Is Having a ‘Career’ the Biggest Con Ever Perpetrated?

Strong claim. Let me make the case.

Social Conditioning

Wikipedia defines social conditioning as “the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society”.

It works through repetition, reward, and reinforcement. It starts when you’re a child. The same messages, thousands of times, from television, school, parents, friends, colleagues — most of whom received exactly the same conditioning and never questioned it either. Society rewards certain behaviours and punishes others. In that respect, it’s not so different from training a dog.

The result is a population of people who largely conform to the same template — not because they’ve thought it through, but because the template is all they’ve ever seen presented as normal.

The Expected Path

Society has a script. It runs roughly as follows:

• Go to university
• Get a job
• Get promoted
• Work hard — very hard — for the good of the company
• Get married, have children, be a good consumer
• Retire, if the company doesn’t make you redundant first

Deviate from this path and you’re perceived as odd. Difficult. Lacking ambition, or lacking stability, depending on which way you deviate.

I’m not saying any element of that list is wrong in itself. I’m saying that most people follow it without ever stopping to ask whether it’s actually what they want — or whether it will actually deliver the security and fulfilment they’ve been told it will.

The Loyalty Myth

There was a time — roughly the post-war decades through to the 1980s — when the arrangement had some internal logic. You gave a company your loyalty and hard work; the company gave you security, progression, and a pension. People spent entire careers at the same employer, and the transaction was broadly fair.

That world is gone. Globalisation, outsourcing, and the relentless pressure on quarterly results have turned the employment relationship into something much more transactional. Companies shed staff without sentiment when it suits them. The loyalty that employees were conditioned to give is largely unreciprocated.

And yet the conditioning persists. People still feel guilty for prioritising their own interests. Still feel disloyal for changing jobs. Still measure their worth by their job title and their employer’s brand name.

What Contracting Changes

Contracting doesn’t solve all of this. But it does puncture the pretence.

As a consultant, the transactional nature of the arrangement is explicit from the start. You have a skill. A client needs that skill. You agree a price. You deliver. Nobody pretends it’s a family, nobody expects unpaid overtime as a token of commitment, and nobody is surprised when the contract ends.

That clarity has real value. You know where you stand. You make decisions based on what’s actually good for you, not based on a loyalty that was never going to be returned anyway.

Whether contracting is right for you depends on your circumstances and temperament — we’ve covered that elsewhere. But at a minimum, it’s worth stepping back and asking honestly: am I following this path because I’ve chosen it, or because I was conditioned to? The answer might surprise you.