my somewhat accidental philosophy career, birthed in naivety and ignorance from the start, might well have come to an appropriately ignominious end right there and then. But someone on the search committee for the University of Oklahoma, Ed Sankowski, liking my CV and motivated by diversity considerations, contacted me at the hotel itself. By sheer happenstance, I had gone up to my room to change, and it was in this brief window of time, before I went back down to the convention—maybe ten-fifteen minutes or so—that he telephoned. Perhaps he would have tried again; perhaps, discouraged, he wouldn’t. But it does bring home how dramatically one’s life can be altered by mere timing, brief lucky connections shunting us over to alternative timelines. (pp. 99-100)

In a somewhat similar vein, in her wonderful Dewey Lecture, Ruth Millikan recounted various ways that "life" affected her career--how she had to walk out of an exam of Stanley Cavell's for personal reasons (p. 4); entered grad school at Yale as only one of two women in a class of 22 students and one of only two students without a fellowship (pp. 4-5); how her dissertation supervisor (Wilfred Sellars) left her program before she had made any real progress on the dissertation (p. 5); and had a serious back injury, two children, a divorce, and spent a summer in mental hospital, all during graduate school, leading her to take 5 years (!) to complete her dissertation, with basically no supervision (pp. 5-6).

Mills' and Millikan's stories deeply resonate with me. My career has gone nothing like I expected it would...you guessed it, in large part due to life and luck. 

Here, in quick outline, is my story (which I tell for reasons that will become clear only at the end). My career started out well. I graduated magna cum Laude from Tufts University in 1998, with Dan Dennett as my thesis advisor and mentor. Despite saying complimentary things about my abilities, Dan tried to deter me from pursuing a graduate degree--for the usual reasons. Of course I didn't listen, and entered Syracuse University's PhD program at the tender young age of 22. Because, or so I was told at the time, grad school takes '5 years to finish', I figured things would go swimmingly and I would have a tenure track job by the time I was 27. Ha. Anyway, my two years at Syracuse were wonderful: I got along fantastically with the grad students and faculty, and got straight A's. Everything was going according to plan. But then luck happened: four of Syracuse's up-and-coming faculty members--John Hawthorne, Ted Sider, Dean Zimmerman, and Brian Weatherson--were all hired away by other programs...at the same time. Given that they were the faculty go on best with and planned to work with, this was a total disaster. Given that they were hired away after grad school transfer applications were due--for all but two schools (Arizona and MIT)--it was even worse. Because I knew I didn't want to wait another year to transfer, I applied to both of those schools. I got into Arizona.

In some ways (in many ways, as I will explain shortly), getting into Arizona was good luck. Unfortunately, this is also where life interceded in not such a good way. Moving to Arizona was not an easy thing for me. It not only required me to leave many close friends (grad students at Syracuse, as well as the bandmates I had been playing music with in Boston with ever since my undergrad years). Moving to Arizona also coincided with the end of my first long-term romantic relationship (with a woman who at the time was at UPenn). Further, after getting to Arizona I has to essentially retake courses I had already taken at Syracuse. I also had some health issues. Anyway, for one reason or other--or, more likely, all of the above reasons--my transition to Arizona did not go well. I didn't gel very well with the faculty and grad students, and I didn't do very good philosophical work.

In many respects, my troubles were almost certainly mostly "my own doing": a result of my own frustrations at having to leave a place (Syracuse) where I was happy and flourishing as a philosopher (being heartbroken by a failed romantic relationship probably didn't help much either). But that's how life is: it often throws you "curveballs", and you don't always react to them the way you should (particularly when you are young and still maturing). In any case, for the first time in my life I struggled, both personally and professionally. I became frustrated and unhappy, and increasingly focused on things about the profession (program rankings, journal rankings, etc.) that seemed to me to sap the joy out of philosophy (note: this was around the time the internet, and Leiter rankings in particular, were becoming an increasingly large part of the philosophical scene). To make life a bit more tolerable, I turned my attentions away from philosophy to a number of distractions: playing music in a band, playing videogames, and yes, trying to find love. It was the first and only time in my life when I made some royally irresponsible choices. Needless to say, none of this helped my career.

Anyway, after several years of flailing around philosophically and not endearing myself to anyone, I somehow got my act together--due in part to some long-overdue self-reflection, and in part due to some mostly-undeserved faith by a few mentors--and finished the PhD...life and luck be damned. Alas, life and luck decided to intervene again! On the "good luck" side of things, I met my future spouse and got a 2-year job at the University of British Columbia. On the "bad luck" side of things, I came down with a very-difficult-to-treat form of congenital insomnia (which runs in my family). Then, on the "life" side of things, because my spouse could not immigrate to Canada, I applied to jobs in the US--and got a job in Tampa. Then, on the (very) "good luck" side of things, the job in Tampa--which was advertised as a 1 or 2-year post--turned out to renewable for seven years. Given that it took exactly seven years to get a TT job, that might have been the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. Chances are, if I didn't get the exact job I got at Tampa, I wouldn't have been able to stay on the market long enough to stay in the profession. In any case, when all was said and done, I finally (and just barely) ended up with a tenure-track job...at age 39, approximately 12 years after I expected when I started grad school, and after spending 43.5% of my entire time on Earth (17 years!) either in grad school or on the job-market.

And so you see, just like Mills and Millikan, my career has been profoundly altered by all kinds of good and bad "life and luck." I'm also not alone. One of the things that has stuck out to me the most over the years is just how impossible it seems to reliably predict whose career will go well and whose won't. When I started grad school (both of them!), I recall having all kinds of expectations about "who would do well" in their career and who wouldn't--and I know other grad students and grad faculty had similar expectations: grad students often gossiped, sizing up who was "smart" and who wasn't; and, or so I heard, grad faculty often do this sort of thing as well, at some programs even so much as ranking grad students (at least in my time, they apparently did; I have no idea how often this happens anymore). But here's the fascinating thing. Of the grad students who I figured would have great academic careers, only something like 50% of them did. And the grad students who I figured wouldn't have great careers or even "make it"? Here again, my sense is that something like 50% of them did go onto have good careers. In other words, I've noticed very little--if any--correlation between how "promising" someone seemed early in grad school and how their academic career actually went. The only thing, to me, that makes any sense of this is...you guessed it, life and luck.

There's a great scene in Children of Men where Jasper (played by Michael Caine) recounts the tragedy of Theo's life (played by Clive Owen). Theo's life, like all lives, Jasper explained, was a haphazard mess of "faith" and "luck." Theo had been a promising young man with great ideals, a wonderful spouse, and beautiful child. But bad luck totally broke him. This is why--at the end of the day--I think the question of whether one should pursue a career in philosophy is undecidable. As my case, Millikan's case, Mills' case, and the cases of the many grad students I've known in my life show, the problem with pursuing a career in philosophy is akin to the problem Luke Skywalker posed in The Last Jedi: "This is not going to go the way you think."

This isn't to say one shouldn't pursue a career in philosophy. After all, so much of life is like this: getting married, having children, etc. Life rarely goes the way one expects. Much of life is a blind step into the unknown, and life and luck can lead to one to regret many a choice. The reason I tell my story, though--and the reason why I wrote this post--is that I think all of this often gets lost or ignored, particularly at the critical juncture when people make the fateful choice to hazard a shot at this career. As my story indicates, I was totally in the dark about these things when deciding about grad school, on just how much the fate of my career might rest on "life and luck." And I often get the same sense when talking to students considering the choice: that they too are approaching the choice much as I did, blissfully ignorant of all the ways their choice could go right or wrong as a result of things they might never expect. Ultimately, I always tell them the choice is theirs...but I think we owe it to people considering academic philosophy as a career to tell our stories, so that they make whatever choice they do with their eyes as far open as reasonably possible, as it were.

Or so say I. What say you? How, in your estimation, was your career (or attempt at a career) in academic philosophy affected by life and luck? And how would the sense(s) in which it was affect your choice, if you could go back in time and decide again?

Comments

[As well]

Marcus,
Your reflections are interesting and important. But people should not forget that every life and life choice may potentially lead to regret. I know people who made very safe life decisions - staying at jobs that were secure, and promised great pensions - to be let go before they could enjoy them (this is not an academic). Or people who pursued more practical jobs to feel in mid-life that they wish they took more chances, or pursued a dream. Not to be cliche about it, but you only get one life. I have made a few really risky life choices along the way ... ones that had low probabilities of working out ... and I now have a life I wholly embrace. Of course I have suffered and endured loses. But you need to have a sense of ownership with respect to your life. Even your bad decisions should be accepted with some sort of peace (hopefully we learn from them as well).

[Marcus Arvan]

As well: Thanks for the kind words. You make a very good point.

I know someone who made a fortune having a successful career in medicine who nevertheless wishes in retrospect he had been an academic mathematician. I also know attorneys who make a ton of money but despise their jobs because they can't enjoy life, working morning to night 6 days a week. Finally, I also know people who chose industry jobs who love their lives and careers.

At the end of the day, most major life-choices are a crap shoot. They can go well or badly - all too often due to "life and luck." I wouldn't trade my career for anything now that it worked out. I just think it's important to recognize--especially, for young people considering an academic career--both the risks and the large and underecognized roles that "life and luck" can and do play in determining whether the choice turns out well.

[Amanda]

I don't agree life is a crap shot. I think there is a LOT of luck involved. There is also a LOT of self-determination involved. And then there is also your natural disposition. I have been reading some interesting articles about the primary determining factors for happiness in life, two things come up a lot, and I find both very compelling:

1. A person's natural disposition. Some people seem to be relatively happy and satisfied with their life regardless of what happens. For instance, they might really regret not choosing career A instead of B. However, they are still very happy in career B (they just think A would have been even better.) Other people are naturally prone to anxiety and/or depression. This seems a bit more common among academics. In any case, even when people like this are satisfied with their job and would not want to do anything else, they are still depressed and anxious.

2. Relationships. Again, and again, evidence shows a very close connection between having close, supportive, relationships and happiness/life satisfaction.

Now in addition to the above, there is also a lot of evidence that while money/material goods do not make one happy, they can make one unhappy. People need a certain base line of financial security in order to enjoy other aspects of life.

[Marcus Arvan]

Amanda: no doubt. It's not *just* a crap-shoot. Character, determination, relationships, etc., all play very important roles. Still, there are people who do everything right but things "never go their way." I've known some people like this. There are also people who do things badly but get lucky. I've known people like this too. Life's a vast morass of luck, determination, relationships, etc.--and it is impossibly difficult to tease out how much of each. They are *all* important!

[Amanda]

I almost agree with you, Marcus. I would just add that I have never known anybody who has done everything right. I have known people who have done at least as much right as super successful people, yet sadly they are anything but successful. Too bad mom was right about life being unfair.