Adapt or Die

 Noah Smith had a Substack post earlier this week unpacking the latest flare up in the perennial controversy about the academic job market—specifically, the lack of any academic job market for humanities PhDs. He was responding to a recent back-and-forth on Twitter that brought competing claims of discrimination and "reverse discrimination" in academic hiring (is it easier or harder to get an academic post as a straight white guy these days? You'll get very different answers depending whom you ask). 

Smith's ultimate conclusion was that these sorts of claims are unavoidable when there is so much scarcity in a particular job market in the first place. The real problem that humanities PhDs are up against is that the overall market for their services has shrunk—at least at the university level (smaller departments, fewer humanities majors, less funding). And when there are so few positions to go around, it's easy for people to get paranoid and allege bias when they see one person get a job and not themselves. 

Smith's advice to aspiring humanities academics is to try not to be too wedded to a single professional outcome in a rapidly changing world. If you want to get a PhD in the humanities, great—more power to you. But don't set your heart on a single vision of the future it will earn you: don't assume you will end up with a tenure-track assistant professorship somewhere. Instead, aim for something more vague and general, like an "intellectually stimulating job," which is compatible with a wider range of outcomes. 

It seems like a timely message well outside of academia as well. As uncertain as the fate of the humanities PhD is at the moment, it's getting harder and harder to think of the absolutely-assured professional future to contrast it with. The advice to high school students looking for guaranteed employment used to be to study computer science or engineering. Now, AI is playing havoc with those job markets as well. Other industries are in even worse shambles: journalism, for instance, is hardly a fallback for humanists. 

Generative AI, meanwhile, is only one of many recent changes introducing a state of abject uncertainty into our attempt to plan our futures. Is it worth thinking about jobs post-law school when by this time next year, we might be living in Year Zero of the Trump Dictatorship? How exactly are we supposed to answer the question of "where do you see yourself in ten years" when we just experienced the hottest year on record and the world's climate is only going to warm and become more unstable from here? 

When trying to imagine what possible future one could plan for yourself under conditions of such radical uncertainty, it seems hard to improve upon Smith's advice. Whether we are humanities PhDs or not, we are all just going to have to adapt. Adapt or perish. As a character in Kerouac and Burroughs' early joint novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, puts it—summarizing the pop science of his day, "the more forward-looking dinosaurs mutated into mammals while the bourgeois dinosaurs became extinct."

I was reading this book partly because it was referenced in a recent Times obituary of Caleb Carr—because it concerns a sordid real-life incident from the life of Carr's father. Read as true crime, though—or worse, as "thriller"—the book is thoroughly underwhelming. It lacks even the rudiments of suspense; the murder it is based on just sort of "happens" at the end. Read, however, as deadpan existentialist or "lost generation" novel—which its young authors seemed to have thought of it as—it works much better. 

The book is reminiscent of The Sun Also Rises—with its aimless bohemian parties full of Harvard grads, assorted lowlifes, trust fund babies, and criminal underworld types—or of the interminable Greenwich Village conversations faithfully recorded in Gaddis's The Recognitions. Like these other novels, it portrays a group of people manifestly refusing to make any provision for their future. They live for the next "drunk" that can be purchased on someone's monthly trust fund check. After it runs out—who knows? 

It's not an existence that would appeal to everyone. But it has some resonance with the world of radical instability in which we find ourselves now. The people in this book have learned the lesson of our time: one must accept the unknowable future as it comes and adapt. As the same character continues in the passage quoted above: "You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, and someone keeps hanging onto you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right."

People still aiming for the one job and future they always envisioned for themselves—whether in academia or elsewhere—seem very much like the sticky-fingered denizen of the pond still trying to hold the fish in place. "Just stay here; nothing has really changed." But the truth is, things have changed. Or if they haven't, they might. And we don't really know how radically they might change. We have to be prepared to adapt. And the old-style bohemianism has some lessons for us in that. 

The notion that literary types and humanities people would be guaranteed a comfortable middle class job is, after all, a very recent notion. No one in the first half of the twentieth century would have kidded themselves in the first place that becoming an urban intellectual and writing book manuscripts correlated with stability and financial success. The literary people of the time assumed—like the characters in the Hippos book—that they would have to take menial odd jobs or mooch off friends to survive. 

Whatever one thinks of their values, they were at least prepared to adapt. They had already seen the world overthrown and sent into upheaval multiple times over in so many decades (war, depression, war); therefore they accepted—and this perhaps remains the defining trait of the multiple postwar "lost generations" that we can still learn from today—that the future was unknowable. It is no coincidence, therefore, that this was the generation for whom the teachings of existentialism came most naturally. 

I try to ask myself how well I have adapted to the uncertainties of my life—how well have I embodied the advice of Noah Smith in that Substack post. To the extent I set my heart on anything specific in my youth, I imagined that I would one day be a writer and a political activist. I envisioned myself as a kind of globetrotting Orwell or Koestler—getting involved in the historic events and upheavals of the day, while supporting myself by writing about them, both as a periodical commentator and a novelist. 

In my college years and early adulthood, I spent a lot of time lamenting the idea that such a life was "no longer possible." The business model of the old-fashioned periodical journalism was already dying when I was a teenager, and it has suffered multiple other mass-extinction events since. Who knows what ChatGPT may do to it now. As for becoming a novelist, I've never had the least window into how people even get started on such a thing in today's world. Maybe you have to get an MFA and be on TikTok. 

And yet, defining my life goals more broadly—in a Noah Smithian way—I realize that I have actually become a writer and political activist after all. My path to this future hasn't taken exactly the form I envisioned or been a linear one (but then, who could describe Orwell or Koestler's lives as linear either?). I found my way into the NGO world, and that became a vehicle both for constant writing and advocacy on political issues. Up to a point, therefore, I can claim to have become what I set out to be.

I made my goals broader and vaguer; and this allowed me to adapt without forfeiting the things I really wanted to do or that give me meaning. This has to be a hopeful sign that I can actually live up to Smith's advice. The scary thing, though, is the fact that it's not enough to broaden and adapt once. I may have to do so time and again in the next decades. And I worry, as any of us would, that my ability to broaden and adapt diminishes as I get older. I risk becoming a "bourgeois dinosaur" rather than a mutating one. 

I try to grasp amidst this prospect for some kind of certainty—the bedrock of "absolute safety" for which Wittgenstein was seeking all his life. You can't find it in money—lord knows what the dollar will be worth or the global economy will become in twenty years. You can't find it in the continuity of our democratic institutions: have you paid any attention lately to what Trump is saying about his plans? You can't find it in job security—as discussed above, that is becoming scarce in far more industries than just academia. 

All one can do, therefore, is accept that the future is unknowable. And there is a kind of comfort in that. More properly, perhaps I should phrase the insight as realizing that the future does not exist. In the Bergsonian view of the life-history of each intelligence—or Van Veen's conception of time at the end of Nabokov's Ada or Ardor—we are not creatures living on a timeline that stretches straight before us; rather, we are accumulations of past experiences—we are growths made up of what has been, not what will be. 

We should think of ourselves not as people with a future ahead of ourselves, but as creative intelligences to which an ever-increasing supply of new experiences is being added. This growth of what we have been through is what we mean by the "passage of time." We therefore are constantly adapting. Bergson's "creative evolution" is the condition of our existence. If it were not happening—if we became static—then we would no longer be alive. To live is to evolve. So we have no choice but to adapt. 

What the world will become through this process is unforeseeable. It might end up looking a lot like the one we currently inhabit after all—Trump might lose the election or be stymied in his authoritarian ambitions by other checks and balances; generative AI might prove to be over-hyped in its ability to transform the economy; humanity may adapt to a warmer globe. But then again, it might not. We just don't know. All we can do, therefore, is live into what comes; to accumulate it as new experiences. 

In such a world, we are all bohemians now—software engineers no less than humanities PhDs. We are all existentialists. We are all mutating dinosaurs. We have come to accept—or will have to learn to accept soon enough—as John Fowles once put it—that "life [...] is not one riddle and one failure to guess it." It "is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured."