How to Overcome Career Anxiety: Wittgenstein’s Advice
The Problem
“I’ve made a mistake in my career.”
I’ve tried to get rid of this thought for years.
Sometimes the thought really seems like it’s gone for good. I can go weeks, even months, without thinking about it. But then something disappointing or disheartening sets me back, and the thought sidles up, filling my life with anxiety and regret.
“I’ve made a mistake in my career!” These are feelings that I’d like to wish away. But they always come back! This post is about how a great philosopher addresses this problem.
A Bad Solution
‘Career anxiety’ — by itself, the concept can seem more trivial than it is. We are tempted to tell ourselves to ignore career anxieties. We may feel foolish even expressing them.
Isn’t it horribly ungrateful to express anxiety over one’s career? We tell ourselves that we are lucky to have jobs in the first place.
But what if the feeling just won’t go away? If the feeling persists, chastising ourselves more probably won’t work. If we really have a recurring feeling of career anxiety, telling ourselves to try harder, stay positive, and ‘you can do it’ will only go so far.
The anxiety seems to say: “you made a terrible mistake!” In response we want to insist: “No, I did not!”
But if this back and forth continues for very long, we start to feel a strong sense of inner division. A battle is waging within are we seem powerless to stop it.
A Better Approach — Wittgenstein’s Advice
What is the way out of this dilemma? To stop engaging in the battle. This is the path suggested by a great philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein in a letter of advice to his close friend. Wittgenstein’s advice is simple, but profound.
Here’s the story: Wittgenstein’s friend, Drury, is training to be a doctor. Walking with Wittgenstein in the park, Drury mentions how clumsy he can be at work, how his hands shake when suturing a wound. He recalls that an old mentor once told him he had the intellect to be a doctor, but lacks the ‘right temperament’.
Drury goes on, expressing what we have all felt at some time or another:
“I am worried at times whether I have made a mistake, and whether I will be any use as a doctor. Too nervous and hesitant to make the necessary decisions. But perhaps it is wrong even to allow myself to think about that.”
The next day, Drury finds a letter for him at the hospital (read the full letter on this blog).
Look at People’s Sufferings
In the letter, Wittgenstein advises Drury not to think of himself, but to think of his patients.
“Look at people’s sufferings, physical and mental, you have them close at hand, and this ought to be a good remedy for your troubles.”
Let’s look first at what this sentence doesn’t do. Wittgenstein isn’t confirming that Drury has made a mistake. Nor is he trying to reassure his friend by telling him that he made the right choice and must believe in himself.
He avoids these two responses because he doesn’t think Drury is right to use the word ‘mistake’ in this case.
“You didn’t make a mistake, because there was nothing at the time you knew or ought to have known that you overlooked. Only this could one have called making a mistake…”
Wittgenstein wants Drury to ask himself: why am I thinking in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ here?
Drury seems to think that there is a destiny he has perhaps missed out on — a ‘right’ career choice, in an absolute sense, that he ought to have made. But how does Drury know this?
“For what human being can say what would have been the right thing if this is the wrong one?”
A Personal Note
In my case, when I was in my late teens, I was at a crossroads between two options: music and acting. I chose music (long before philosophy came calling).
The recurring career anxiety that haunts me over the years is that I chose wrong. ‘If only you’d chosen the other path!’ Like Drury, I feel that my destiny somehow was subverted.
I can tell this voice to shut up, insisting that I did make the right choice after all. But this leads back into the endless inner battle. Or I can take Wittgenstein’s advice.
Turn around, he seems to say. Look at the way we think and talk about the things that happen in our lives. Do not assent to the terms of an absolute ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choice. Do not unthinkingly be seduced by the word ‘mistake’.
Did I make a mistake in choosing music? Was there something I should have known at the time but overlooked or ignored? Or is this ‘mistake’ just something I am projecting onto my past?
What’s Past is Past
And what if really did make a mistake? What if there really was something we should’ve known at the time but repressed or overlooked?
Well, even then, Wittgenstein interjects, we should ask ourselves whether we are justified in feeling that making a mistake dooms us forever.
Even if you have made a mistake, Wittgenstein says, “this would now have to be regarded as a datum as all the other circumstances inside and outside which you can’t alter (control).”
The mistake is past. It is done. There is no changing it.
When we allow our thoughts to take us back to the mistake again and again, wallowing in despair at falling off course, perhaps we are the victims of an unrealistic sense of what we do and do not control in life. To give up this false sense of control, we need to move on from dwelling on the mistake.
Live in the World You Are In
“The thing now is to live in the world in which you are, not to think or dream about the world you would like to be in.”
We might feel a rush of relief in reading this sentence. We do not have to make the world in our own image.
But we also feel a responsibility: we can’t submit to the temptation to escape the world we’re actually in. How do we resist our hurtful projections?
“I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough.”
Well, one way is to simply start looking. Where does the meaning of our life reside? Where do we find that our actions are the most important?
Wittgenstein suggests that the answer is in our ability to see others. He goes so far as to say that this ability — this opportunity — is a gift from heaven.
“Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you have to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you.”
To live in the real world, not the one we’d like to be in but aren’t, is to be exposed to the great highs and lows of human feeling. A doctor has the chance to see even greater peaks and valleys than the average person.
Why would this be a gift? Because, paradoxically, communion with others is the only place where peace resides. Looking at others, Wittgenstein says, “ought to heal your frayed soul.”
Life as Meditation
We might think of Wittgenstein’s recommendation as something like meditating. When we meditate, we bring our attention to our breath.
Our thoughts, of course, intervene. They carry us away from the breath. We simply notice when this happens and return our attention to the breath.
Wittgenstein’s suggestion is that life as a whole is like that period of meditation: our thoughts carry us away — into thinking that there is a ‘right’ path we have diverged from, for instance. We are simply to notice when we are carried away and return our attention to the moment and place we are in.
This action is not simple or hard. It is just the act of turning, always: turn from tempting narratives of grandeur back to the healing nuances of the ordinary everyday. We may find, paradoxically, that as a result our lives become interesting for the first time.
Conclusion: Resist Setting Up an Internal Battle
Wittgenstein’s letter is something to keep close. It can help us if we feel that we’ve made a terrible, unredeemable mistake in the course of how our life should go.
This is the feeling that something somehow has gone fundamentally wrong in life, and that everything as a result appears tainted or unreal.
When we feel this way, our tendency may be to try to overpower it, pushing down the anxiety via positivity. It is then as if a war occurs within ourselves, one voice wallowing in despair and the other insisting that everything is fine.
Wittgenstein offers a way out of this self-division by saying: don’t accept the battle on its own terms. The voice that depicts life as a matter of absolute ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices, as a matter of a knowable destiny, a way that the universe must unfold —
Don’t believe this voice.
Ask it questions like the ones Wittgenstein suggests: how could I have made a mistake when there was nothing at the moment I knew or should’ve known but overlooked?
Or, even if I did make a mistake, why should I dwell on it now as if I could somehow change the past? Investigate the way that your thoughts set the stage for an endless inner battle.
When we live in communion, not in our heads, we look at the lives and faces of others. Our clarity of sight will guide our actions, and we will start to heal from our inner division.
We shouldn’t unthinkingly accept that reality is an all-or-nothing choice between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. With this mindset, no wonder we feel anxious!
Look and see, Wittgenstein is always saying. The world, not our fantasy of it, is where we find our home. Isn’t it?
Originally published on my blog — How to Live in the World.
Painting above is Edvard Munch’s ‘Summer Night by the Beach’ (1902–03)
Anxiety, Career Advice, Career anxiety, Choosing a career, Mistake, Philosophy, Regret, Wittgenstein
I’m a philosophy PhD candidate at the New School in New York. I have two master’s degrees (one in philosophy) from leading universities (New School and NYU) and have studied philosophy for over a decade.
