“... and so yeah, it’s a specific career field within the vast array of insurance jobs. Sometimes there is some spillover into the broader FIRE world, usually finance, but 99 percent of us are in the nitty gritty of Insurance with a capital I,” Mike begins to explain himself, as he always must when talking about his job. “I often say it’s sort of like being a lawyer in the sense that you get to spend absurd stretches of time fretting about the placement and verbiage of utter minutia, but with a lot of math and statistics, and you get hyper-focused and specialize in some type of insurance, which involves economics as well. And you know about the bar, right, the tests taken to become attorneys at law,” he uses air quotes around attorneys at law with a subtle derision that goes mostly unnoticed, “well, we take an exam too before we can get hired by any companies. Except after we pass the first one, we must pass nine more exams to be fully credentialed—and lots of companies won’t hire you as an entry level analyst until you’ve passed two or three exams. Have you heard about the entry-level job market yet? Degree plus three years of experience? Has anybody told you about this? Some of you are shaking your head, most just blank stares—well, good luck and Godspeed; it’s hard out there. None of this process is going to be friendly with you; chummy. But well anyway, my field is no different, it just involves credential exams as part of the prerequisites. And for the most part, these exams get increasingly difficult, though they don’t all build on each other—but they’re all hard. For example, the fifth exam, which is a direct continuation of the fourth exam, had a 27% pass rate in the fall 2018 sitting. Sort of an infamous case, but the average pass rate over the last decade isn’t all that much higher.”
Mike eases into some light pacing. Steph taught him early in their marriage that he paces every time his noggin gets joggin’, as if his mind doesn’t work unless his feet are moving, as if he can’t think without circling their kitchen island, looking but not seeing, roaming but going nowhere. These are the things a man learns when he gets married—that he’s a pacer and has a weird mouth rinsing ritual after brushing his teeth. That kind of thing.
Continuing his parenthetical, “what I mean to point out is about one in four of the people who sat for it passed, and these are people who’ve already passed four credential exams, are given hundreds of paid study hours, comped materials and exam costs, have committed their minds to studying for and passing these exams because this is their career, who they are, with hundreds of personal hours spent on the exams outside of their allotted 40-hour workweeks. And three out of four of them failed. Oops, sorry, guess you don’t know enough,” he adds, taking on a higher pitch and excessive gesturing. “Better luck next time! I know 90 percent of the undesirables have already been weeded out by the first exam and you could be perfectly competent at your job with your current level of mathematical precision, especially considering Excel is going to do it all for you, but that just won’t cut it!”
He pauses, looking down at his feet. “I’m not bitter,” he chortles. Nobody reciprocates the laughter. “It’s just… it’s a lot, is what I’m saying. It’s a lot to juggle.” Mike's mounting defensiveness is clearly felt by the audience as they begin to shift in their chairs, and he can see that they are not loving this rather strange start. The back of his mind is aware that he’s entering stage two territory despite the 40mg of lisinopril currently coursing through his veins, but this is nothing new.
Mike shifts his tack, “One thing you’ll note with a cursory Internet probing is that my occupation is always in the top five or ten most desirable. Low stress, high pay, time off, benefits, et cetera. Your standard criteria. This is true enough, considering lawyers and doctors are working 50 to 100 percent more hours if they want to go somewhere or are on call, respectively or whatever, which means their hourly pay is closer to two thirds or a half of their salary—although, with bonuses, the overall compensation might roughly equate for hourly pay, maybe, but well the point is that my career field is always at the top of the list, all things considered.”
Mike pauses to tap the corners of his sealed mouth with his right thumb and index finger, looking down at the ground just in front of him as he stalks, then continues, “but all these considerations assume full credentials. Being an analyst, which is what you are for several years, upwards of like two decades, can be hellish,” much of the audience gives a barely audible gasp, but Mike doesn’t notice and barrels forward, “because your pay is comparable to some random marketing analyst who makes pretty PowerPoints with a couple of graphs that your average teenager can understand, or, I don’t know, a 25-year-old journeyman electrician who didn’t spend his entire young adulthood studying Poisson and Gamma distributions, and amortization schedules, and, and, I don’t know, lasso regression techniques—which sound a lot cooler than they are, these lassos, believe me—and this electrician is free to do whatever he wants job-wise, and so well anyway you might as well consider yourself a full time student on top of your full time job, since you’re spending hundreds of hours studying for exams outside of work every spring and fall. I mean, let me just put it plainly here. You are recommended to put in at least 100 hours per hour for these exams. Most exams are four hours, so that’s 400 hours of study. Over a ten-week period, you need to put in 40 hours per week of studying. Considering you’ll get about a quarter of those hours covered by your company, all that’s left to accomplish in your free time is about thirty hours of study per week. The IRS considers 30+ hours per week as a full-time job. And the average time to full credentials between passing your first and last exam is about eight years, but this distribution is heavily skewed to the right. We’re talking fat tails here,” a giggle or two is subconsciously heard by Mike, but he doesn’t register it enough to look up, “and so it’s common—I mean, it’s the norm to be this student analyst for your 20s and often into your 30s, and that’s if you got your start at the end or right out of college.”
Sick of talking about things he’s spent years of his life thinking about, Mike kicks back up, hand waving excessively, “So, you know, what’s a second job when you already work full-time? C’mon, you’ll have the cushiest career in the world when you finish! Just do this for the next ten years and you’ll love your new life—we guarantee it. Your twenties and thirties are overrated anyway—you can start a family at 38, no problem.”
Mike pauses entirely, lost in a state of limbo, a floating space of ponderous anger, what if, but why, how in the world, and so much more. He lets out a deep breath, gathering himself, as if relieved and supine on a comfortable leather couch, spilling all to his therapist. But therapists can only dream of a patient like Mike: upper-middle, smart but not threateningly so, neurotically introspective, able to make grievances with systems and ideas rather than petty relationships, angry but not in a brutish, blue-collar way, and effete from the decades of cubicle life with fluorescent lighting, such that he could never truly be a danger to anyone—the perfect ingredients.
Slowly, Mike is brought back to awareness of the question at hand: What Do You Do? The woman swiveling in an office chair about eight feet from Mike’s circle has her mouth half open, unsure if she should step in to say well hey Mike thank you, this has been informative or whatever, a stop-the-bleeding courtesy kind of thing.
“Ah, shoot, look at me, rambling on about exams again. Nobody asked me to complain about this, and nobody asked me to go into this field anyway, so who do I have to blame?” Mike says, raising his line of sight above the listeners, seemingly longing beyond the wall stopping his gaze, hungry for help that is not coming, aid that will never materialize because he is the help he is afraid to seize.
“The question is What Do You Do, I suppose. Well, I help make rates. There are variations of this in different insurance fields, but we basically all have to figure out what to charge so that people who need to file claims are covered without bankrupting the companies covering the insured. I mean, this sounds simple enough, right? It’s not. Nothing is ever simple in this world. There’s an enormous, complex process of data understanding and manipulation that precedes the final rate. That’s what those exams are for. They prepare us to contribute to an ongoing ratemaking process that has been created and slowly modified over the last couple of centuries. Early on, this was just basic statistical methods on small datasets. Then, more data was created because more insurance was sold, and with more experience, there were improvements and changes made to the statistical processes. So, certain ratemaking procedures were set in stone, and then those who were long in the tooth added bits and pieces to the original, skeletal process. Over the years and decades, the process grew significantly and rapidly, and what was considered the standard process one year was often quite a bit larger, stranger, and more complex than what was taken for granted just ten or twenty years prior. And then you just keep going; we keep going, I mean. Competency and experience continue to be downloaded from the individuals who gained such, and then the process grows again. It’s basically just taking information from minds and turning it into a repeatable system, a process. And at some point along this line, we got a Process with a capital P, a titanic monolith of essentially unchangeable procedures, only to be slightly modified or added to—although the modifications are usually applications of a part of the Process that allows for modifications, which would render the modification just another aspect of the capital-P Process.”
A hand goes up in the audience. Mike doesn’t notice it and continues, “And well anyway this Process became so vast and complex, so totalizing, that it is now the protagonist of our field rather than, you know, a group of people doing ratemaking. The Process is the thing at work here, it seems to me, and we are basically managing the Process. I mean, well, let me explain. You know, all along the way of the creation of the Process, checklists and best practice documents are devised by those who are in the know to manage use and manipulation of the Process. This is especially true for the lower-level analysts who have neither the experience nor the competency to understand basically anything that is going on. They follow these checklists and allow the process to do what it has been created to do. The analysts are essentially protégés of the checklists, mentees of the checklists, not necessarily any flesh and blood men or women with loads of experience, although those with experience will provide guidance when the checklist seems opaque or a novel hand change needs to be made. But, but, the point is that the bulk of an analyst’s training comes from checklist tutelage, all of which serves and fosters the Process—that is, the essentially unalterable capital-P Process that is beyond any of the individuals involved. At some point in the past, competence and experience became such insofar as they were understanding of the Process. Hence, a capital-P Process of which nobody is really in control, nor can anyone radically change. This is true even of the top brass. Again, they are merely manipulating or contributing minor additions to the Process. Analysts—well, forget about it. They just run some programs, check hither and thither to make sure things look reasonable—these standards are in the checklists, of course—perhaps make a hand change, if need be, which would be noted in the checklist, obviously, and then send these spreadsheets to people who are allowed to make consequential decisions. But anyway the point is that we are all working on and in service to the Process. There’s no radicality here, the roots are set in stone. We’re all working on the same Process from different angles—basically, it’s management and the managed, is what I’m getting at—managing large or small aspects of the Process for the top brass, and the analysts get to be managed along with the Process while they’re managing their little pieces of the Process. It’s management all the way down, really.”
Mike is looking into without registering the eyes gazing back at him, which are beginning to resemble the abyss. He goes still and hangs his head over his mid-line, closing his eyes. After an indiscriminate period, “spreadsheet manipulation. This unending hierarchy of management comes down to moving around numbers and/or varying the ways that we routinely deal with the numbers—mostly in spreadsheets. Moving around numbers is more of the ad hoc daily tweaking while varying or changing the way we routinely deal with numbers is a higher level process change, probably done in the off seasons through dozens of hours of meetings, chock-full of hemming and hawing. This isn’t unique to my field. I’m pretty sure the near total of technical jobs are like this, the stuff we call knowledge work, and they all have their own capital-P Processes. They run the world, these Processes. Gone are the days of the Greats like Charles or Alexander; the capital P’s run the world.”
Mike is opening his eyes wide while blinking deliberately, pursing his lips. Shifting his gaze up slightly to allow for more pacing, he adds, “It all used to be done on paper, believe it or not. Eh, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing that—can you believe it all used to be done on paper? Kids these days just don’t understand! I barely understand, though, so I’m sure you don’t. Of course, the Process was not as complex before digitizing the then-Process. I mean, improving one’s technology to increase efficiency always leads to an increase in complexity, so the paper Process was less than the digital Process, but still.”
Mike softly snorts, “I suppose this brings us face-to-face with the problem of technology. Now, okay, I said problem and maybe you’re uncomfy with the notion of technology as a problem. Culturally, that’s not really a thing for us. Innovation and whatnot and so on. Technology is unequivocally good, we think. Then, you know, just think of it as the question of technology, if that makes you feel better; comfier, more comfortable. Anyway, the point is that with each technological advance comes a corresponding increase in complexity. Think of the automobile. Ford solved real problems, such as getting farmers around and into town, interacting with the society they fed and whatnot, actually going to church, having some tangible idea of how their work fostered the common good—oh, and the car doubled as a backup generator for new farming equipment. I mean, the power of the automobile is taken for granted by us because of its ubiquity, but it was a revolution as profound as any. It’s an engineering marvel, the car—a beautiful testament to man’s ability to create. So, lots of issues were solved or improved, especially after Ford could mass-produce them. Eventually, it all went to Hell, and that’s where we live now.”
While Mike briefly pauses, he doesn’t notice the audience’s agape mouths, “I once heard a wise man say, the only man with a car is a god. When everyone has a car, he is stuck in traffic. What I mean is that Hell is a place filled with paved roads. We once had streets, but not anymore. Roads get you from point A to point B. Streets are filled with people and trade and whatnot. Roads always existed, Silk and otherwise, but we went on a road creation spree after the mass production of the automobile. It didn’t take long to reduce America from a society of farmer-gods to men in traffic. Eisenhower littered the country with freeways under the pretense of war, and the city was reformed in the image of the car. The freeway system might not have been such an issue if it merely connected cities across the vast landmass that is America, but we didn’t do that. We carved up already existing cities so that cars could get through at breakneck speeds. I mean, just think about the old boroughs of our city. Today, they are separate neighborhoods divided up by hundreds of thousands of pounds of concrete throughout the city. That’s not how our cities started. Europe didn’t do this in a lot of city centers, so you can actually walk there or take public transport with a reasonable schedule. Lots of towns still have a medieval layout, just made ugly with glass and steel monstrosities. But America is nothing if not a cult of efficiency—the Protestant work ethic and whatnot, you understand. The car is efficient A-to-B travel, therefore we must reform society in its image. As a result, it’s essentially impossible for most Americans to work and live without a car. Everyone who can scrounge together the money to buy a car does so because not having one outside of maybe New York City and Chicago is all but impossible. Yet, if everyone has a car, we get traffic. This brings us to the irony of the whole thing: the race toward efficiency has left us with hour-long commutes and needing to drive 15 minutes to get groceries, park, walk a mile to go into the store, get our foodstuffs, buy it, and walk back to our parked car, then drive back home, and so on. Takes an hour to get a few groceries these days. The cult of efficiency leads us to waste years of our lives in banal queues. We rush with great haste—five miles over the speed limit if we’re lucky, albeit a fraction of our vehicle’s true power—only to arrive at another humdrum period of wait; yet one more line we can sit in while other efficient consumers ahead of us dart off to another detainment center, and those behind us anxiously anticipate their chance to do the same.”
Mike sighs and squats down onto the balls of his feet, heels off the ground as if he’s examining the soil content of this well-trampled carpet on top of concrete. Slowly standing back up, he shakes his head and gestures with open hands, “Well, and so my point is that computation solved some of our problems, even many that we didn’t know we had, but for every increment of increased efficiency brought five instances of added complexity. Wow, we can do X so much faster, now we have time to tweak and change—hey, what if we used this extra power and speed to do ABC? This isn’t inherently bad. I mean, think of the real problems the automobile solved, right? I’m not saying making things more complex is evil. But it is important to recognize that things are immensely more complex and complicated than they were in, say, the 1960s or even the 1990s. The fundaments are the same, but much more complex at the top end. Again, this isn’t bad per se, but it’s real, is what I’m saying.”
The woman off to his right is opening her mouth to speak as Mike restarts, “and you asked me what I do. What is the work I am doing, that’s what you’re wondering. After what I’ve said so far, we might ask, is this really work? I mean, we’ve got to be consistent here and shine light on everything. But I suppose if we’re going to be serious about it, we’d probably have to take a further step back and ask, what is work, anyway? In general, I mean. How would we define it? The physicist is going to say it’s the product of force and displacement, but I hardly think that’s satisfying. Nothing physicists say is satisfying, but I guess that’s for another time. Anyway, when you guys ask me what I do for work, I don’t think you’re looking for, like, the joules output by my hands on a mouse and keyboard, right? Right, yeah, I mean, you’re asking what comes out on the other end, the product of my labor. The honest truth is that I don’t know. I mean, clearly, there are things we produce, and they do affect the world. That much is obvious. We make rates, the rates are immediately or eventually accepted, the insurance carriers abide by these rates, companies buy insurance from these carriers, and somewhere down that line a man or woman eventually needs to lean on that insurance. It’s apparent that what I do has some bearing on the world, as a therefore, you know, syllogism-wise, but the tangibility of this work—office work in general—is still difficult to ascertain. At worst, it’s a line of argumentation like I just gave you, or at best it’s a printed-out rate filing that I can hold: a thick packet of numbers, charts, and legalese. But is this work? Again, what is work?”
Despite the audience’s lack of involvement in Mike’s diatribe, he is taking on an increasingly interrogative tone. He is nearly berating the listeners with his line of questioning, “I mean, what we’re used to thinking here is how exactly something is brought about. That’s work, right? Bringing something about? Is this not what you’ve been taught, either explicitly or by osmosis? You know, there was a Greek guy who lived long ago—I think he’d be helpful here—he called this efficient causality. Kind of a fancy term, but it just means bringing something about, how something is made. Think of the potter creating a ceramic bowl. There is some clay material that needs to be formed into a definite shape, and this is brought about through some system of artistic craft I know next to nothing about. Going through this process of molding the clay into the desired shape and whatnot is the efficient causality of making the bowl. Today, this is basically what we call work, the process the potter takes to create the bowl. But, of course, all of this began and was directed by a mind that wanted to order these things in such a way. We call this the final cause. But then we have the matter of clay and the form we realize in the clay through the working of the material. So, there’s a four-fold causality at work here: material, formal, efficient, and final causality. You might think of this more straightforwardly as what is made, material, what it is made into, formal, how it is made, efficient, and what it is made for, final. If we take the Greek at his word, I mean.”
Mike is slowly walking back and forth on a line parallel to the front row of the audience. He was lost in thought enough to forget their presence before, even while looking directly at them. Now, he’s ceased even looking at them, slipping into the solipsism required of such a monologue.
“Whatever our misgivings of this old man’s philosophy, or Greeks in general, an even cursory examination of work leads us to think there must be more to it than efficient causality. At the very least, this fourfold causality is a useful paradigm in unpacking the way the world works. And so when we think of a ceramic bowl, to continue the example, we hold the form of the bowl in our minds. Then, as we realize this form through the actual formation with our hands, the instantiation of that form, we are actualizing the reality that once existed as a theoretical object in our mind’s eye. Furthermore, there is a uniqueness to this kind of work because there is never the exact same amount of material used, nor of exactly identical quality or consistency, and the worker can never be so exacting in this process such that each step yields an utterly identical piece of formation as the last time he performed this same step. In other words, each ceramic bowl is unique, and with this uniqueness comes a personal imprint on the final product. Part of the worker is leftover in the formation of the thing—the worker is in the product of his or her labor. The bowl is the potter, and the potter is the bowl. Not that I want to completely mystify work here—the bowl is not literally a piece of the potter, as if the potter loses some part of himself every time he creates such that after he creates his last bowl, he disappears into the ether. That’s absurd. The point is that the realization of the form of the clay bowl through the efficient cause the potter employs—all in light of the final cause he maintains in his mind—leaves an individuated bowl as a product of that specific potter. Nobody else could have made that exact bowl, and he will not even be able to make this exact bowl again.”
Mike takes a deep breath out, returning his gaze to the audience, “but okay, enough throat clearing. How does this apply? The thick filing I can hold at the end of another ratemaking season can certainly be weaved into this four-cause framework. There is material, formal, efficient, and final causality in there. Paper and ink, the printer, receiving commands from the computers we use to go through the spreadsheet process on our new data, and so on and so forth. I think that clearly falls into efficiency, somehow. However, I don’t know what exactly is the matter being formed, nor what the form is. Is the matter the claims filed by individual men and women with their insurance carriers? Is it the insurance companies who sent us the data, which turned these men and women simply into indemnity, medical, property, et cetera losses? And digitally so? Perhaps the questions are the same if these losses are written down on paper rather than entered into a database, but the digital nature of the data seems to complicate things. Now to form: are the mathematical and statistical processes we follow and implement the formal cause or causes? Do we form the data—which are real people filing claims—into understandable statistics rather than just rows and columns of numbers? Or is it the process of using these statistics to project into the future that is the formal cause, turning the material of prior experience—i.e., more claims from another year—into predictive analysis for the near future? Or is the form simply the final formatting of the headings, paragraphs, graphs, tables, et cetera?”
Mike’s blood pressure is rising with his voice after each successive inflection. He continues, “And if the efficient causality is the digitized Process—or simply, spreadsheets with our math and statistics automatically programmed into the Process—that we follow and tweak, is this Process itself bringing about the formal cause, as in without reference to the men and women who created it or currently run and tweak it? Or are the men and women currently running the Process bringing about the form? Is it neither? Is it all the men and women who created the Process in the past, along with the current analysts, the current tweaks, and the Process itself—the Leviathan, as it were, in toto—is this totality the formal cause? Or is all of that part of the efficient cause?”
Mike expires slowly, pushing the air through his lips. After staring and blinking for an indiscernible stretch of time, he exasperatingly adds, “I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions. And whatever the answers are, we’re obviously in extremely abstract territory here. We are far removed from anything like the potter-clay-bowl-kiln world. And even if I or someone knew the answers to these questions, it still feels as if this work lives in and fosters gray area. This work, if we can call it that, inhabits an ethereal realm of activity that I’m unsure how to define or quantify. Also, these questions could be applied to a huge portion of our economy, the whole vector of knowledge work, as opposed to, well, work. And, for whatever reasons, our culture champions so-called knowledge work as objectively better than, say, carpentry or electrical. But is it? By this logic, the more abstract the work, the greater it is.”
Mike places his tented fingers together, over his sealed mouth. He is fatigued. A light goes on, “Ah, we can use cars again, but this time the car itself. The earliest automobiles were engineered and created by individual men or small crews, which had clear material, formal, efficient, and final causality. Fast forward to the Ford plants just a few decades later where dozens or hundreds of men are stationed along assembly lines. Each man is tasked with a single step to follow repeatedly for some stretch of time. He is not asked to create a car, he is asked to, say, I don’t know, attach a steering wheel column to the steering box. He is not engineering a whole from the ground up and creating or assembling everything from the rubber wheels to the camshaft; he is merely following a single step within that vast process ad nauseam, while his assembly line neighbors to his right and left are doing the same thing, just one step before or after him. So now, looking at the car at the end of this process, who and/or what actualized the form? Is there an imprint of the assembly liner in the form of the car? The final cause must be in the mind of the car’s designer, but where is he? Or where is the team of designers? Or, if they designed a car that has already been around for years or decades, merely updating it, who claims the final cause? Certainly not anyone in the factory, at least. Is the assembly liner recognized in the product of his labor? Are the hundreds or thousands of men in the car the way the potter is seen in the bowl? Are we saying the glass is half full and that these cars are blessed with the forms of dozens or hundreds of men while the old cars only had the form of one or a few men imprinted on them? Probably the glass would have to be 1/1000th full if we’re honest, but I digress. All this is to ask, if abstract is better, isn’t the assembly line worker living his best life? In fact, isn’t the assembly liner living the best life? Hyper-abstract work with a straightforward, consumable product at the end? No, I think we all have to agree that that’s silly. Nobody thinks factory workers live great lives. I mean, they had to pay exorbitant wages to first get men out of the fields and trades to work in factories. Men fought the movement of labor into factories because they immediately and viscerally recognized that it was inhumane work. Nothing has changed. We know factory workers are there only as long as they have to be before they move to greener pastures. But the point is that these assembly liners are working only in the most superficial sense of the word. They are realizing the tiniest possible subsection of the whole process of car creation. This is not work, this is abstract labor completely divorced from final, formal, and even material causality. We are reducing these workers to a meager sliver of the efficient causal pie. Now, to return to my career and the seemingly pure abstraction of it all, without clearly discernible material, formal, or even efficient causality—the question again rears its ugly head: what do I do?”
As Mike probes the audience, he finally registers that he is not the only mind in the universe. He is flooded with embarrassment, flushed with rosy cheeks as the blood simultaneously drains from the rest of his face—a blend of humiliation and shock. The listeners look as if they have been bludgeoned, but without leaving any bruises. They appear as if they’ve been deprived of a week’s sleep despite being well-rested before the start of his monologue. Suddenly, the air seems to have escaped the room, and Mike is caught gasping for oxygen with a mouth so dry his tongue could crack in two.
“Um, well,” the teacher to his right finally stands up from her chair. Putting a hand on Mike’s arm and gesturing to the class, “Thank you, Mike, for that… enlightening look into your, well, work?” She snickers uncomfortably.
“Yes, um, I’m sorry about that. I guess I got a bit carried away.”
“That’s all right, it’s never too early to teach kids about the realities of the workplace, even if this is only the third grade. I’m sure they won’t forget this What Do Your Parents Do Day, I know I won’t.”
“I’m so sorr—
“Class, do you have any questions for Sophia’s dad, Mike?”