Logical Defences

Today I had a chat to an old friend who’s a sort of university academic.

I say ‘sort of’ because this person exists from contract to contract which vary between one and three years in length, subject to research grant success.

What I got was a big whinge about the unfairness of this, viz a viz those lucky academics with full-time and even tenured employment.

I countered that I couldn’t think of anything worse than being shackled to a job at a university through some cushy T&Cs. I noted that it’s the teens not the sixties, after all.

I suggested to my old friend that rather than seeking the rotting debenture, he could look for ways to diversify his income through contract work.

Confusion at the other end.

I explained that he could have more than one contract in place at a time, and that one or more of those contracts could be from non-university sources.

I suggested that income certainty was better in this scenario and that if he is worried about continuity of personal cash flow he would be better off seeking multiple-contractibility rather than job security with its binary risk factor of temporal non-existence and CV-destroying lack of variety.

I also noted that modern IT massively enables the ability of an individual to become a genuine contractor.

I suspect that I was up against some resistance from the personality type in this instance.

There was to be no inserting of logic through the defences not constructed with logic in the first place.