How Do You Build a Career When Professions Keep Changing?

AVAlexander Volchek

There is a lot of talk today about which professions will disappear, what you urgently need to learn, and where to go if you want to remain in demand a few years from now. I was asked: how should someone build a professional path today when we don’t know what will happen in ten or twenty years? And what should someone who is forty or fifty do, someone who already has a profession, or more than one, and a certain amount of experience? Do they need to change everything and start again? And does every person need to react to all the changes happening around them? It’s an interesting point, given that I have several channels, including one devoted entirely to technology and artificial intelligence.

On that channel, the core audience is roughly thirty to fifty, but there is also a very large audience aged fifty to sixty-five and older. A substantial number, a great many people who are not merely in the second half of life but in its fourth or fifth part. We receive a lot of comments, particularly from people discussing how they are jumping back into the technological world, for example, or trying to understand it, trying to explore it. This raises a very interesting question: does a person, regardless of age, by the way, need to react at all to the changes happening around them?

And if so, which changes, and at what age? Does age matter here? Because it seems to us that at twenty-five or thirty you need to respond, for example, but at sixty you don’t. Or you can choose not to; you can respond or not. Of course, everyone tries to connect themselves with the current idea of being sixty, an age they haven’t reached yet. ‘When I’m sixty, I’ll be very active. I’ll study everything, look into everything, know everything. It’s the people who are sixty or seventy now who don’t know anything.’ There are reasons for this, aren’t there? Someone who is thirty now was born into a world where computers were already beginning to become fairly common.

Someone born in 1990, say, or 1995 or 2000. When they were born, computers were already starting to appear, not everywhere, but they were appearing. Telecommunications were gradually developing. By the time that person started school or university, cell phones had appeared too. I’m not even talking about children being born today. Of course, someone who is seventy… Twenty years ago, notice, there were no social networks. The social networks that did exist were tiny beginnings, with a minuscule number of users. Twenty years ago there were no smartphones. They didn’t exist; there was no App Store. It was all just beginning to appear.

The App Store… We also started making mobile apps in 2008, I think. It was all just getting started. The first iPhones were in, I don’t know, 2005 or 2006, around those years. Of course, if someone is seventy now and was fifty then, their perception of technology is completely different. And obviously, today’s ten- and fifteen-year-olds, fifty years from now, will on the whole be much more developed technologically at sixty or seventy than people that age today, in terms of their access to technology. That doesn’t mean being able to use lots of things professionally, but they will be more developed in terms of access. A genuinely important question arises: if someone is fifty now, do they need to learn something? If they’re forty, do they need to learn? And if they’re thirty, do they need to learn?

Of course, there aren’t many thirty-year-olds on my channel, or many people under thirty. Most are thirty-plus. Mostly. But it is very important to notice that everyone has their own life. Some people will become deeply involved professionally in the technological world regardless of age. Of course, if someone has been farming in a village at fifty, growing potatoes, for example, and has never left the village, their becoming involved in artificial intelligence at fifty or sixty would be quite a complicated prospect. Some extraordinary impulses would have to kick in, and their entire life would have to be restructured and remade.

Moreover, if we look at karmic circumstances and take a spiritual perspective, this is no longer a karmic process, is it? Because, basically, a person’s karmic experience of life has, as it were, concluded by forty-eight. Such things are theoretically possible too. But if we look at younger ages, thirty or thirty-five, it is obvious that many people will remain in the same areas of professional development they were already in. Take someone who works in a coffee shop, for example, or in the service industry as a waiter. Does the arrival of artificial intelligence mean they have to rush off somewhere? Here we can look closely at what has happened over the past twenty years. Twenty years ago, many people worked as waiters, but they didn’t rush toward technology. A huge number didn’t.

Or they worked as drivers, but didn’t rush to become programmers, marketers, or designers. Many didn’t rush to become any of those things. Many worked in sales, making calls in a call center, and twenty years later they were still making calls in a call center. They are even connected with technology, in a sense. They know what noise-canceling headphones are, can use a CRM system, can use Word and Excel, send PDFs, edit files, and so on. But they were call-center employees, and they remained call-center employees. Then new people entered the modern world after finishing school or university. They went to work as loaders, into agriculture, driving a combine or working the soil. They went into coffee shops as baristas. Fashionable words appeared.

They started making coffee and told everyone that a barista is an extraordinary profession. Sometimes you walk in and look at the person making your coffee: what extraordinary profession? They’re just pressing a couple of buttons. Of course, modern equipment keeps getting better and better and better. The settings are adjusted correctly, and all you have to do is press buttons. Although we know that in coffee, one person’s touch differs greatly from another’s, in tiny movements. What matters is that many people in today’s technological world have passed technology by. And many people with their own FOMO, their own sense of lacking something in the technological world or falling behind professionally, assume it is the same for everyone, that everyone is experiencing this.

That everybody is thinking about how to start a new project, build a business, develop in their profession, move up the career ladder, or learn new technologies. Even most people in modern professions have an illusion that they are up to date. Look at the huge number of people in today’s world. You are a young woman in this world: look at how people talk about being fashionable, brilliant marketers or fashionable, brilliant IT professionals. They go on about it, foaming at the mouth. But if you know that field and know what really is impressive, you look at them and say, ‘You aren’t impressive at all.’ Yet the person is sure they are. They have an inner sense of importance, of being right, and of how impressive what they do is.

I explore this a great deal on another channel. I have a channel about meditative development and meditation, and very much about spiritual development. We discuss many of these subjects here; there it is more systematic and precise. It is always a question of causes and consequences. If someone earns money for ten years and their business grows, and then they are put in prison, are they a bad person or not? What kind of person are they? Karma takes shape over the first twenty-one years. All the events in a person’s life are directed toward subsequently living out that karma. You may think you are doing good or bad things that lead to certain karma, while those actions are creating causes within this incarnation so that the consequences of past causes can occur.

If you look at this, it is called an inverted space of cause and effect. What is an inverted space of cause and effect? I’ll give a simple example. Someone killed another person and went to prison. We think and say they went to prison because they killed someone. But what if we look at it this way: according to their karma, they were supposed to end up in prison under certain conditions, and in order to end up in prison, they killed someone. Then, and this is very important, the cause of the killing is precisely prison. Prison itself. The consequence of that cause is committing the killing. They kill a person in order to end up in prison. They simply aren’t in control of it. Yet in the social world, in its basic reasoning, in the material world, we see an entirely different pattern.

From twenty-one to twenty-eight there is a period called the dual period of forming karma and living through karma. It’s the same here: how much does a person understand reality when they say they know how to develop properly, know what to do right now? What are they truly paying attention to in terms of life and understanding their own steps? How much do they see and understand, for example, that one chosen path of development will lead to these consequences, and another to those consequences? Or to what extent can they control those consequences at all? You know the Russian-speaking market called the information business fairly well, don’t you?

Look carefully, really carefully, at what ultimately happened to different people in that market. What makes it noteworthy is not someone saying, ‘Oh, of course, it’s all success hype, or something shady, or whatever.’ It is noteworthy because it was the first market to become very open to the outside world. It exposed its results. The markets in oil and gas, agriculture, and food are closed; they didn’t expose themselves. There weren’t exactly lots of bloggers, CEOs, and business owners talking about how they work, what they do, and where they are, gaining millions of followers and all the rest. This market is open. We see people simply lying in today’s open market of public relations.

Presidents of countries, presidents, ministers, famous people lie. Why? Because now it is all easy to check. If you say something on camera or write something on a network, it is recorded and can be checked. Then people come out and say, ‘You said one thing here, another thing there, a third thing somewhere else.’ The person says, ‘I don’t know what was going on there, but actually I think a fourth thing.’ People in this market have opened up a great deal, and you can see a generation of people in terms of their business or professional realization: what actually happened over a broad range. And understand it not to humiliate someone or label them wonderful, good, bad, or anything else, but by studying causes and consequences, the actual laws of human life, karmic interconnections, and social causes and consequences as well.

When we talk about professional development, that includes studying social causes and consequences. Because professional development is a very important matter. My mother, for example, once enrolled in a polytechnic institute in Belarus. She had a plan for her social career, and her parents had a plan. Then, in 1993 or thereabouts, she decided not to work. She decided to devote her life to her children, to herself, her children, her family, and so on. And she didn’t work. That was her career. She was born in 1956, so suppose she planned one thing in 1970 or 1973, and by 1993 something completely different had happened in her career. By the way, she never said she was upset about not having worked.

There can be different kinds of disappointment, but that doesn’t mean you made a right or wrong choice. It was a choice that was predetermined. But I want to show you this in career terms. I went to study programming, for example, without understanding at all why that was what I should study. And I do all sorts of things. From time to time I deal with situations where people have legal problems. My wife and I were driving yesterday and saying I would have made a good lawyer, in a normal market. In the American market, I think I would have been a good lawyer. In America, yes. There are countries where legal practice is heavily political. That doesn’t interest me. But where laws are in place, I would do fairly well in that field in terms of strategy, evidence, details, and all the rest.

Imagine the connection with a legal education. I remember studying programming while many acquaintances were in law school. To me they were these people, lawyers of some sort. What did they do? What were they involved in? It was another world. If you could put me back into that child, choosing where to direct his attention and what to do, I don’t know what I would now advise myself to do, if I were told to change my life in social terms. Even back at university, I had two job interviews in my life: one for a programming job with a French company, which I joined, and one to become a merchandiser. They could have hired me there and offered me more money.

I would have driven around stores checking that Pepsi-Cola was displayed properly, because it was Pepsi. I clearly remember the woman at the interview saying, ‘Listen, you seem to be doing very well studying programming. Why do you want to work in this field?’ I ended up at that interview by chance. I wanted to work and earn money, and someone had simply invited me to it. Could my career have gone that way? It could. Or my friends and I decided to sell phones in 2001 or 2002. We didn’t get very far: something broke, something didn’t sell, and so on. But if it had worked out, and we had started making a lot of money year after year, I would have become a phone seller. Life can take very different paths in terms of a person’s development, their professional development, their professional path.

The question is whether the person really chooses it themselves, and whether they understand the full breadth of what is happening. Again, the first thing I want to emphasize is that for many people it comes down to perceiving their own current state, where they are now. Don’t deceive yourself about what you actually know and where you are. Don’t deceive yourself about what profession you are in or what you do. The second, incredibly important thing is being able to feel at ease with different kinds of work, to have an open, calm attitude. Even if today you are a CEO or own a business, you should be able to feel at ease with the possibility of working as a salesperson in a store tomorrow. Ask yourself: am I at ease with that or not? This doesn’t mean you need to do it. But in general, are you at ease with it? That is very important.

Don’t leave the idea of working as a salesperson in a store filed away as something bad. This morning, by the way, I unexpectedly had to take the children to school. I hadn’t planned to do it; my wife was supposed to take them. As I drove, I noticed an American school bus again and thought about how much the community values school-bus drivers here, or the people who deliver the mail, not to mention the fire department. How sincerely, warmly, and well people treat them. And I remember the attitude in my childhood toward people doing this supposedly simple work. It’s supposedly simple, isn’t it? Supposedly not highly skilled. Yet it isn’t easy work, just like any work.

Because work cannot be compared. You can’t compare it. How could you? My wife can happily play with a child for three hours and find it restful, while someone else spends twenty minutes with a child and feels as tired as if they had been hauling sacks. They say, ‘I’d rather haul sacks.’ How can you compare that? Who has it easier, who has it harder, which job is more difficult? How can you compare it at all? It’s like measuring someone’s work by the hours: how long they work, what time they get up. That’s a fashionable trend, isn’t it? This person gets up at four in the morning, so everything works out for them; they’re so efficient. This one gets up at eleven, and everything works out for them too. They lived to a hundred, and everything worked out.

Observing these points in yourself, the ones I mentioned, gives you a much greater ability to take your next step well, by drawing on them and remembering them. But again, it is important to understand that the next step in professional development is only a tiny reverberation. In some lives it matters a great deal; in others it has no significance at all. None whatsoever. The person never lived through what they were supposed to live through. For example, all my life I’ve felt drawn toward significant, large projects, corporations, or politics, something big, some kind of influence.

Yet sometimes you watch a film and it says clearly that if you are this politician or work at that company, certain circumstances mean you never see your family. It is obvious that an airline pilot or flight attendant sees their family less than a barista does. Fundamentally, they don’t have the opportunity. They’re flying through the sky and getting less sleep, for example. Some things are very clear, yet that hasn’t stopped me feeling drawn to them. Why do those energies arise in me? Why does one person feel at ease with this, while another can’t even imagine it being possible? They can’t imagine how it could be possible. My wife and I were driving and talking. She said she had met someone who had had to go many years without seeing his child.

We said to each other, ‘Why go years without seeing your child because of social circumstances? It would probably be better to see the child.’ That is the impulse living within her or within me, for example. That is how it is for us. But another person may have the exact opposite experience. We don’t know what impulse was at work in that person. Why do some mothers leave the family and leave the children with their husband? Why do some husbands leave the family and leave the children with their wife? What impulses are really operating inside a person? What drives them? What state arises within them? Of course, that is the foundation for forming any kind of framework for your own professional development, for not building illusions.

Of course, professional development involves strategies. If we look at it socially and move away from the level of a person’s true development, there are strategies, and you can build them. But you need to understand a very broad range of what is happening to build any strategy in the modern world. You also have to be prepared to sustain it, to carry it out, not to fall ill at the wrong moment, not to meet certain people at the wrong moment, and so on. I was talking to my nephew about what he likes. He said, ‘I’m studying all this science, tech, technology, science, AI, but I like music.

So I put on a concert a month ago. There were four hundred and twenty people or something, and I jumped into them. I was performing and even jumped into the crowd.’ I said, ‘Listen, if tomorrow in Europe you happen to meet a famous designer, a fashion designer, the day after tomorrow you’ll say you like the fashion industry. If he draws you into his world, starts involving you and telling you how interesting it is, you’ll immediately forget music and programming. You’ll be interested in fashion, because you are generally someone who can get excited about all kinds of things, if someone takes an interest in you as a person. And you’ll drop any task if nobody takes an interest in you as a person.

You’ll make decisions based on particular motives.’ Some people make decisions based on money. There really are people who won’t change their current life, their current profession, for money. A person will say, ‘I won’t do that for money. I like this.’ Those cases are always wonderful and very interesting. There are cases at Walmart, the American retail chain, one of the world’s largest major companies at one time in terms of employee numbers and company value. Some employees received stock years ago and kept working at the register. These retail workers kept working at the register even after becoming millionaires through Walmart stock. They kept doing it. They didn’t buy a house in Hawaii, although in those years they could easily have bought houses with that money, and they didn’t stop working or start a garden of their own.

There are a huge number of people who ran corporations, never made much money, and said, ‘I don’t want any of this anymore,’ and went to work in retail. There are people who spend their whole lives in business; I know people like that. They say, ‘We want to make money and stop doing this altogether, move to a warm country and stay there.’ A friend of mine always said, ‘I’ll make a million dollars, move to Thailand, buy a house, and live there.’ I don’t know how he would live there on a million dollars, or for how long. How many years would that million last, I wonder? Suppose he planned to live even another ten years. Ten. And he said this fifteen years ago. Even if he planned to live ten years, that would be about $8,000 a month.

That isn’t an enormous amount to live on. And you could lose it, too, and so on. All right, let him live on $3,000 a month with his family for twenty years. Then what? Is that really what he wants to experience within himself? What feeling does he want to have? He has an imagined feeling of what will happen in Thailand, an imagined feeling. What exactly will happen there? What do you want to get? An earthquake, a flood, a political conflict? Or do you want to open a business there? What exactly do you want there? Warm weather, or what? Why do you want to do it? Why do you want to take that action? Of course, most people don’t think that way, don’t see it, don’t reason or look at it that way.

Then of course it’s hard to understand all the aspects of what is happening, even in your own short-term strategy. What should you actually do? The important thing is that people continue living in an illusion, just as they always have. The illusion hasn’t changed compared with what it was in the Soviet Union, for example. In the Soviet Union there was less illusion around professional development than there is now. Or: do well at school and you will have a good job. How has that rule changed? It has transformed a little here and there. And now we live at a time when it really is unclear what you should learn at all.

Because we live at a time when people genuinely don’t understand what is going to happen. Take programming, for example, even though programmers are a fairly protected group because of their connections with technology and their technological training. But if everyone is saying programmers won’t write code, what will they do? They have reinvented themselves as creators, creators of products. It’s like calling everybody a businessperson, which is exactly what people do. Look at the statements of some people, not all, but some. It would be worth checking, by the way. I don’t think Elon Musk, for example, says everyone will become a businessperson.

But Sam Altman says, ‘Great, everyone will become a businessperson.’ There are political slogans too. For example, if Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, published a huge document last week setting out his view of what is happening in artificial intelligence, that is a purely corporate document, an utterly meaningless corporate document. Moreover, he cleared every step in that document in terms of what can be said and what can’t, what is right for the corporate strategy and what isn’t. So what will happen now, what should people do now in terms of a profession? People who have access to education… Not everyone has internet access, do they? You understand that not everyone has the opportunity to watch everything and so on.

People who have internet access, people who have access to in-person education or a particular offline social environment, face a great dilemma. If they use their brains. Their brains; simply using their brains is enough. You don’t even need spiritual vision through Inspiration or Intuition here. Use your brains. I want to say it is a very serious dilemma, Olya. Very serious. What should you do? And we also need to understand that modern people don’t want to live according to understanding, the laws of cause and effect, and truth. They want to live the way they want, the way their ego-driven motives operate within them. Just take food. Or the idea of deception.

If everyone wanted to, if they truly understood how certain foods affect their health and said, ‘Of course I’m not going to eat that,’ they wouldn’t eat it. But people continue eating a huge number of very particular foods. And they will continue. Because people don’t perceive reality. They live in a closed state of damaged perception of their own personality, ego-driven motives, and active impulses. A person lives like a robot. And if, at that moment, you expand your perception, everyone will say, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Even you don’t know what to do right now.

I don’t know what to do. Let alone a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. The only thing you can do is look at their life spiritually. But that isn’t what today’s meeting is about. Look more broadly at the aspects of life. That is the only thing that gives me a very firm point of support in raising my own children. Otherwise, you will simply remain endlessly infected by a sense of your own insignificance and lack of fulfillment, and pass it on to your children. What can you offer a child in terms of education? That is a big question. What do they actually need to study? What do they really need to know in today’s reality? Right now, today, what should they know? What should they be taught? And do they need to learn computers at all?

I’ve had many talks on my channel about the idea that you need to teach a child about money. I hope we’ll bring those videos up and show them. I have an approach to raising children. I know that saving money has no connection with managing money well; there is no correlation. Having a lot of money in childhood isn’t connected to having a lot or a little later. Nor is having no money connected with any of it. What I know is this: I want my children to avoid becoming involved with the energy of money for as long as possible. Everyone will learn to count money, just as all the people living in a city or in our families will learn to read. They will all learn. Everyone will learn to move pieces of paper around.

It is so absurd, sending children to special courses, or saying a child wants to start a business, or teaching them to count correctly, spend rationally, and save. It is complete absurdity if it is done superficially, without understanding the fundamental causes, without understanding that it is only a very small part of life. An entire universe of things affects these circumstances around money. An entire universe. If you don’t approach it that way, what are you doing? You are missing a tremendous amount of what is happening. A very serious amount of what is happening.