How to Have a Day Job and an Intellectual Life

It won’t come as a surprise to anybody reading this that I love to read, and write, about ideas—from theology to philosophy to legal theory to modern art and basically anything else.

I started out doing this in high school when I would write up book and movie reviews as Facebook Notes, then later on my own WordPress blog. And I’ve tried to keep doing it over the years—since then, I’ve had the chance to write for some pretty neat venues about a fairly broad range of topics. I also try to maintain a pretty active personal reading habit (there’s a circular relationship here; writing about a topic means finding sources, and reading source material sparks new ideas to write about).

I’m also, for whatever it’s worth, a lawyer who likes his job. I went to law school straight out of college and have been gainfully employed in the field since then. I don’t tend to write all that much about legal issues, but I see it all as one big intellectual continuum: the force of law is always just a few steps downstream from questions of first principles.

Because I’m a lawyer whose job is (somewhat) public-facing, and because I’ve written a lot about extraneous topics not directly related to work, I get a decent amount of outreach from conservative students interested in similar paths. And as it happens, I’ve had some version of the following conversation with a smart mid-twenties interlocutor probably a dozen times over the last few years:

Them: I’m still figuring out what I’m going to do next. I’m kind of interested in law school…but I’m also interested in academia. I’m really interested in reading and writing about ideas.

Me: Well, you can do that as a lawyer too. You don’t have to give up being interested in big ideas just because you have a job that pays decently.

Them: Well, yeah…I suppose…but I don’t want to spend my life doing something I hate.

Me: But you can be very satisfied having a job that pays the bills, that allows you to have a family, and you can always do your reading and writing on the side.

Them: Well, yeah, but…

Here’s the problem: somewhere along the way, smart young people seriously interested in relatively unmarketable ideas—in theology, philosophy, political theory, or what have you—have gotten the message that the only viable career path for them is academia. Now, anyone reading this probably knows how dire the job market is for new academics, especially in humanities fields, so I won’t belabor the point.

But we can say more: assuming you get a tenure-track job, you may be consigned to living in a place you detest. You will be expected to teach a substantial load of classes. You will have service responsibilities, both to the university and to your students (those rec letters won’t write themselves). You will have bureaucracy to deal with. All of this means that your opportunities for actual research and writing (at many institutions) will be compressed into a smaller and smaller window of time.

Making matters worse, American academia doesn’t really reward the big, “synthetic” sort of writing that’s the most fun to read—the grand social or cultural theories that weave together disciplines and advance a new way of thinking about the world. The institutional incentives favor narrow specialization. (See Paul Griffiths on this.) In other words, your professional future depends on the outcome of your research and writing, but several years in, you may not even be researching something that really interests you anymore.

I think it’s worth asking whether, for the average twentysomething who loves the life of the mind, this route makes a lot of sense. Against this backdrop, the value proposition of a “normal” job starts to look a little more appealing. (At least, this has been my calculus.) The hard part of working a “normal” job isn’t subsistence. It’s finding the time and motivation to pursue the reading and writing you love. And these problems are solvable.

Regarding law as an alternative path, let me concede this much. A peculiar thing seems to happen to incredibly bright, interesting people who spend a lot of time working in large law firms. Specifically, their personalities tend to “flatten out”: their interests outside of work start to converge around (1) HBO or other prestige TV shows; (2) fancy restaurants; and (3) fancy vacations. There are a lot of talented attorneys who went to top-flight schools, and who probably once had strong opinions about Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy or the character development in Northanger Abbey, who just seem to…stop caring after a certain point. Office happy hours get duller.

There’s nothing nefarious going on here. In fact, it’s an entirely logical shift. If you’re working a lot of hours in an intellectually demanding role, then you watch TV when you’re too fried to think straight anymore before you go to bed, you go to nice restaurants for client events or date nights, and you look forward all year to that swanky overseas trip you have scheduled. It’s as simple as that.

But I think it’s fair to say that this is not the future that a lot of bookish young twentysomethings want for themselves. They don’t want to lose that part of themselves that really cares about Trinitarian theology or the trajectory of the West or Thomistic epistemology. And the good thing is that they don’t have to.

This is one of the reasons I loved Zena Hitz’s 2020 book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life so much. Hitz makes the point that an “intellectual life” is not, strictly speaking, an academic’s life. Countless thinkers have produced brilliant work while working jobs that have nothing to do with their creative interests. And Hitz is entirely correct. You don’t need a stage or a tweed coat to think on the levels you want to think, or engage the ideas you want to engage. What you need is motivation coupled with organization. To that end, here are a few practical strategies that have helped me balance reading, writing, and other intellectual projects with my job (and family) responsibilities:

• Make reading schedules. This means deciding what “hard” books you want to prioritize reading, and then coming up with your own syllabus-style breakdowns of how much to read per week. You don’t need huge, uninterrupted blocks of time to do this. Very few people I know have the acumen (or inclination) to read dense theory for more than a few hours a day. Even if you just read some Heidegger or Gadamer for 30 minutes in the evening before you watch Netflix, you will get through very long, very hard books if you do this consistently.

• Read multiple books simultaneously. There will be days when the thought of cracking open a 700-page volume of theory feels impossible. That’s why you keep some lighter nonfiction or novels around. Maybe also stick an ePub or PDF or two on your phone.

• Embrace audiobooks where possible. Title selection is key here. You’re never going to internalize a book like Peter Leithart’s recent Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1 by listening to it on your commute. Rather, audiobooks are perfect for “fluffy” fiction (I recently finished Pierce Brown’s sci-fi thriller Light Bringer) or narrative nonfiction in the mold of Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment. Point is, if you’ve got a stack of heavy theoretical texts to get through, don’t waste your limited “book-in-hand” reading time. Use Audible for the fun and easy stuff.

• Give your writing space to breathe. When you’re inspired to write, you don’t need to necessarily put pen to paper right away. Jot down notes or outline an argument, and then come back to it when you’ve got a block of time to develop it more fulsomely. This not only makes for better writing, but faster writing: the words fly when you’ve got the full argument already cemented in your head.

In the end, I suspect that many—even most—young people who love ideas, and who think that academia is the only way to maintain a “life of the mind,” simply don’t know what other paths are out there. You can live a happy and intellectually fulfilled life working a “normal” job (maybe even happier, if you’re not constantly strapped for funding). The key is discipline. And anybody can learn to be disciplined.

originally published on Substack