A friend, who has the intellectual chops for academia, charm enough for sales, and the ethical heart of a British-style social drama, writes to ask if I would “kill him” if he told me he was entertaining thoughts of working for the European Commission.

The background here being not only that he’s young enough to still be choosing a career, but that he had previously expressed particular distaste for certain of those among his peers who he saw as headed to Brussels to participate in the make-work at the centre of the EU’s log-rolling, authoritarian market-making machine in return for the promise of reasonable work-life balance, job security and 5 weeks a year of paid vacation. This being a sentiment which, I can’t lie, I had some sympathy for.

“I got rather seduced,” (no doubt) “by a lovely lady telling me how I would have a great life working on things that matter to me.” (A committed feminist, she was, apparently). “All that, and with the possibility of a life outside of my professional life: i.e. 5 weeks of paid holiday a year.” (His addendum, somewhat hyperbolically: “I don’t want to end up 40 and alone. Ahhh… what do I do with my life!?”)

Now, as an aspiring teacher to a profession that is known for taking in young idealists and turning out depressed sociopaths, I’ve actually muddled somewhat over the question of how to prevent professional momentum from taking young people places they don’t want to go. I myself had a number of years where the question of what to do with my life bore down with the strength of a thousand suns. My response to him boils down a lot of my thoughts on the issue:

You will do well wherever you go, so long as you refuse to give up your inquisitive mind and critical perspective. The Commission could benefit from people who haven’t bought in to the European project hook, line and sinker, and who know especially that they have alternatives if they end up feeling like they aren’t contributing to anything that matters. It couldn’t hurt, for the purposes of bringing some value to the democratic accountability of the place, either, that you haven’t yet ‘transposed’ your ‘modalities’ into the arcane vocabularies of Brussels English. In all seriousness, though, so much of what matters in your work isn’t “what’s your job?” but “how do you do your work? how do you relate to your work? how do you, as someone with an identity and personality that is separate from that work, relate to this ‘job’, this ‘thing you do’?” Also, you aren’t choosing a career now. Find something to do for the moment, but never stop thinking of it as an awesome 7-year post-doc that will have something come after.

In other words, the question, when it comes to work that involves judgment, creativity and thought, isn’t “what will your work be?” but “what will you make of your work?” Not, will you win the prize, but what will you do with it when you do?

Postlethwait’s speech here, at the end of Brassed Off, provides a good tie in for three caveats: first, these thoughts are a bit partial, and much of what I have to say was, it turns out, largely foreshadowed in questions raised by Duncan Kennedy in the early 1980s. In Rebels from Principle [pdf], a piece he wrote for the Harvard Law School Bulletin, he wrote:

the locus of conflict between oppression and liberation can’t be conceptualized as always outside us. It is inside us as well, inside any liberal or left organization, and also inside the apparently monolithic opposing organizations, like corporate law firms. I think it follows that there are no strategies for social transformation that are privileged a priori — either in the sense that they designate the right place to struggle because struggling in that place will lead most certainly to the overthrow of illegitimate hierarchy and alienation, or even in the much more limited sense that some struggles have an absolute moral priority over others.

Second, I am troubled by the fact that this advice can be given to lawyers and certain other professionals, but seems a much poorer fit for, say, the heroes of all of those British-style social dramas. I suppose that the capacity to have some power, some say, in what your work means or how it’s organized, is one of the reasons for the success of the labour movement.

Third, none of this means that we should define ourselves by our job. In fact, I mean exactly the opposite. There are gardens to be planted, communities to be built, children to be raised and music to be played. Ultimately, there is a world to be (re)made.

But sometimes — often —these things, too, are work and much of them take judgment, and creativity, and thought. And we are defined in large part by how we do our work. Half the battle is choosing where to apply ourselves, and where not to: when the music matters, and when it matters bollocks.