Coherent Professions

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes work by William Damon at Stanford that sought “to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick”:

Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy.

In their study, modern journalists were suffering in the era of market consolidation and the growing attention economy:

Many journalists who worked for these empires confessed to having a sense of being forced to sell out and violate their own moral standards. Their world was unaligned, and they could not become vitally engaged in the larger but ignoble mission of gaining market share at any cost.

Contrast that with genetics, where doing good and doing well are usually the same thing.

Decide if you think being a healthcare worker in the now-typical corporatized environment reflects a coherent or incoherent profession. This is essentially the premise behind the “moral injury” reframing of physician burnout.

Unfortunately, recognition doesn’t really help because reclaiming coherence is hard:

A coherent profession, such as genetics, can get on with the business of genetics, while an incoherent profession, like journalism, spends a lot of time on self-analysis and self-criticism. Most people know there’s a problem, but they can’t agree on what to do about it.