💡 Career Anxiety series For the full picture of why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why Career Advancement Never Quiets Your Anxiety About the Future
Introduction: A Question One Step Before “How to Succeed at It”
The times change, the skills that are wanted change, and so we must ceaselessly relearn and acquire new skills. Reskilling — relearning — is now among the most strongly recommended words that circle careers. The claim sounds, at first, beyond doubt: to adapt to change is only natural for a living thing.
Plenty has been written on how to succeed at reskilling. What this article places is the question one step before it: from whose viewpoint the word relearning is uttered, and what it shifts onto the individual.
Let me give the conclusion first. Behind the order you must relearn lies an unspoken demand: the buyer’s demand has changed, so you, the seller, must remake yourself to match. This is not a denial of learning itself. It is only that we need, once, to question anew why, and for whom, we are being made to learn.
📖 Contents
Who Decides the Demand for Skills?
First, one thing to confirm. Why does relearning become necessary? Because the skills you now hold go stale. Why, then, do skills go stale? Because technology advances and the market’s demand changes. And who decides that market demand?
Here is the crux. It is not you who decides whether there is demand for your skills. It is the side that buys labour power — the market.
Look at this structure and you see that the word reskilling is cunningly shifting where responsibility lies. Skills go stale because the market’s demand changes, and that is an external circumstance an individual can do nothing about. And yet the response to that change is made, whole, the individual’s responsibility, in the form you should relearn. Labour power that lost its value at the buyer’s convenience must be remade by the seller, at their own expense, on their own time. The cost of relearning, and the risk, are all borne by the side that sells. Thought through, this is a decidedly one-sided arrangement.
The Lineage of the Order “Raise Your Employability”
This shifting of responsibility takes, in the field of careers, one refined form: the idea that you must keep raising, by yourself, your capacity to be employed — your employability. Trace when and how this order was born, and a clear history comes into view.
Once, many workers lived within a premise in which they belonged for long to a single organisation, and that organisation provided the stability of employment. Under that premise, the stability of a worker’s life was part of the organisation’s responsibility. But as the economic environment changed and it became hard for organisations to keep protecting employment, this premise crumbled. Here a shift occurred. The task of the stability of employment, which the organisation had borne until then, was shifted, whole, onto the individual worker’s task of raising the capacity to be employed.
Look carefully at this shift. Employment became unstable owing to a circumstance beyond the individual — the change of the economic environment. And yet coping with that instability was made the individual’s responsibility, in the form you must raise your capacity to be employed. The cleaning-up after the instability that the structure produced is made the individual’s to shoulder, using their own time and money. The order raise your employability is the retelling of this shifting of the cleaning-up as a desirable, forward-looking, self-reliant attitude.
Once the shifting of responsibility is complete, a strange reversal occurs. The side that became unable to provide the stability of employment begins, rather, to extol its very inability as a story of the worker’s self-reliance. A free way of working that does not depend on a single organisation — the disappearance of security is retold as though it were liberation. In this retelling, you come to mistake what was taken from you for what was given to you.
▸ This root — why relearning does not change your position — is treated in “I don’t want to work” is not indulgence.
What the Order to Relearn Quietly Condemns
The word reskilling has one more function: it quietly blames those who neglected to relearn.
As the norm you should relearn to match the times spreads, those who have not relearned come to be seen as people who neglected their self-management. Value was lost at the market’s convenience, yet the responsibility is displaced onto the individual who did not relearn. So a problem the structure produced is, at some point, swapped for a problem of individual negligence. The order to relearn has two faces: it urges adaptation and, at the same time, quietly condemns those who cannot adapt.
Let me make one thing clear here. This is not a story of denouncing a particular institution or position in a partisan way. To learn, and to acquire new skills, hold their own joy and value. What I want to question anew is the way that relearning is spoken of — as if it were a neutral, self-evident duty. When you simply obey the order relearn or be left behind without seeing that structure, you are turning, once more, a circuit that feeds your own anxiety.
Conclusion: Question Not Learning Itself, but For Whom
Reskilling deserves to be asked whose relearning is it really because the structural problem of the obsolescence of skills is cunningly shifted onto the individual’s responsibility, and the disappearance of security is retold as a story of self-reliance.
Once more, let me make it clear. I am not denying learning itself. What is cut is the structure that turns learning into the sale of anxiety. What matters is, while raising your ability, not letting go of the question why am I, alone, shouldering this cleaning-up? That question is what makes the structure behind the order visible. And learning chosen not because you were hurried from outside but for the direction you yourself are heading becomes an altogether different thing from water for putting out a fire. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step. How this displacement of responsibility works across career anxiety as a whole is gathered in why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
- Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten
