It seems to me that we have become a world of idle pedlars. Almost nobody is simply doing anything anymore. We are all furiously selling things to each other, never mind that most of us don't have much to sell.
Youngsters who have read half a page of Seneca now sell fourteen-day Stoicism masterclasses to people who merely wanted to look at a photo of a sunset on Instagram. On YouTube, there’s a middle-aged man, with spiky hair and the unblinking confidence of someone who has never encountered his own uselessness, who tells you never to begin a presentation *this* way. On LinkedIn, a regional sales director turns the five seconds he spent holding a door for a stranger into a three-hundred-word parable about servant leadership, complete with a call to action.
Being laid off is no longer a private misfortune; it is repackaged into an epiphany. In my own field, vice-chancellors and deans and professors are too agitated to merely sit and steward seats of higher learning; they peddle £30,000 educational journeys with the manic energy of timeshare salesmen in Benidorm. Eminent scholars, who once spent serene decades pottering and pondering, now invest their afternoons crafting obligatory posts about their latest monograph, and the keynote they were “honoured” to deliver “while sharing the podium” with another luminary grander than themselves.
We have managed to completely lose the glory of good, old-fashioned work—the sheer satisfaction of a person fixing a leaky U-bend, taking their payment, and going home to watch AFC Bournemouth without feeling a moral imperative to publish a twelve-page PDF on The Zen of Pipework.
The whole business is so infectious that the other day, while being completely outwitted by a child lock my wife had installed to thwart our four-year-old, I caught myself wondering if I ought to film a three-part video on Unlocking Your Parenting Potential. In the end, I did. I also felt a sudden urge to log in to LinkedIn and write a post promoting The English Ink—a new essay of mine, which, incidentally, is an absolute triumph of historical scholarship—but I am proud to say I resisted the temptation.
Everyone is hawking expertise they haven't earned to audiences who don’t want it. How can a nineteen-year-old who bought her first yoga mat on Tuesday offer a £299 webinar on ancestral healing by Thursday? What does a twenty-one-year-old know about “life coaching”? The trouble with a world where everyone is shouting from a stall is that nobody is left to actually buy anything.
But goodness, do we keep peddling.
