Authenticity and Compromise
Can you make any job your dream job?
My partner has a love-hate relationship with their job. On the one hand they’re certain that they want to get out of Dodge and explore other ways of earning a living that feel closer to who they essentially are. Minding children and people with intellectual disabilities has been rewarding; it’s helped them reconnect with their own inner child after a childhood spent having to be an adult; but that stage of their life is coming to an end and it’s time to see what moneymaking opportunities might come out of art and movement. On the other hand I can see that they still take real pleasure in what they do, because they love showing me videos of their charges going on walks, playing, trying out musical instruments, and generally living their lives.
Mum said something to me this year that had a big impact on me: that the principal thing an Enneagram 4 brings into the world isn’t their creations, it’s themselves - their personality, their way of seeing things, their capacity to experience the world and enrich other people’s experience of it. I’m in a generous mood today, so I’m going to broaden that out beyond my tribe and say that the same is true of anyone who sets out to live in as open-minded, open-hearted and generally conscious a way as they can.
Actually, I’m going to broaden it out beyond my species altogether. My partner’s Golden Retriever is so beyond winning that even I can’t resist his charms - no mean feat given I’ve never had, or wanted, a pet my entire adult life. I love his unselfconscious smile, his big sad eyes, how he pants when he’s excited, the way he combines a love of affection with a laidback attitude that lets you give it to him in your own time - he’s just perfect.
One day when the three of us were out for coffee, the dog was going from table to table looking for attention and affection and generally making friends. When I joked that he was abandoning us for new owners like he tries to do on every walk, the reply came: ‘He’s doing his job.’ I found that a little enigmatic, but didn’t pursue the issue. Later, when the happy animal had returned and was lying down beside us beaming at the world, I said ‘Just look at that smile - he’s grinning from ear to ear’, and the answer came: ‘He’s making everyone happy. That’s his job.’
I liked that. Making everyone happy via the simple means of being happy himself. No trying involved, no exertion, no sweating, no doing at all. Long-time readers will already know how fond I am of the 34th chapter of the Tao Te Ching, but some things bear repeating:
The great Way is like a river, winding through the land. The living things sprout from it and its gifts never stop flowing. It achieves marvellous things but doesn’t take credit. It gives birth to, clothes, and raises the living things, but it doesn’t claim to own them…The living things keep coming back for the life it pours out, but it doesn’t use their reliance as an opportunity to lord it over them…Because it doesn’t seek greatness, it is magnificent.
Easy for dogs and rivers, you’re now muttering darkly to yourself. What about people? Take me for example - I’m a person. How do I embody the Way? Riddle me THAT, O anonymous Substacker.
I’ll get to your query in a second, my vaguely hostile imaginary reader, but first I’ll let my main man sum it up better than I ever could:
In 1969 I was giving a series of lectures in New York City. Every night, taking the bus up Third Avenue, I got the same extraordinary bus driver. Every night it was rush hour in one of the busiest cities in the world, but [he] had a warm word and a caring presence for each person who got on the bus…Everyone who got on the bus was less likely to kick the dog that evening or to be otherwise hostile and unloving, because of the loving space that driver had created. Yet all he was doing was driving the bus. He wasn’t a therapist or a great spiritual teacher. He was simply being love. Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act.
I encountered my own version of that bus driver recently. This is the first tax season where I’ve needed to declare the income I make outside of my day job, and as someone who never learns about boring things until I absolutely have to, I had no idea what I was doing. The deadline loomed nearer and nearer. Things kept getting in the way: work. Errands. Sickness. Total confusion about every step of the process. A healthy aversion to pain and suffering. A comprehensive lack of the slightest desire to engage with anything to do with this entire field of human endeavour.
After days of fruitless research and sending emails that were never answered in a way that actually helped me, I gave up and, with a day or so to go, did what I swore I’d never do: ring the tax department and talk to them. How do I register and get myself set up as self-employed? Why isn’t it working when I try? What are these ‘certificates’ you speak of? Are the citizens’ info crowd right that I should have got on to you as soon as I first started earning above the minimum threshold, i.e. almost a year ago? If so, are they also right that I now owe you a fine? Are we talking about a hefty fine? And what if I end up missing the upcoming deadline? Do I owe you a fine then?
The woman on the other end of the line confirmed that yes, I should have got on to them months ago, but that was then, this is now, and we’re not talking about massive numbers here. When it comes to last year, just leave a note on the pay-as-you-earn website you already have an account with that you also made some money on the side. You have until the end of this calendar year to make that disclosure, and it won’t get you in any trouble. When it comes to this year, let’s get you registered as self-employed now so you can pay the appropriate amount of tax next year. Click, click, click - you are now registered as self-employed. Have a nice day.
‘I shouldn’t have done any of that,’ she said as she finished, ‘but I don’t care.’
Imagine, if you will, a job involving no compromise. Something that just screams authentic fulfillment. Maybe you roam the world, going wherever your whims take you, writing up your weird and wonderful experiences in distinctive travel books that are wildly popular precisely because they refuse to pander to what people usually want from a travel book. Or let’s say you’re Ennio Morricone, writing scores of such standalone beauty that directors let you write the music first then shoot the scenes around it. Hoovering up all the prestige Hollywood has to offer while refusing to leave your hometown or even learn English. I’ll leave the fantasy up to you.
Now imagine the most hopelessly compromised, inauthentic job you possibly can. Maybe you have the soul of an artist but you’ve somehow ended up on an assembly line putting together a product you don’t even morally approve of. Or your constant need for stimulation is matched only by your passionate opposition to traffic pollution, but you work in a toll booth. Or you’re a middle-management bureaucrat who spends your days hectoring your underlings to implement byzantine policies and processes you barely understand and yet somehow know are pointless.
Now imagine my job, or more accurately jobs. I teach English as a foreign language. Sometimes my courses are accredited, which involves a lot of government micromanaging and reams of tedious paperwork. But for this past term all my lessons have been unaccredited, meaning I’ve been free to teach my students more or less whatever I like in whatever way I like. I also proofread, teach guitar, do singalongs with old folks, play with cover bands, perform my own music with my originals band, accompany choirs, entertain patients in hospitals, compose soundtracks, and - when I can squeeze it in - publish here.
I’m always at pains to tell people that these mostly fun-sounding activities are the tip of an iceberg largely made up of tasks that range from humdrum to outright annoying: for every hour spent teaching, playing or typing up my thoughts about life, imagine another two hours emailing, scheduling, negotiating, querying, invoicing, fielding offers or reaching out to venues myself, chasing people up for money or being chased up for money myself, combing through textbooks, updating attendance sheets, printing and organising sheet music, learning material, maintaining my business social media accounts, promoting and advertising, doing training, trying to understand the terms of my new contract, and sending approximately 1000 WhatsApp messages a week reminding people to do things or assuring them that I’ll somehow find the time to do whatever it is they’ve reminded me to do. I like to joke that I spend half my time wondering when people will get back to me and the other half trying not to think about all the people I have to get back to.
In other words, I mostly work in admin.
Alright, that’s a slight exaggeration. But I certainly spend more of my time sitting at a laptop than I do at my piano. I’d like a very different email-to-songwriting ratio, and am always trying to tweak around the edges of my working existence so that it more closely resembles the Morricone end of things - a life of (what I imagine to be) maximum authenticity, freedom and happiness.
The trouble is that every exciting offer I take on comes with several strings attached, many of them invisible until after I’ve said yes. Take the latest addition to my working week - singing and playing for patients undergoing chemo and other procedures in various hospital wards every Monday morning, covering for the usual musician who will be on maternity leave throughout 2025. When I signed up to this I had no idea it would involve circa twelve hours of mandatory online training (including half an hour on how to wash your hands), a session of on-site manual handling training, and sourcing public liability insurance. None of that would be a problem if this were my only job. As it is, it’s all been added to my enormous ‘death by a thousand cuts’ admin pile.
And I’ve got to be honest - box-ticking like this makes me resentful. Really resentful. In fact, one of my most consistent patterns in life is taking on a lot of things at once, underestimating how much work each of them will take, feeling overwhelmed and trapped, getting resentful, and suffering both mentally and physically until my load gets lighter. This load-lightening might come about via anything from a summer break (the majority of my work is seasonal, so it all happens at once then all stops at once) to a gut spasm or lung collapse.
The question I keep coming back to is: how much is this buildup-of-stress pattern based on the things I do - the type and amount of jobs I take on - and how much is down to the way I do the things?
If the main problem is that I do too much, or that I’m not the type of person who responds well to a day job, then I should be noticeably happier during the periods when I’m not working a day job. And it’s undeniable that during the summer holidays I feel more centred, at home in myself and the world, restful, attuned, slower, calmer, you name it. I don’t end up doing nothing - I get to work on the things that I love. Writing, playing, recording, project-pursuing. Taking things on for their own sake. Living the life of the active retiree.
But of course it’s not that simple. Do I feel idyllically happy when I’m doing my own thing? Do I suddenly turn as inspired and prolific as Morricone? Breathe in pure creative fulfillment and breathe out pure artistic expression?
No. Core beliefs, fixed ideas and inner-child fears make just about all of my pursuits a struggle. If I’m given a bunch of difficult sheet music to learn at the last minute, I’m not just angry because I already have too much on my plate; I’m also angry because I’m afraid to tell the person I’m not happy about learning the music. This fear is based on a deeper fear of rejection / being disliked, and a concomitant fear of being seen as unprofessional or incapable, and therefore not good enough as a person in general ( = always trying to prove myself even when there really isn’t any need, = resentment, = burnout). If it wasn’t so daunting to say ‘Learn all that in a couple of days? You must be joking’, there wouldn’t be any need for all the bitterness. Really, so much anger is rooted in fear.
Actually, the best evidence that my problems are at least as rooted in the how as the what of my working life is this blog. Is it a genuine passion project? Yes. Do I feel called to do it? Yes. Am I under any external pressure to do it a certain way, or to keep doing it at all? No. Does it involve much tedious admin or promo? Not the way I approach it, no. Does it impose a daily schedule, thankless commute, gloomy location or irritating colleagues on me? No. How about all the less glamorous sides of artistic collaboration - creative disagreements, everyday friction, all those WhenAvailable polls, the endless follow-up emails? None of the above, because there’s no collaboration. As far as The Small Dark Light goes, I’m an entirely free agent.
Is keeping the blog updated difficult anyway? Yes. Would this be true even if I were less busy, for reasons that are entirely to do with how my inner child approaches all creative endeavour? Yes.
So: my paid music work falls under the “arts” banner, making it most people’s idea of a fulfilling, expressive, and therefore “authentic” field - but it still involves a lot of tedious compromise, because that’s just how life is. My teaching, which doesn’t technically fall under the banner of the arts, nevertheless involves a lot of creativity and self-expression, which comes out in my lesson planning, spontaneous interactions with students, class role-plays, etc. But it also involves a lot of tedious compromise, because that’s just how life is.
The things I do purely for my own creative gratification - original music and blogging - don’t involve the same level of compromise as either of the above, but I still have to fight my own inner demons, doubts and fears every step of the way to ensure that at least some of my authentic voice survives the process unscathed. Meanwhile, you have bus drivers and tax employees who are happier in their work than I am, and use their unglamorous jobs as vehicles of spontaneity and authentic self-expression because any job can be such a vehicle if you do it right.
When you look at things this way, where does authenticity end and compromise begin?
Or more practically - how much should I be modelling myself after Morricone, and how much after Ram Dass’ bus driver? How much would my life be improved by going for broke creatively, ditching as much of the typical day-job stuff as I can possibly manage, and dedicating myself to putting out the kind of stuff that’s closest to my heart, the stuff only I can put out? Would I actually be any more loosened up, or would the way that I approach my activities - fears, mental blocks and all - make the longed-for life of creative freedom just as challenging as the life I’m living now?
I always loved the clarity and concision of the Serenity Prayer: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ In 2025 will it be more important to make some courageous changes to my schedule, or to get better at accepting the mundanity and tedium that will always be part of everything I do? Do I need to be bolder or more sanguine? Make a grand gesture on the grounds that I only live once, or ease into my current lot on the grounds that ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’? ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’, but that doesn’t totally preclude seeking out the things you think are good, right?
On the one shoulder, Morricone whispers to me about a life of authentic creativity with zero compromise.
On the other shoulder, a bus driver whispers to me about a life that derives its authenticity not from what it is but who I am.
And here my head sits, at the exact midpoint between the two.