Science Quote by Greg Egan

There’s a sly sting in Egan’s deadpan: the thing most people call a “career gap” is, in his case, a decades-long run of paying work. He frames sustained self-employment not as freedom or achievement but as a liability, borrowing the nervous language of HR to expose how narrow “employable” has become. The joke lands because it’s also true. Modern hiring systems treat conformity as competence: a clean timeline, recognizable job titles, recent managers who can vouch you’re still domesticated.

The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s a critique disguised as a shrug. By saying “supported myself,” he reminds you that markets already validated him. Yet he anticipates being judged by a different market altogether: the bureaucratic one, where legitimacy comes from institutional scaffolding rather than output. The subtext is that writing - especially independent, solitary work - produces skills that are hard to credential and easy to mistrust. The longer you do it, the more you look like an outlier, and outliers are expensive to evaluate.

Context matters: Egan is a scientist-turned-fiction writer with a reputation for rigorous, technically dense work. That background sharpens the irony. If even someone trained in a prestige discipline assumes he’s “unemployable,” what does that say about everyone else whose labor doesn’t map neatly onto corporate boxes? The line doubles as a warning about how work has been moralized: stability signals virtue, while self-directed success can read as deviance.