One of the greatest losses in the era of deindustrialization was the loss of stability. For decades, workers could expect a consistent job and respectable pay without needing years of college or other school. The average person could find a reliable job and hope to stick with it all the way until retirement.
When industries left, they took stability away from many workers. Workers who expected to spend a lifetime at the same job every weekday suddenly were left without anywhere to go. In many places, these industries were the basis of local community. People worked together at the same place and built lives around a shared identity at work.
In many places, that stability was never replaced. There weren’t enough opportunities for stable work to replace the lost jobs. In many places, local culture changed forever as people left for different opportunities or simply lost their connection to the old culture.
Stability and Familiarity
We need stability to build a sense of place and identity. A sense of placelessness creates a sense of meaninglessness. Familiarity is often the first step to loving something: C.S. Lewis described the love of something familiar as the most natural kind of love. The simplest way to find a sense of connection is in this sense of stability.
But stability is often out of our control. The workers at those factories didn’t have control over whether the factories would stay or go. It was something entirely out of their control.
This sort of event might seem rare. A total change in the economy doesn’t seem like something that happens all the time. But in our era of rapid technological change, this is always a risk. With advances in AI technology, even jobs that seemed irreplaceable are at risk of being automated. Workers in industries like banking and computer programming are at risk of seeing their jobs lost or totally redefined.
It doesn’t seem like we can trust in traditional stability as much as we used to. It’s clear now that all work can be automated—though it’s not clear if it should be. Though it’s not clear what will happen to work in the near future, it’s clear that AI means nothing is guaranteed.
We need some kind of stability in life. A life of vocation largely means a life of consistency: Real vocation means everything in life sharing a clear purpose and direction. When there’s no stability, there’s no opportunity to find what that direction should be. We have to take a moment to be still if we want to find out which way to go.
It’s hard to rely on things out of our control. Some people might be fortunate enough to find work that remains reliable and predictable for the entirety of your working life. But many of us will be left with work that’s unpredictable and uncertain.
If we can’t rely on this sort of stability, where can we find the stability needed to create meaning? If much of this stability is out of our control, where can we find the foundation necessary to build a sense of meaning?
To start, it’s important to remember that we can’t be ruled by fear. Though we need to think about the future, we also need to keep a sense of daring and confidence. Instability is not only a danger: It’s also an opportunity. Learning to take the right risks is essential to the pursuit of happiness.
The pursuit of happiness requires change, and change requires risk. Perfect stability—never changing at all—isn’t a path to happiness. Really, it’s the main way that we fall into misery. The most unhappy people are often those who are stuck in a pattern of life that they cannot escape.
But instability is not good for its own sake. Losing your job to economic changes might be an opportunity, but it’s certainly not going to offer any sense of instant happiness—unless your job was terrible already. We shouldn’t fear all change, but we shouldn’t pretend that all change is good.
It seems that we need to find something that’s in our control. We want to find something that we can always return to and that nobody can take away from us. What could this be?
The Philosophy of the Stoics
This search was the motivation for Stoic philosophy. The Stoics, ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, wanted to find the best path for happiness in life. But they feared the idea of risking losing happiness to chance. If you decide to rely on fame or wealth for happiness, you’re risking losing everything if it’s taken from you: There’s no way to guarantee these things.
Instead, the Stoics argued that your happiness needs to come from things entirely in your control. They argued that the only worthy source of happiness comes from living a righteous life. If you know that you’re living based on a set of moral principles, you can always be confident that you’re living rightly. Even if you’re struggling with instability in other places, this gives a reliable sense of purpose.
In the end, our actions seem to be the only thing we have total control over. Though some factors might make it harder to choose freely, we still have the free choice to behave how we’d like. As long as we have this sense of freedom, we have something to return to.
The Stoics argued that this should be the only thing that you value in life. Many Stoics even encouraged staying distant from your friends and family since these relationships are still out of your control.
But we don’t need to be so extreme to apply these principles to our own pursuits of happiness. We still need this base of stability, but stability is not the end in itself. Sometimes, we might misunderstand the pursuit of happiness. We think of it as a race with a finish line. Eventually, we cross the end and achieve happiness.
But this isn’t what the pursuit of happiness means. There’s no line to cross where the race is finished. Instead, it’s an activity that goes on forever. The pursuit of happiness is something that continues without end. There’s no staying in place: There’s only moving forward.
What we need isn’t simply stability for stability’s sake. Instead, what we need is something reliable to build life from. Though we can’t guarantee stability from outside factors, we can guarantee a base in values and purpose.
There’s no way to guarantee stability. Nobody has total control. But no matter what, we must always keep that base of purpose to return to.
‘It seems that we need to find something that’s in our control. We want to find something that we can always return to and that nobody can take away from us. What could this be?’ - This is the million dollar question.