The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [29]
The evidence suggested that the forming of an individual in its early years was as sensitive and important a task as the correct casting of a skyscraper’s foundations and that the slightest impurity introduced at a primary stage could possess a tyrannical power to unbalance a human animal until its dying days. To continue to deny the significance of barely perceptible childhood abuses was to manifest the same robust and foolhardy common sense which had once led our ancestors to scoff at the notion that there might be deadly colonies of microorganisms thriving in drops of saliva no larger than pinheads.
Seen from this perspective, the weight accorded to ideas of nurture and to the development of self-esteem in theories of modern education no longer seemed like a sign that our societies had gone mad or soft. On the contrary, this emphasis was as finely attuned to the demands of contemporary working life as instruction in stoicism and physical bravery had been to the exigencies of ancient times. It owed its existence less to kindness than to practical necessity. Like the rearing methods of every age, it was intended to ensure that the young would be granted the optimal chances of survival in a hostile environment.
6.
A few weeks after we returned from the north, I travelled with Symons to an office in central London, where he had been commissioned by an American bank to put some job applicants through a morning’s worth of tests. Symons had hoped that this process could be combined with a more informative round of face-to-face interviews, but the bank turned out not to want to expend the requisite time and resources. The tests would be scored overnight and a decision taken on hiring the following day.
Symons’s subjects devoted the bulk of their session to filling out the Morrisby Personality Profile, the most respected and widely used of all aptitude questionnaires. Never far from doubting the wisdom of my own career choice, I joined the candidates in the hope of learning more about my working psyche. I searched for exceptions within lists of words and tried to solve visual puzzles and analogies such as ‘Heavy is to light as a) wide b) day c) jump is to d) brick e) narrow f) house’.
Which wheel turns the fastest when the tractor moves?
Which of these identical ships has the heaviest load?
Two days later, my test results came back from Symons’s office in an exclusively bound folder designed to assert the importance of their conclusions. Held up against the subtletly of the psychological exchanges I had observed between Symons and Carol (who had since handed in her resignation from her law firm and applied for a managerial post with a housing charity), the report felt like it had been written by a computer. ‘The candidate displays average abilities which would render him well-suited to a range of middle-ranking administrative and commercial posts’, the document began, before it singled out a particular talent for marketing and a weakness with numbers. ‘His future may lie in one of the following fields: medical diagnostics, oil and gas exploration or the leisure industry’.
I recognised my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future. At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence and indeed, the more I dwelt on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counselling as a whole. I thought again about the smells of cabbage and swede in Symons’s office. It struck me as strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person’s vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalised therapists practising their trade from garden extensions.