Most people have probably never thought about vocation, and those that have heard of it might only think of it as a religious calling; as a word related to the latin word for call, it’s often used when people talk about God’s calling. Yet at my school it was explained more broadly as aligning your career choices to your passion, and even more specifically, your passion that does some kind of good for the world.
I thought it made sense at the time, but the further I get away from my undergraduate years, the more frustrating that mentality becomes. In many ways I feel like I need to find that one thing that I want to do with my life. Part of me feels like I’m just doing other things (albeit enjoyable things) until I figure it out.
Some people do have a passion or vocation, and that’s great for them. But what if you don’t? Or what if the thing you are most passionate about isn’t necessarily a humanitarian thing? Or what if you’re equally passionate about many things or jump from passion to passion? Then what do you do? I spend a lot of time thinking about what I “want to do with my life,” then despairing about how far I am from various things, or how my choices up until this point have made it difficult for me to pursue certain interests.
To make this more concrete, I’ll give an example. I’ve thought multiple times that I would enjoy a career in international development because I’m very interested in other cultures and languages, and that kind of work, done in the right way, aligns with my values. But I know that the way to get into such work is through experience and through connections, and at this point I haven’t really done anything consistently or majorly humanitarian, and I don’t have any good connections. Not only that, but I don’t even have one cause that I’m particularly drawn to over others. I care about a lot of the world’s problems, but it seems silly to me to one day arbitrarily decide that I’m going to be all about women’s development in Ghana or micro-lending in Bangladesh. I feel like I should have some sort of good reason. But then that’s absurd too — to feel like one has to justify his or her desire to help others or have a legitimate reason to support a humanitarian cause. If all the world felt that way, humanitarian causes would be doomed.
I wish I could have the mentality of “a job is a job” or just decide to follow some career path without overthinking it. Just because a person may not be out saving the world that doesn’t mean that his or her job is not important. There are so many mundane, monotonous jobs that need to exist for our world to function, and we shouldn’t belittle them. I also love how there are people that have devoted their lives to one not really “practical” subject – like Shakespeare or poetry or a specific period of art history – because there are so many non-practical things that enrich humanity even if we don’t have statistics to show for it. But I can’t stop over-thinking things. And I can’t balance the competing loyalties in my head for doing good for the world, doing something that fulfills my elitist ideals for myself (thanks, liberal arts), doing something that enables me to support myself, and doing something that fulfills my practical day-to-day wishes in terms of things like schedule and ratio of independent work to human interaction.
It would be nice if jobs didn’t define a person. But the truth is that they largely do. And to be in a position where you have a lot of choice is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, I’m teaching English in Korea right now, and I haven’t regretted that decision. But I can’t escape the nagging feeling that I still need to figure things out, that I need to have some kind of grand plan in place in another year’s time.
It’s not even that I feel I still have so far to go; it’s that I haven’t even figured out where I’m going.
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