Professional Dislocation: The Malaise of Modern Existence

The Shift from the Agrarian Age

For most of the post-nomadic period, marking the transition to fixed settlements and community formation, humans have connected deeply with the land, toiling on the soil. The agrarian way of life, however, represents a relatively recent chapter in human history, spanning just a few thousand years.

Agrarian life brought not only surplus food and animal products that could be stored, bartered, or traded as needed but also rootedness, order, and predictability. Over the last five to ten thousand years, human settlements have flourished into complex civilizations, primarily in fertile river valleys—from the Nile to the Yellow River—fueled by agricultural abundance and settled life.

Originating in developed societies, the tide is now turning again—toward a new age of modern nomadism. This shift has made professional dislocation an unavoidable reality, leaving many people perpetually anxious and disconcerted.

This way of life endured until industrialization and social transformation flared through Europe and, driven by mercantilism and colonialism, later spread far corners of the world. Before this upheaval, only a small fraction of the human population engaged in non-agricultural activities such as military service, trade, or specialized crafts like masonry and metalworking. Originating in developed societies, the tide is now turning again—toward a new age of modern nomadism. This shift has made professional dislocation an unavoidable reality, leaving many people perpetually anxious and disconcerted.

In the modern world, questions like “Is this all my career has to offer?”, “Is this the result of the hard work of several years of my youthful life?”, or ”Is this what I would be spending the rest of my life doing?” torment almost every professional (except for the lucky few whose professional achievements have perfectly aligned with or surpassed their aspirations) every day.

Beyond Job Dissatisfaction: The Roots of Dislocation

When a significant portion of the workforce experiences a crisis of meaning and purpose in what they do. and when many experience a stark misalignment between what they prepared themselves for and what they must settle for, we cannot brush this experience, the experience defined as professional dislocation, under the carpet as an individual crisis or project it as a failure of an individual in finding meaning and purpose in their existence.

This experience, often shrouded in its vagueness and unnamability, which many fail to put their fingers precisely on, cannot be reduced to the experience of a midlife crisis or a form of existential angst bound to stir a person's consciousness at one or another point. Neither can the lexicons like 'job dissatisfaction' or 'underemployment' fully capture the dimensions and implications of this experience.

The end goal of modern education is heavily contingent upon improving the chances of employability guided by the stream or discipline they are pursuing. In its finality, it promises a rewarding career after high school, college, or university education.

From a broader perspective, professional dislocation is a social crisis and a failure of the prevalent social arrangement, particularly the educational frameworks. For a six-year-old child roused early each morning and promised a bright future through education, professional dislocation represents a betrayal. It is not a betrayal in small measure when the child as a grownup cannot land a fulfilling career (if he or she gets employed at all) several years through their demanding—and, at times, soul-stripping—formal education. The end goal of modern education is heavily contingent upon improving the chances of employability guided by the stream or discipline they are pursuing. In its finality, it promises a rewarding career after high school, college, or university education. Even without much formal education, the child still could have been a good shepherd in the mountains or a farmer and derived more joy and meaning out of life the way their forebears not so long ago did.

Utilitarian Education System and Its Discontents

Today's education, strongly rooted in utilitarian values, does not have much pretense about the lofty ideals of turning a student into a valiant fighter, a polymath, a renaissance man, or a moral/spiritual champion, as the pre-industrial education, available to only a few, usually did. In its push for employability, today's education envisions fitting learners in the factory and office settings more than in the social settings, turning many into nerds and geeks incapable of creating their social space and functioning as an active member of a social unit. The way we are raising our children, goading them nonstop, to excel in their domains has not only artificially intensified the level of competition, but has also narrowed their social engagement. This, along with other contributing factors, has to do with why children today tend to have fewer friends and less social interaction than their cohorts of earlier generations and why societies the world over have seen a sharp incline in the sense of alienation and loneliness.

This was glaringly evident after the COVID-19 lockdowns when many professionals chose not to return to their previous jobs. This was not mere laziness. It was a collective reckoning with the soul-crushing effects of professional dislocation and a desire for more meaningful careers.

Despite the continual weeding out of subjects such as history, literature and languages, and moral education from school curriculums and overemphasis on skill-based education tailored for science, technology, and business, many professionals still find a huge gap between their expectations and the reality they have to confront with. This was glaringly evident after the COVID-19 lockdowns when many professionals chose not to return to their previous jobs. This was not mere laziness. It was a collective reckoning with the soul-crushing effects of professional dislocation and a desire for more meaningful careers. Ostensibly, the break gave people an opportunity to step out of their routine life and reflect on their life purpose, or ikigai, as the Japanese would put it and raison d'être as the French would.

You Are What You Do: A 21st-Century Predicament

For a great majority of people, a profession they are involved in is not merely a source of income; it is something they invested a significant amount of time and resources in and made personal sacrifices for. A person sees his or her employment as a destination he has arrived at after a long journey of education and skill development. It is a self-reflective experiential mirror in which people see who they have become. In today's context of careerism, our societies indoctrinate us to view a person by what they do in comparison to any other signifiers. Sadly, the adage 'If you like what you do, it's not work." applies to very few people--the lucky achievers who have managed to jostle their way up to the top of the ladder and who are viewed by the new batch of career aspirants as role models. People feel misidentified when they realize their jobs do not reflect who they are and, given the opportunity, who they could have become.

Depending on the prevailing cultural and ethical values characteristics of a society, different variables, such as the who-knows-who network and the self-perpetuating cycle of meritocracy, come into the equation.

Professional dislocation has profound psychological ramifications on both personal and social levels. When a problem like this manifests itself on a mass scale having debilitating and corrosive effects on self-worth, productivity, and overall life satisfaction of individuals, the problem cannot be left to the market to sort out and fix. If the capitalist logic of ensuring employability regulated and filtered by the needs of the job market were the only solution, we would not have had this crisis in the first place. In fact, it is fatuous to believe that the market always looks for and awards employees based on their capabilities and skill sets. Depending on the prevailing cultural and ethical values characteristics of a society, different variables, such as the who-knows-who network and the self-perpetuating cycle of meritocracy, come into the equation.

Beyond the Hustle: The (Dis)illusion of Choice

A person who has no connections and prior experience is likely to accept anything that comes their way in their desperate bid for a job in their difficult financial situation. As time passes, the job they expected to be a short gig at the beginning of their professional life turns out to be their only viable option. Moreover, in today's rapidly changing world, they find that keeping pace with changes taking place outside their area of engagement has turned out to be an uphill battle. Gradually, they get shaped and conditioned by their jobs. Once they get settled with employment, they begin accumulating knowledge and know-how of the particular domains while their unused knowledge and unexplored potentials diminish. As their family obligations and bills keep mounting, what they initially thought of as a waiting station becomes a permanent shelter. Many find themselves stuck with the jobs they would not have accepted in the first place if they had better options in hand. The sense of stuckness slowly festers into malaise—a sense of discomfort, disquiet, and directionlessness.

In today's dominant hustler and influencer culture, it is easy to be swayed away by these winds and miss their underlying limitations. We mostly fail to see that despite their merits, in the cut-throat game of success and wealth generation, chance, connection, and social standing play a more decisive role in determining who triumphs and who perishes. Besides, having an insider view of the rules (and having knowledge about where you can bend the rules) of the game apart from the safety of bouncing back (even when you hit rock bottom) into the game determines who remains inside the arena. The pinnacle of the pyramid does not tell the whole story.

The Human Cost of the Gig Economy

Because a large number of people depend on their employment, unlike any other time in human history, for their livelihood and self-realization, a job is more than just a job in a person's life. It is the workplace where they spend most of their time (if we discount the time spent at home) during their working life. Sadly, today's economy by its very design has no qualms about treating employees as disposable hires. The focus on profit metrics has shifted the focus from the important considerations, i.e. the human factors, which have exacerbated the financial hardships and psychological anguish.

Lacking the collective thread of unionization, the workforce becomes fragmented individuals operating on self-interest rather than collective benefits with which they not only lose the power of collective bargaining for better pay, workload, environment, and other benefits such as insurance and pension but also support network and the sense of community it could offer.

With the shift of the job market towards short-term, contract-based, outsourced, and on-demand freelance projects, employment in today's global context has become a constant bid and an endless struggle for survival which has added new anxiety and despair in the preexisting sense of discontent and dislocation. The conversion of employment into short-term contract gigs has produced, to use Marx's term, a reserve army of labor, the unemployed mass of workers who could be hired or fired at any time. Lacking the collective thread of unionization, the workforce becomes fragmented individuals operating on self-interest rather than collective benefits with which they not only lose the power of collective bargaining for better pay, workload, environment, and other benefits such as insurance and pension but also support network and the sense of community it could offer.

Those who believe in the self-regulatory nature of the market see this volatility as a liberation of the labor force from the monotony and fixity of long-term employment. With inherent ageism bias, this, no doubt, gives the exhilaration of novelty and adventure to career enthusiasts until they have the luxury of moving from one exciting stint to another. In these uncertain times, what kinds of disruptions and displacements the integration of AI might cause in the workplace remains uncertain. Many predict mass unemployment as a logical eventuality of this development.

Toward Urbanization: Dislocation and Its Cultural Manifestations

The world has seen a continual flow of populations toward urban centers in the last two centuries, primarily in search of employment opportunities. It has basically been a move from the agrarian mode of existence to an industrialized one. Cities like Dhaka, Mumbai, Lagos, Jakarta, and Manila, to name but a few, have seen a massive population increase in the last few decades. The trend is predicted to continue accelerating globally in the coming years. When the balance between population growth and the prospect of having a dignified professional life tilts, the sense of malaise engendered by this situation usually results in social withdrawal and isolation since not everybody is equally equipped and resilient to bounce back.

If the issue remains unaddressed and a growing number of people, having failed to cope with the demands and challenges of the professional world, continue slipping through the cracks, what is visible today as a lifestyle-choice subculture can potentially transform into a mainstream culture, causing a deep rot in the society.   

This sense of disenchantment and hopelessness has manifested itself differently in different societies. It is seen in the form of hoboism and 'quiet quitting' in Western societies, hikikomori (ひきこもり) in Japan, and recently bai lan or 'let it rot' (摆烂) in China. If the issue remains unaddressed and a growing number of people, having failed to cope with the demands and challenges of the professional world, continue slipping through the cracks, what is visible today as a lifestyle-choice subculture can potentially transform into a mainstream culture, causing a deep rot in the society.   

The New Social Contract of Work

Does a society owe a person a fulfilling professional life? The instinctive answer is often "no". We are inclined to say that with an independent agency, an individual is responsible for his/her destiny and destination in a free society. We have also seen in the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries in what ways employment guarantees and their utopian imposition can hurt individuals and society as a whole in the long run. Hence, we instinctively believe that an individual employment seeker owns the responsibility of exploring their choices and paving their career paths forward without having to be dictated to or directed by others about how to conduct their life and career. This would have been certainly true if the employment prospects were equally fair to all. Relinquishing responsibilities entirely drives a society to another extreme.

Does a society owe anything at all to a person? The truth is not everybody in society is born with the same kind of safety net around them. When we bring a child, who is made to believe that he/she would have a rewarding career if he/she studied hard, we are more likely to change our perspective and opinions. Children do not choose to be born into a world where their futures hinge on systems beyond their control. Society cannot betray them by promising one thing and delivering another.

Since employees whose works have wider social connections and impacts report better job satisfaction, job responsibilities need to be realigned with their social significance.

If not an employment guarantee, every society has a responsibility to ensure a fair chance for career aspirants which requires reassigning prestige, dignity, security, and stability with employment and offering a level playing field for professionals at all levels. Since employees whose works have wider social connections and impacts report better job satisfaction, job responsibilities need to be realigned with their social significance. We need to break away from reductively profit-oriented and isolationist tendencies prevalent in today's workplaces.

No doubt, this all needs a paradigm shift in how we view a profession today and an overhaul, rather than cosmetic reforms, in our current cultural values and practices.

Conclusion: Reimagining the Future of Work

On a final note, it is crucial to acknowledge that a society needs to function with the notion that not everybody is equally tenacious and inventive enough to thrive in the Wild West of career adventurism. Since their careers define people and reflect who they are to themselves and others and since they give them a sense of life purpose, a just society cannot and should not shirk its fundamental responsibility of making the professional life of all individuals meaningful and purposeful. When people fail to grow in their jobs and the avenues of social mobility are closed, a society plunges into morbid malaise, which, once sets in, is not easy to heal. Neither can anything short of systemic change undo the structural biases existing in current practices.