WISDOM
CALLED TO A CONSCIOUS CAREER By Maria Kostelac
Careers are currency. It was around the middle of the 20th century, following the end of World War II, that the modern career as we know it was born; although Jane Austen’s pre-industrial era novels offer the seeds of its germination. Through the lens of a contemporary, Western democracy, an individual’s cultivation of their career extends beyond work, and into the definition of their very identity and place in this world. In modern times, careers have played a key role in economic stability, global migration, social integration, democracy, societal ideas of prosperity, and social standing and mobility. As the social and economic value of education and ‘skilled’ labour has grown over the past few centuries, so too has humanity’s hunger for knowledge and empowerment. It is because of this, and the revolutionary movements that it has inspired, that the average person now has access to knowledge and information that was once closely guarded as ‘privileged’. In the striving of marginalised groups for social, political and economic emancipation, the workplace has become the locus of activist voices and political transformation. Historians posit that the kind of social transformations driven by workplace activities and discussions could likely only have been wrought through brutal uprisings, civil war and populist rebellion in times past.
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A wide range of historical events and movements has contributed to the creation of today’s career-driven society, including industrialisation, workers’ rights, urbanisation, globalisation and free-market enterprise. It is worth noting that our current career-oriented paradigm has caused a significant expansion of the global middle class. In fact, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that the present-day global middle class consists of an estimated 3.2 billion people, compared to 1.8 billion in 2009, and a predicted 4.9 million by 2030. These numbers are striking, particularly considering they have come about during the worldwide recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession. According to Homi Kharas’ 2017 article The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class, this “implies a tipping point where a majority of the world’s population, for the first time ever, live in middle-class or rich households”, with one third of the world’s economy solely attributable to the commercial habits of the global middle class by 2017. At this point, you’re likely considering the oddities of the idea that we are living in the most educationally and economically prosperous population and era in human history, considering the myriad challenges facing us from all angles. For centuries, humanity has had to grapple with
