15 Comments

A terrific interview with James Richardson about re-invention: detailed and a full examination, discussion of re-invention after an academic career and with James who also has Asperger's. A wonder of an interview and a discussion of James's book, as well. Humor and serious conversation.

Expand full comment
author

Thanks Mary!

Expand full comment
Jan 30Liked by Joshua Doležal

Josh,

We've talked a lot about personal branding, and you mention here that you're "not mastered the distinction between that public face and the private self."

Perhaps explaining my own dilemma--in a way I haven't before--might shed light on your situation.

The core of who I am is an honorable, ethical person. I grew up in the honor mythos of the military before its more chauvinistic turn after 9/11. I cared so much about growing up to be a good man that I eventually earned a Ph.D. in it!

But the demands of the capitilistic marketplace are amoral. Humility, honor, loyalty, integrity, and more, are not virtues that long survive unless one finds a refuge. It's all about appearances, hubris, and feeding the beast. And, as James notes, one may have to contort themselves in knots. This is a well-known paradox of our time, and is why so many people admit disatisfaction with their jobs and lives on one hand, while publicly portraying the smiling hussler on the other. It's Janus-faced.

I just can't.

Worse, given the individualistic obsession of mainstream culture, the "I just can't" looks like individualism to most. They misunderstand the rejection as just another choice rather than, to borrow James, an inability to adapt to the cultural circumstances that predoiminate, because doing so is destructive of oneself.

Shouldn't this sound familiar, given your background?

In my teen years, I grew up on the edge of the wilderness near communes and back-to-the-landers. In later years, ruminating on that has reminded me that this has been a perennial problem and that we just need to find a community that we are well-adapted to ... even as the marketplace seems more and more driven to delete us.

Expand full comment
author

Good points, Jason -- certainly the waves of layoffs that I see periodically on LinkedIn capture the amorality of the marketplace. I saw a plaintive post recently about whether those boom/bust cycles in business were not more stressful than the ongoing problems in academe. But it's hard to tell the difference when the university is increasingly corporatized.

I've been wondering if my grandfather's lifelong career at a sawmill, where he was a union member, was more the anomaly in American history than the rule. The labor exploitation of the 19th century spurred some reforms that lasted for a couple of generations, but we're rapidly losing those protections now, and I don't think we have the same political will to mobilize. So every individual is at the mercy of the boom/bust cycle. How people own homes and raise families in the face of that uncertainty is baffling.

Perhaps I'm bright-siding the past again, but when I was growing up, if you were willing to work, you could find work. There was no bureaucracy involved even in getting a job with the Forest Service. You talked to someone, and they hired you. I tried to get my students USFS jobs years later, and they had to go through the depersonalized online application process, which didn't allow for any personal referrals. This ostensibly served the purpose of making hiring more inclusive, so it wasn't just an old boy system, which I can understand on some level. But I also know that real inclusivity is a myth in business -- people know people, who open up opportunities for them. If you are trying to break into industry as an over-the-transom applicant, without some kind of insider network, you really are screwed.

Expand full comment

I am affirming the final comments.

Years of working in a local college, plus having insight into state governments through my wife's job, repeatedly show that attempts at equity tend not to work. The research generally supports this.

For instance, at one former employer, they only advertised jobs on obscure local websites, and thus word-of-mouth was the predominant source of job candidates. It stayed this way for decades, and the institution was blissfully unaware of how shallow both their pool and existing talent was.

Another instance. I was overhearing in a coffee shop that these two young ladies--just graduated--landed their jobs because the company routinely hired from this nondescript college in Florida that was the alma mater of some of the executives long ago. Moreover, candidates would be sent to this location as the insiders knew that this division was the path to upper management ... by design. This scenario is harder to prove via the data, but I have seen the data for the placement of research Ph.D.s, for instance, and it looks exactly like this.

I'm not convinced the situation is better than the "good ol days." I'd say that the patterns of inclusion and exclusion have shifted, and perhaps the line of inclusion-exclusion has become more equitable, but our national social and cultural problems still thwart attempts at equity. For example, America still won't talk about equity when it comes to socio-economic class.

Side note. I coached one of my last students on how to handle some of this, as he wanted to be an ecologist for the USFS or state equivalent. But he'd already been working on the inside for years, so I have hope for him.

Expand full comment
Jan 30Liked by James F. Richardson

I really appreciate James' honesty about the status of communal life in typical American culture. Despite what many Americans may think, typical American culture just isn't communal, and the sociological statistics as well as "deaths of despair" phenomena illustrate this. Moreover, as James notes, the research shows that it affects men most harshly.

Add the "recovering academic" to this mix ... it ain't pretty.

Expand full comment
author

thanks for reading it and sharing your thoughts!

Expand full comment
Jan 30Liked by Joshua Doležal, James F. Richardson

Our arcs in life share some similarities. See my other post.

Expand full comment
Jan 30Liked by Joshua Doležal

I meant to say I was familiar with James from Substack. I subscribe. But not familiar with his background. Respect 💪🏻

Expand full comment
Jan 30Liked by James F. Richardson

First read through--very powerful discussion. So many threads to follow. I will listen again. But I really like the constructive conflicts you both undertake. I wasn’t familiar with James. As a former entrepreneur who found his way to the finish line despite the stresses, loneliness, and in my case--addiction--it was powerful to read.

Expand full comment

I am so loving this interview that I'm reading it slowly, bit by bit. Right now, this inspires a perverse thought: "I do believe that there's certain forms of neurodivergence that really are really maladapted to an unstructured autonomy-driven, seek your own glory, culture that we live in. People like me do much better in highly structured society, where there's actually much less choice."

I want to flip neurodivergent around in its meaning, from people who want more structure and don't find it to people who want total freedom and will kill for it:

What if human history teaches us that a highly structured society is the norm for the human species (and other animals, too), but for some reason a "neurodivergent" minority (redefining that term) went rogue and blindsided "normal" (communal, structured) people and have run things ever since?

What if our "problems" of attachment, attention, and other evident signs of divergence are consequences of that original human minority taking charge? No wonder "divergence" is starting to feel like "normal"?

There's a lot here to think about. I'm still reading. :-)

Expand full comment
author

My comments were from a high-functioning autistic perspective...just one form of neurodivergence...I'm sure my ADHD clients totally agree with you. I'd also add that by 'structure' I mean predictable daily rhythms and rituals not bureaucracy per se.

Expand full comment
author

My friend Carol Roh Spaulding has a wonderful essay called "Autistry," written about raising a son with autism, but flipping the idea of neurodivergence to examine the ways we all need rituals. Her conclusion is that we are all, to some extent, "autists."

I don't know how James feels about this, but I think there might be some danger in minimizing the differences that an autism diagnosis might reveal, or imagining those differences as a commonality between people living with autism and people who are not. Yes, we can all identify with being divergent, with not fitting within a popular social or professional mold, but I think it's also worth acknowledging that some of these differences are insuperable, and that we forge more enduring understanding by recognizing those differences and adapting to them.

However, your comment -- and James's own description of solopreneurship as something that neurotypical people are maladapted to -- reminds me of watching "The Social Network" and thinking about how bizarre it was that Mark Zuckerberg managed to project his introversion and insecurity onto an entire generation through Facebook. That is, the mechanism by which one interacts on Facebook -- generally passive, sometimes invisibly lurking -- is not necessarily the default setting for a lot of people who use the platform, who might prefer more direct, forthright ways of interacting. But the platform requires everyone to behave in a way that a socially maladapted person might.

Expand full comment
author

The autistic should never run social networks or host parties larger than three people…yes, I include myself…

Expand full comment

Excellent comment, Josh! I've not seen "The Social Network," but that's fascinating. If one applied the same approach to other influential designers of our current economic and social systems, what would we learn about the individual anxieties projected into world-scale systems? Harrowing thought.

Definitely, there is a practical side to a diagnosis that no one would want to yield to a thought experiment. A diagnosis makes treatment and funding for treatment available.

It sounds like I would relate to the article "Autistry" that you mention. I've never gone looking for the literature on neurodivergent-adjacency nor written about it, but your friend's perspective as a parent sounds similar to the one I formed as a child. Live close enough to what someone else calls divergent, and you're inclined to ask, "Divergent from what?"

Expand full comment