What should you do with your life?
What should you study in college?
What job should you take?
What career should you develop?
How should you make a living?
These are perennial questions. And they are due for re-appraisal in light of the economic difficulties of the past few years
Lately, there has been increased scrutiny of the idea of “doing what you love,” which has been a staple of privileged, progressive college and career advice since at least the 1970’s when Joseph Campbell admonished his students to “follow their bliss.” More recently Steve Jobs famously said “Do what you love and love what you do.”
Earlier this year, Miya Tokumitsu wrote critically and compellingly, in Slate, of the way this paradigmatic approach to finding and choosing work can distort our notions of how we make a living, how we are compensated for our labor, how we envision — or ignore — inequality, and contribute to our willingness to be economically exploited. Her critique and ire, were refreshing, bracing even, but ultimately misguided.
If you’re not pissed, you’re not paying attention.
No doubt, as one surveys the current economy, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
Finding your calling (your “vocation”, from the Latin vocai) is a matter of soul.
Making a living is a matter of economy and the political wills that shape it. That we may be exploited, or exploiters, if we do what we love is of course true, but that exploitation is not a function of our efforts — and it is a tremendous effort — to seek and find vocation, but a function of our unwillingness to fight for a just economy.
It may be a measure of the health, vitality, human-ness of an economy that the greatest numbers of people possible can make a living at their vocation. But there is no guarantee in any time that ones deepest gifts are the things that provide them bread and shelter.
"From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity...creation" - Henry Miller