I was a teenage magician. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement – magic dominated my childhood. I have a picture of me being shown a card trick at four years old, and I probably did some amount of magic practice or performance every day of my life between then and when I went to university.
The Internet was new back then, so I’d spend hours watching other people’s performances, ordering the hottest new trick, practicing in a borderline-meditative state and then revelling in the delight on people’s faces when I showed them the silly little piece of impossibility I’d been working on.
Naturally, when the time came for me to make my own income, magic was my first thought. I booked a couple of kids parties, a wedding, a village show. I was astounded by how fortunate I was to have a passion I could turn into profit.
That was when I fell out of love with magic.
The social anxiety before shows, the dread that lasted for days, the endless post-gig post-mortems wondering if I’d humiliated myself – none of this had existed when I performed for free. I enjoyed the craft itself, but hated everything required to commercialise it: the marketing, the sales, performing the same five tricks on repeat, working a room in a formalised, professional way.
The image we have of how a certain career will look often doesn’t quite match up with the reality. Sometimes that disparity is immediate, sometimes it develops over years, but the moment it hits can be one of the most challenging crises of self that we face. It hits hard when we realise the life we thought we were living doesn’t quite match up with our real, day-to-day experience.
Case in Point: Creatives in Berlin
I recently read Perfection, a novel by Vincenzo Latronico translated from Italian to English by Sophie Hughes. The book’s protagonists are Anna and Tom, a married couple of digital artists living in Berlin. When they’re travelling, they sublet their apartment, posting pictures of it online which totally fit the aesthetic of their cool, creative lifestyle:
The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated. It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet.
This enticing vision of a life goes beyond just their apartment, it’s Anna and Tom’s entire life:
Through all of this they continued to document their remote working life on social media. The pictures were always stunning, enticing – prickly pear groves, Camparis on red plastic beach tables, sunsets over vineyards… their laptops usually somewhere in frame to prove they weren’t on holiday – evidence of a life of freedom and adventure, one full of beauty and hard work.
The strength of this darkly satirical novel is that we all recognise the type of images it’s talking about. The modern creativity and old-school industrialism of the creative Berlin apartment that makes you feel like you could paint a great work on your weekend city break. The happy freelancer pictures that make you think about quitting your employment to travel and see the world. The power of these images is how aspirational and envy-inducing they are. They speak to a lifestyle that so many of us find appealing, if inaccessible.
But the central theme of the novel is how the “life promised by these images” is not the life that Anna and Tom live. As time goes by, they feel increasingly disconnected from the energy and spark that they first had when they moved to Berlin. As the city changes, their friends take different directions in life, and their work feels increasingly repetitive and less engaging.
Later, in an attempt to recapture the feeling they’ve becoming nostalgic for, they try temporarily relocating to Lisbon, but have can’t shake the same feeling that something’s just not right anymore. By now, it’s clear that there is an irreconcilable dissonance between the images Anna and Tom are posting online as aspirational symbols of their lifestyle, and the experiences they are actually having.
Back in the day, looking at images like those and knowing how frustrated and unhappy they had been when they took them made them feel ashamed, deficient, as if the reality presented in the photos should somehow be capable of triumphing how they really felt, and that their inability to enjoy such a desirable life revealed a flaw in their character. They had outgrown this insecurity. Now those images just seemed like a con.
This is particularly telling, as it lets slip that not only do Anna and Tom’s experiences no longer feel aligned to the images they want people to have of their life, but they’ve never matched up. Anna and Tom used to aspire to those images themselves, even as they were posting them. But by this point they’ve been doing it so long that they no longer desire the life their posts are promising. A realisation like this is often uncomfortable, but always important. And these revelations aren’t solely for Instagram-worthy creative careers.
Drifting Purpose in Full-Time Employment
While Anna and Tom’s life is a perfect example for satire, it’s important to recognise that this drift away from what we thought our careers might be is not unique to freelancers or creatives. I often speak to people whose career development strategy has always been planned happenstance – seeing what opportunities come up, leaning into the ones that feel right and away from the ones that feel wrong. Sometimes those people are delighted with where they’ve ended up, and sometimes they’re wondering how they got to the top of a profession they never had any particular interest in or passion for.
I can’t remember where I heard the witticism that “Middle age is reaching the top of the ladder and realising you’ve been climbing the wrong wall”, but I’m in my 30s and I can already think of a good handful of times that I made good progress up a ladder only to realise I had no interest in the wall at all, I just knew I was supposed to be climbing.
The drift from the image you have of your career to a very different reality can happen slowly and invisibly, but often the realisation is sudden and sharp. It is a difficult moment to come to terms with, but in the right light, it can be liberating. The shift from “I should be grateful to have a job” to “this company/role/environment just isn’t working for me” can bring with it an openness to a range of opportunities and possibilities you may not have considered before. Like Anna and Tom, you might “outgrow this insecurity” and the mismatch between truth and image might no longer feel like your fault, but rather an objective shift that you now have the chance to part ways with.
For me, it felt sad for the longest time. I felt like I had a prime opportunity to make a career out of magic, but I’d squandered it by being a wimp in social situations, or by not understanding business basics. It was only with time, space and distance that I realised that even if I’d carried on with it, I would sooner or later have had to admit to myself that I was uncomfortable and unhappy. Professional magic simply wasn’t (and isn’t) for me, and with the benefit of hindsight, I’m glad that I saw that early and have been able to revisit my passion as a hobby, without attaching any commercial imperative to it.
Why This Isn’t Actually a Crisis
The difficult thing about this revelation is knowing what to do about it. You’re often in too deep, and your sunk costs can lead you to black and white thinking. It can feel like your options are to keep doing the decently-paid job you have now accepted you abhor, or tear it all up and start again, at great emotional and fiscal cost. But it’s important to remember that doing something isn’t the point. Or at least not immediately.
For me, not pursuing a career in magic didn’t mean there was no longer any value in it as a creative outlet, or that I had wasted all of those thousands of hours of practice – in fact, the trust in my creative ability that I cultivated throughout that time has become a cornerstone of the work I do now. Similarly, Anna and Tom’s story doesn’t end with them dramatically throwing it all in and becoming farmers (well, not that dramatically, at least). Instead, they have a stroke of luck which allows them to pivot the things they do like and they skills they have gained to a new venture.
The revelation that you are no longer satisfied by your current career path is growth, so don’t feel the need to jump straight to action. You have information now that you didn’t have before, and it’s important to recognise that before taking impulsive action. You’ve taken the first step toward owning your story rather than letting someone else write it for you, and that’s a big deal – it’s wise to take a minute and assess your options.
What comes next will be different for everyone, but you probably don’t need to blow up your whole life. More likely, the answers lie in returning to the parts of the work you actually enjoyed, or recognising which parts of your passions are meant to stay hobbies versus which bits you can happily monetise, or simply acknowledging that the career you drifted into organically might not be the career you want to stay in deliberately, and beginning to plan intellectually and financially to pivot to something more rewarding. These are the building blocks of your new story.
Your job might be a beautiful lie. But it’s your lie to stop telling. Once the old story has finished, you can begin to write the new one. With the right tools and intention, you can write it your way, and stop following someone else’s script.
