Work Matters: Mona's Story
We are on a mission to liberate ourselves and others through meaningful work. This is Mona's story.
I never planned to leave academia. I spent ten years in school, doing everything you need to do to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Then I landed a dream tenure-track position at a wealthy liberal arts college in the Midwest. I should have been over the moon, everyone was so proud of me, but… cue the tears in the morning coffee.
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I was the most unhappy I have ever been, and had such a full schedule that I didn’t have time to process what was happening to me. I thought maybe it was just living in Midwestern flatlands that was the problem, that I was suffering from an acute case of what I termed “horizontal vertigo”: I seemed to feel great anxiety just looking out onto the interminable flatness. Needless to say, I did not renew my contract and left as soon as it ran out. I went on to teach for a few more years, ending my run at UC Berkeley.
But when my students came to me asking how to learn to be activists, and I referred them to a group that does this, and in short order students took over Wheeler Hall in protest of rising tuition and more, and so many faculty stood back and stood down, I realized my days were numbered. I can’t prove that is why my contract was not renewed, but the timeline fits. They made me apply for my job, and then didn’t hire me back.
From small liberal arts college to a large public university, I saw a lot of how academia works, and how it fails especially people like me. I love teaching, but I found higher education to be unbearably classist and disappointing, not to mention badly paid. I wanted to make more money, and on my own terms, so I started a business.
This was my head-spinning, first pivot into real estate photography, and then I took a second pivot from there into coding. Towards the end of my photography business, I photographed vacation rentals for Airbnb as I traveled in Latin America. In Mexico I started to teach myself how to code so I could build client websites. It was more lucrative than the actual photographs, and the work more flexible.
A coding bootcamp and apprenticeship later, I became a software engineer working on contract at Nike, and then at a tech start-up called Hopin. I found my love of teaching again when I became an instructor at coding bootcamps. I really believed in the mission of diversifying tech, and I thought I had truly found my path. Then the tech lay-offs came, and the coding bootcamp industry collapsed as jobs for new developers dried up. After being laid-off from two positions in one year, I was forced to pivot again.
Despite all my education and experiences, I felt undervalued in this brave new market, and unseen as a mature woman in tech. But I’m only in my fifties, and have a lot of road in front of me. I always thought I would find my way back to Philosophy, and given the state of the world, it is time for philosophers and others trained in the humanities to earn their keep, as it were. So I started a philosophy Substack, Philosophy Publics, in December of 2023. It has been challenging but also amazing. I have gone from writing for a tiny set of colleagues to reaching thousands of people each time I post — thrilling! The reach of online media still astounds me — in less than two years, I have reached many more people through Philosophy Publics than I did in all my ten years of teaching full time in higher ed. I still have a ways to go, and so many plans for the future, but it is a great victory: it is meaningful work that connects me to others.
Through all my transitions, I experimented with a lot of side projects. I wrote some of the first vegan cheese cookbooks that were available on Amazon. I also jumped early on the “reverse coloring book” trend with Abstract Florals: A Reverse Coloring Book. I tried to turn my thrifting passion into an arbitrage business. I have created online courses (when Udemy was brand new), run in-person philosophy salons; created an early Philosophy podcast (thinkPhilosophy) with a nearly 10k following on the old Twitter; built websites and online tools for philosophers. I have even tried affiliate marketing through Pinterest. Some of these projects succeeded modestly, but none provided the sustainable, meaningful work I was seeking. What I have learned is that offering something to the world is not yet a business. If you don’t treat your passion projects like a sustainable business, you will not build a sustainable business. And maybe not all your projects need to be businesses (probably not!), but maybe one can be a great business that gives you something meaningful to do and connects you to others.
In my many orbits around the sun, I have realized that we can’t easily shape the academic and corporate worlds that we inhabit, and have very little say about the work we get to do. Even when we think we control the work we get to do, that is within very narrow parameters. As an academic, most of my time was filled up with teaching and administrative tasks, with my own work relegated to the Summer months. I understand that this is a lot more than in many other kinds of positions, but it gave me a taste for doing meaningful work. Corporate worlds are not made for any of us (save the narcissist and sociopaths it tends to reward), and tech is actively hostile towards women.
I started to experiment with online projects as we were witnessing the birth of the first online economies, before it was clear how one could monetize this type of work. Now we know how to monetize almost any online project (not to say it is easy, but the paths are well trodden). Before you had to own the factory to own the means of production; now we can rent a piece of the factory. The way I see it, we are just coming out of the online economy’s adolescent phase — dropshipping empires, hustle culture, passive income dreams, girlbossing and bropreneur culture, MLMing — and now we are into something new. I will write about this in an upcoming post. I don’t want to paint too-rosy a picture, it is an uphill battle on the best of days, but I see an opportunity on the horizon, an opportunity to reinvent work. And I think women are going to be particularly well suited to it.
Humans are political animals (Aristotle said this) that define the meaning of their lives through the work that they do (Hegel, Marx). Our deepest desire is to do work that matters and that connects us to others. You would have to kill every person on the planet dead in order to do away with this basic fact of human existence.
Let’s work together to realize our full human potential.
LFG!
Mona Mona
