Picture a bunch of relatively impecunious PhD students, in an effortlessly mangy pub, in a Scottish fishing village. A fellow apprentice philosopher, American, puffs at her cigarette and coughs out some angst: “So I guess this grad school thing isn’t working out for me. No jobs, no nothing. I’m going back to California and, like, get a cushy job with my family’s real estate company.” Me, inadequately: “Mmm-hmm.” Her: “Y’know, imagine me at a party, telling someone I’m a realtor. People are gonna run a mile. And I’m gonna be bored out of my mind.” “In a sense”, I reply, “You might be right.” Was she?

It seems to me there are two things going on in our friend’s lamentation. First, the worry about becoming a centrifugal force for fellow partiers. I’m going to suggest that’s about authenticity, or lack thereof. Second, the worry about bottomless tedium. Arguably that’s about alienation. Let’s take the two issues in turn, and then see how they may relate to each other.

Authenticity: the rough idea is that you’re an authentic person only if you are true to yourself, or at one with yourself, or the way you present is the same as the way you are— not that these are exactly the same. So why would an estate agent be suspected of being inauthentic? Presumably my friend worried that flogging houses isn’t many people’s idea of a true calling. Or it just that this wasn’t her true calling, and she worried that people would clock that. Either way, there’s an element of blame associated with inauthenticity: the inauthentic person has made a rotten compromise, and so is blameworthy.  

The other worry, the one about being bored into rigor mortis, isn’t about blame or social stigma. It’s about one’s own well-being, or sense of self-worth. Enter alienation, that old Marxist bugbear. Perhaps the plight of a philosopher-turned-estate agent isn’t quite what Marx had in mind; then again, in a society as rich as our own we may reasonably ask for more fulfilling jobs as a philosopher. Still, on that boozy night I found myself somewhat short of the implicitly requested amount of sympathy. I couldn’t help imagining an impoverished migrant scrubbing the houses my friend will sell through a gritted smile. What about the cleaner’s alienation? Is it on a par with my friend’s? Will the cleaner even think of her livelihood in those terms?

Marx thought she should, but might well not, at least not until the revolution. He thought that, under capitalism, all workers would be inescapably enstranged from their true selves in several ways: from their balanced flourishing as humans, or “species being” (constant cutthroat hustling and little time for much else), from the product of their work (the production line stretches out of sight), from work itself (shouldn’t there be more to producing stuff than making money?), and from society at large (everyone’s primarily a competitor or worse).