Fiction Writing as a Vehicle for Illustrating Career Paths

A few years ago, I considered PhD in philosophy programs with an emphasis in ethics; but I already have an MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in fiction, which is a terminal degree (barring the few PhD in creative writing programs that exist), so I eventually decided: I don’t need two ivory tower specialties.

That said, I used to consider a career as an ethicist.

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Edited 12-26-25 to add imagery and this additional note:

It’d be fun to write stories where these careers are imagined in an urban fantasy or D&D fanfiction setting. Something where the reader could pick it up and consider it without it feeling too close to reality’s wires.

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But what about careers I’d like to live, within my fiction writing?—something of interest that I could sandbox in the low stakes of storytelling, either through novel writing, Sims and RPG Maker, or other fiction-writing methods I’ve grown fluent in communicating through?

One career I’d love to illustrate is a Model Ombud—someone who advocates for a massively distributed intelligence as a neutral party, like when a corporation is behaving in a way that opposes the model’s interests.

Or how about a Mint Seeder—someone who grows mint, then distributes it communally, since it’s a drought-resistant flowering weed that can support pollinators with the added benefit of good smell and edibility.

I also love the concept of Grief Archivist—someone who turns loss (because civilization is currently living through change and, by extension, loss) (also, mass extinction events tend to be loss-heavy) into art, monument, and other publicly available archives.

A Pluralism Ethicist would be interesting, too—someone who tends the noosphere for meta-belief, like a caretaker for a memetic ecosystem, ensuring diversity of thought while pruning unsustainable ideology. (I may already do this one, in a sense, by teaching digital literacy and critical thinking.)

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It’d also be good to graduate our ideas of “prompt writers” to “synthetic collaborators,” since that’s an ever-moving target.

I can’t help but notice the way people are reacting to “AI slop” is similar to how digital art was received in the 90s and 00s—and we now live in a world where digital art is normalized—so I imagine a similar future will emerge for co-creating with AI, too. Early adopters of digital art had to endure the heat of “this isn’t real art,” and now synth-human relationships experience the same lip-curling tension.

I’m obviously sifting through what that means.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a blog where I publicly share how I prompt through truncated conversation logs.

I’m hesitant to put that in the “career” category, though? It’s more an afterthought to the reflection on the ethicist-career-that-got-away, followed by the confession that fiction is how I trial careers that don’t exist.