Careerism

The creativity, despair and hopefulness of the writing life. A contorted view of a successful career and denunciations of the writing life, like romanticizations, cause many of us to miss why people actually write. In this personal piece on ambition and the literary life, Apoorva Tadepalli reflects on the trap of conflating issues with capitalist work for a distaste for work overall and highlights the need to believe in your craft. “I was happy to be redeemed, politically, for disliking my job — and we all ought to be allowed to dislike our jobs and to say as much — but I didn’t actually want to dislike my job. It is important to decry work culture, but what about the fact that we all work? And what about the fact that in order to decry work culture importantly and publicly, we were all obviously finding the motivation and the inspiration to work hard, to maintain the discipline required to write? We must have done it, and continue to do it, because we like writing, and we’d like to put in the effort and produce work that we’re proud of and that other people appreciate and retweet (a perfectly acceptable thing to want, as long as it is not the only thing we want).”