LinkedIn Isn't the Only Way

At age 36, emerging out of anonymity, Walt Whitman, “America’s Poet,” self-published Leaves of Grass.

Whitman began working jobs at the age of 11, which makes the length of time from his inception to his “success” much longer than the average person. He worked as a teacher, and a typesetter, and in the year before he published Leaves of Grass, a carpenter framing houses in Brooklyn. For someone dubbed the successor to Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante this is quite the late start.

Some would view this as an inconsiderable and damp start to what ultimately became a culturally successful “career”, not to mention the significant beauty contributed to the world through his poetry and essays. Whitman spent a considerable amount of time on qualitative things like reading, living, and loafing about before he came to find success in our eyes.

On his lunch breaks next to unfinished houses, he read Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovering for himself what life was and what it was about before he set out to tell about it.

I think the story of Walt Whitman is essential. Whitman lived a full and expensive life, even before - or perhaps especially before - he “made it.” He spent his time living, instead of laddering.

But let’s imagine a different scenario.

Instead of stopping school at 11 and going to work, Walt Whitman goes all the way through school, gets accepted into Princeton, and majors in Philosophy/English. In his four years of university, he applies himself rigorously, gets a meal card, excels academically, joins the right clubs, gets the right apprenticeships, and petitions to the right professors.

He plays the game accordingly - doing nothing for its own sake, only a means to an end.

These pursuits result in the correct resume, the perfect first job, and the beginnings of a respectable network. Perhaps he’s even proved himself enough to take a fourth of his offered vacation time.

Because he’s spent so much time in this highly specialized culture with dozens or hundreds of small steps to get to where he wants to go, he falls in line taking small steps on the moving walkway instead of giant leaps. Instead of being a loafer and a carpenter, opening himself up to the here-and-now universe, he’s drawn into the chess game of careerism.

Eventually, this version of Walt Whitman becomes the LinkedIn version of Walt Whitman. Instead of being nurtured by his poetic belonging through his work and downtime, long before he’s ever America’s poet, he trades the framing hammer for a respectable suit.

This is Veneerism. It is the unending pursuit of career moralism:

Enough right professional (and they’re all professional) decisions results in a formed identity. A moving walkway you only need to stay on.

That’s not really how life works and it says that there are one, or perhaps three or four, careers or lifestyles that qualify as successful.

But it’s also appealing because the narrative is rather simple and can fit into a Twitter thread: I did these five things on this timeline to become successful, and you can (should) too.

Veneerism is the extreme version of an otherwise respectable path: A job/career you enjoy, at a place that has good motives in the world, that pays you well and affords you the ability to pursue what you want to in life.

Or at least doesn’t get in the way of that pursuit.

Versions of true success are vast. A lot of us have some access and ability to our own version of getting to the point where we have enough “material” to self-publish one of the greatest collections of poetry of all time. Again, many different versions and scales here.

To find this, we have to - as fellow transcendentalist Henry Thoreau says -

Unlike the veneer of LinkedIn (I’m a user btw), there’s no formula to this living deep. I believe it’s made up of an appreciation for the slower things like friendships, relationships, faith, taking our time, and Yes, finding work and a career that we like.

It’s taking the time to ask deep questions - “the questions that have no answers” as Wendell Berry says - and spend time trying different paths.

Aka, Loafe.

I think Walt Whitman’s timeline of working and developing many versions of himself is a more realistic approximation of getting to each of our versions of success, one lunch break reading Emerson at a time.