“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold.
Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.
These five words were the death of tens of thousands of millennial arts careers ambitions – spoken by mentors, parents, girlfriends, gurus, and pot noodle eating immersive theater set designers desperate to actually be able to start chipping away at their student debt and possibly one day afford daycare and diapers: You should learn to code.
It is very obvious, at the moment, that you should not learn to code. You should not have learned to code. There will be no jobs that you can get with that skill. You would have been far better sticking with your immersive theater set design ambitions.
The whole approach was wrong. Being realistic was a bad idea. Figuring out what skills you would need in the future was apparently a foolish endeavor because the thing about AI is that you don’t need any skills in the future, or rather, there is a default future to which you are being pushed if you are not a total weirdo in which you will not need skills to do any job you may have to do, which means that people won’t pay you much to do that job.
And the 2010 approach – well yes we can see that we don’t know what skills will be needed in The Twenty First Century Workplace so we will instead focus on teaching kids to Learn How To Learn so that they can Leanly and Agilely Pivot – is equally disastrous, in part because it’s not how the human life cycle is designed. We are not designed to flit from one entire skillset to another, one entire field to another, chasing the Current Thing, until finally that last new Thing comes out and we realize that we are too old to reskill once again and so we have to sell ourselves as protein to younger people, or whatever the endgame is in this vision of a working life (it’s unclear to me.) We’re instead meant to go from apprentice to journeyman to master in whatever our work is, getting better and better, getting wiser, so that when we are old masters and training the next generation of apprentices, we have something to give. The obligation of piety that the youth have towards the aged is meant to be a natural and economically sensible response.
The solution here is obviously to become a total weirdo.
I have a suggestion as to how precisely to do this: a career planning framework that I genuinely think will serve you in better stead than anyone who is currently in your inbox saying bro please just pay me $99 to teach you how to prompt LLMs bro please just trust me, you have to claim dominion, this is for the kingdom, if you don’t learn to use these tools then the woke left will force you into a reeducation camp and also something very bad will happen that has to do with China.
My proposition is simple: You should time travel proof your career.
If there’s a job or skill or career that you can do and get paid for, ish, now, and could have also done in 1750 in London, and ideally could have also done in 400 in Cappadocia, you’re good to go. That means no, don’t be a data engineer. What is that. No one knows what that is.
What follows is my list of Time Travel Proof Careers.
Cook
Actor/other performer
Priest
Doctor
Midwife
Magazine journalist (this sneaks in just under the wire; Addison and Steele started the Spectator in I think 1709 or so)
Novelist
Writer of learned treatises
Librarian
Artist
Farmer/Rancher/Gardener
Bartender/innkeeper/waitress
Lawyer (unfortunately)
Any of the various kinds of Smiths or Wrights or equivalent (blacksmith, coppersmith, wainwright, cooper, cobbler, tailor, jeweler, tentmaker, carpenter, and so on)
Hairdresser
Spy
Servant
Sailor
Any kind of Monger or equivalent (cheese, coster, fish, iron; also any other kind of shopkeeper)
Teacher of any kind
Architect/Builder
Dairymaid
NB Gadfly does not count; you can of course be a gadfly in any age but it is not a job and you should not expect to get paid for it; if however you would like to be paid for a similar career, you can always be a Sophist.
(For another perspective on this, read Rory Groves’ book, Durable Trades.)
Anyway, that’s my list. It is incomplete; I admit that. And yes there are things on it (eg. Lawyer) that are among the professions that you keep hearing are about to disappear. But I must stick to my method: there were lawyers when our Lord walked the streets of Jerusalem, and I think there will be lawyers until He returns.
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 | A guest post by
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Welder by trade here; although I'd rather get paid to spout my opinion on pictures and music, I know that (1) my profession has deep and noble roots going back as far as Hephaestus, and (2) I will never need to go more than a week or so without work.
Great article. Two nitpicks:
- I think there's a difference between folks that love coding and view it as nearly an art form vs those that believed it was a quick way to make a buck. I'll compare this to artists who will continue to paint regardless of the amount of readily available AI slop.
- One time travel proof profession you forgot. Accounting! For shame 🤣 https://accountingfoundation.org/page/PageContent?pageId=/accounting-and-standards/accounting-standards/history-of-accounting.html
Thanks again, this was a great read