There's a video I watched of a man standing by his garden fence filming, narrating as his lawn quietly crumbled, imperceptibly sliding into a nearby lake.
The seawall that used to hold the water back had eroded over some unspecified stretch of years, and the lake had been undercutting the edge of his land without him registering it as an emergency.
But one day he looked out of the window and realised his yard was 5 yards shorter - the rest had been eaten by the lake. Mind you, his house was already close to the water. That's why he had bought it. That is the entire allure of a lakefront property - to look out of your window and see the lake.
But the lake was once 15 yards away and was meant to stay there. Now it was ten, and soon it would be five.
He was scrambling for solutions - anything that might be easier to stomach than spending $60,000 or more fixing his region of the seawall.
But you can't really blame the water. The water did what water does - what most things do - it expanded to fill the space given to it. The seawall had one job, and it had stopped doing it. The beautiful thing, a house by the lake, once unconstrained, becomes a nightmare.
And we're surrounded by the same pattern: something has a job. The boundary around that job erodes slowly. Nobody notices because each incremental encroachment is small. But eventually the job has swallowed way more than it was ever supposed to.
Biology tells us that every normal, healthy cell has a job and a lifespan. It does the job, and then it stops, or dies and gets replaced.
Cancer is what happens when a cell loses the internal instruction that tells it to stop growing. Nothing attacks it from outside. It just keeps going because whatever used to tell it "you're done now" isn't there anymore.
The cancer of scope creep
We've established two ways a thing's job can become unbound. Either the wall around it erodes from outside, or the thing itself loses its own internal stop signal. Once you've got those two mechanisms in mind, you will see them everywhere.
School is the clearest case of boundary erosion through accumulated reasonable additions.
Everyone complains that schools are overloaded now. "What even is a school anymore?"
In the 2020s schools are often expected to feed kids for free (or close), to watch out for mental health issues and social safeguarding, to teach kids about sex and sexual health, to keep kids fit and healthy, and to make sure they have friends.
And that's not enough. People say kids should learn everything for modern life. What about taxes and how to pay bills? How to calculate interest? How to bake and iron and be handy around the house?
Modern schools have inherited a bunch of odd jobs - they're buckets within which we store every social problem a juvenile human between the ages of 4 and 24 might possibly face.
But what was school originally for? What was the job of a school?
The thought that came straight to my mind, and maybe to yours, was "the job of school is to prepare you for work" because that's what I've heard parrotted a thousand times.
But that is only an artefact of the industrial revolution.
The classical idea of paideia in ancient Greece was explicitly about shaping the mind and character rather than vocational training; vocational skills were handled separately through apprenticeship and guilds.
The purpose of school was to learn, as an end in itself, with employability being a simple downstream effect. People would want to hire and do business with you because of your useful knowledge and breadth of thought. Not specifically because you happened to have attended a school.
Industrialisation changed what jobs demanded of entrants, requiring a more standardised, credentialed kind of preparedness than apprenticeship alone supplied.
Schools absorbed that expectation, one reasonable addition at a time.
Parenting faces similar penalty.
Where once you only needed to shepherd a child into their teenage years, from whence they might work and marry and undertake their own life's adventure, now it seems the job of raising a child is to architect their future - to imbue them with passions, to lay before them a great banquet of opportunity and inevitable prosperity.
The sociologist Annette Lareau calls this modern approach to child-rearing "concerted cultivation".
And the weight of that expectation of everything that goes into 'raising a child' successfully has led to people opting out entirely because they're not sure they have what it takes.
The one thing humans were biologically born to do, many now surmise they cannot because, of all the jobs we've attached to the simple state of being a parent.
In some ways you could lay much of our social sadness on the sense that all of our jobs have grown big - too big - and aren't stopping.
Cheques you can't cash
The calendar was once a wonderful tool: a structure placed on boundless time which gave gentle direction: 'You can rest on this day, worship on this one, and here's a general period within which it would be great to plant crops.'
What's your calendar now? When I worked in corporate law, I had to account for my time in 6-minute blocks, because that's how we needed to bill clients. Even on days I was at my desk for over 20 straight hours, my hours were laid out and documented:
Six minutes by six minutes, stretching into eternity.
Yours may not be that bad, but your hell may have its own flavour. The family calendar that's a maze, a jungle of activities, a work calendar packed back to back with 15-minute catch-ups between hour-long meetings.
Now, instead of a vague sense of seeds you have to water, even absent a specific pending task, your calendar gifts you with a nebulous dread that you're halfway through the year with nothing to show for it. That time is slipping by and by. That you're never more than a quarter away from a quarterly reckoning.
And what is the job of money? Perhaps our most famous abstraction. That tool that once let us barter and negotiate surplus from one industry to the next. Now what is its role?
The textbook answer, perhaps, is "to provide for your needs". You need money to put bread on the table and keep a roof over your head.
But that can't be universally true, or centi-millionaires wouldn't throw themselves off buildings and in front of trains because a bad trade reduced them to mere millionaires.
The wealthy person who loses (almost) everything often technically still has 'enough'. But only enough for someone else. Not for them. Because for them, money's job has changed, as it does for all of us eventually.
The job of money these days is mostly psychological - a number that lets you sleep well at night or keeps you up late in cold sweat.
Ironically, those that imagine they will sleep well upon seeing a certain number soon find themselves awake with a new shape of psychological demon to battle with.
Your pocket may grow, but the wanting doesn't.
There's a natural next move, which is to say that whatever hole money can't fill, faith should fill instead. But what is the true job of religion today? What role do you actually see it playing in the public sphere?
You see, with this, as with all things, good ideas, good institutions, good structures, all things that serve useful purpose when used well, these beautiful things when unconstrained can become nightmare situations.
These things, left unattended, seem to grow. Company budgets increase year on year. Government programmes cover more and more scope. The genie never gets back into the bottle.
The expectation grows. What you expect from yourself, from your partner, from your family, these things only seem to increase. What you need from your job, from your finances, from your health and wellbeing - the bar keeps increasing.
On one hand, this could be seen as a symptom of a good life - of an age of accessible luxury - of things growing and improving to the point you must ask, 'What next?' But it is also like the spiralling path that leads to a cliff edge. Or like the house by the lake that might eventually fall into it.
We must be willing to ask, with all things, 'What job does this do? What end does it serve? How will I know when enough is enough, and how do I stop myself from moving that benchmark?'
The truth is that many of these realities can be readily rejected. You can shrink all of these jobs, these notions, through the strength of your contentment. Through your careful curtailing of wanton ambition for ambition's sake and a rejection of oppressive expectations that can easily undercut the bank of your satisfaction and send you tumbling towards the water.
The lake will keep pressing against whatever's left of the wall. The difference is made by noticing while it's still five yards away, or whether you wait until it's at the door.
