Aaron Renn made a splash recently with a tweet, subsequently expanded into a Substack post, in which he explained the importance of choosing the right ‘status hierarchies’ to climb in life and acknowledged some of his poor decisions on this front earlier in his career. (Critical, though charitable, responses to Renn can be found here and here.) I found the original tweet unsavory and couldn’t manage more than a quick skim of the longer post. In my limited interaction with his work, my sense is that Renn is (at least in some ways) a perceptive interpreter of culture and, yet, I find his vision of the world deeply uncompelling.
In reading the tweet, my mind quickly went to a post @ayjay wrote on his blog a while back that, not coincidentally, begins as a polemic against Renn’s “negative world” thesis. But, after rejecting the sort of “strategic thinking” approach employed by Renn and others, Jacobs narrates his own rather circuitous career path. As he explains, his vocational trajectory has not been pre-meditated; there isn’t some grand strategy or plan to work at elite academic institutions or write for the most respected outlets. Instead, Alan has made certain commitments along the way and then has allowed providence to direct his steps and open (or shut, as the case may be) doors along the way. No to strategies; yes to commitments. (And yes to sprawl.)
It’s instructive to see these two writers describe the twists and turns of their respective career paths and, more to the point, to hear the lessons they’ve both drawn from those experiences. I know which path seems more appealing to me.
