This whole “to or not to follow your passion” series took a long time. I think that’s because I had to look up a bunch of charts and stuff and that made me feel sleepy. Basically, I had to take a lot of naps. Facts are hard and that’s a fact (ha ha, please keep reading)… probably why they’re called hard facts. Also, in an ironic twist, I have a full time job which doesn’t involve writing or even blogging at all.
Anyway, we’re on post number 5 now and I got to thinking, what if – just what if – we’ve been asking a flawed question the entire time?
This was deflating but I persevered. Here was my thought process:
Hmm, I wonder what sector hates their jobs the most?
…probably people doing repetitive work inside little carpeted boxes…in cubicles. People in cubicles doing data entry. Data entry probably makes you feel dead inside and purposeless.
Purposeless.
oh…
What if the question should be just as much about purpose as about passion?
That would actually explain a lot of occupations like hospice caretakers, teachers, missionaries, and military whose jobs aren’t just like a party every day. It even explains those devoted zookeepers from a previous post.
So I pulled this one study out of the cobwebs of my memory – the one where they paid college students the big bucks to do something like dig ditches and then fill them in again. In just a few weeks nearly everyone had quit because the work was so meaningless – even though their pay increased every week.
I think we can learn a lot from this study – namely – to find scientists who will pay you a lot of money to dig ditches. That way you can get at least a little of your tax dollars back. It’s like paying the government to pay you less than you paid them.
Otherwise, that fact that money didn’t have quite enough pull for the students by itself is important too.
The irony is that many of those students probably quit their lucrative ditch digging careers in order to prepare for an office career in which they will be tasked with futile projects while their salary barely keeps up with inflation, which stinks because they’ll have those loans to pay off. They also won’t even be getting a tan while doing it, which doesn’t sound like a win-win. Meanwhile, the rest of the participants will work at Starbucks. The irony for them is that they’ll be jealous of their classmates.
After tugging at that study a pile of other studies on meaningfulness avalanched on my head, which made me feel less like Archimedes (or Newton?) and more like a Sophomore. I can’t exactly shout “Eureka!” about stuff that other people figured out, though some credit would be nice. My only consolation is that I have clothes on when my epiphanies strike.
These studies are like everything in Psychology: it sounds like common sense after you hear it. They were all about how vital meaningfulness is to one’s work.
Of course, I’m not factoring in extreme cases here. I’m pretty sure that if you were literally starving and the powers that be in your dystopian world only gave out food vouchers for meaningless work, you’d do it. Or at least you’d do it until you could overthrow President Snow.
Purpose had always been part of my own super secret schema (which I will reveal hereafter) but it was appended onto Passion with an asterisk, like “Hey, this is really important too!” But I hadn’t tucked it inside the definition of Passion itself.
PURPOSE AS PART OF PASSION
And then Vallerand and his colleagues come out and define Passion as…
a strong inclination toward an activity that one likes, that he finds important, and in which he invests time and energy.
In their view, if any of these components is missing from the activity, the person isn’t actually passionate about it. I feel like the authors should’ve added a, “So there! Go find a real passion” at the end to clear things up for any sunshine soldiers but that probably wouldn’t be very sciencsy.
They further say that these passion activities make life worth living for the person – in other words, they are meaningful and provide a reason for existence. So one’s passion also has to be something that provides some degree of meaning in their view.
If Viktor Frankl were on Valerand’s team, he would probably point out the importance of making sure one’s purpose is external to oneself. It is higher; he is under some responsibility. ¹
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Another helpful supplement to thinking about Passion is to take it back to it’s origin: Something you’re willing to suffer for.
This sounds a little more serious than “something you’re willing to invest time and energy into” but I think this is helpful because it weeds out the weak ones: all those things that people enjoy but don’t actually care enough about to go through some pain for. They enjoy biking but there’s no way they’re going to train six hours a day. They might even own a spandex suit and have spent 3k on a bike, but be realistic, there’s no way they’re going to train six hours a day. Money is usually a little easier to invest than time.
PURPOSE MAKES SENSE
This resonates – except for Vallerand’s bit about finite creatures being able to pick what constitutes a higher purpose. After all, the mug that a potter just made doesn’t get to decide what it was made for. The artist had something in mind when he made it: form follows function and all that. As a Christian, here’s how I’d break it down: we were made for a higher purpose and our Creator is the one who got to decide what that purpose was.²
THE PROBLEM WITH THE COMMERCIAL AGE
So here we are – humans made for a higher purpose, individually gifted, creative, and hungry to do something big that will impact generations after us… and for $15.24† an hour we’re stuck behind the machine that squirts Coke into a can.
Perhaps the reason there are so many “soul crushing” jobs is because thousands of industries have been created for the purpose of consumption and profit…oh, and world peace, because as their ad said, Coco-cola is all about world peace.
In other words, they have no high purpose in themselves. Think of everything at the dollar store and on airplane magazines. They either aren’t made well or aren’t worth making.
Secondly, they don’t demonstrate craft or skill. There’s a correlation between how close a person is to his work and the amount of meaningfulness he derives from it. As far as I know, I made this up which pretty much makes it an official scientific hypothesis.
For example, I feel a measure of accomplishment (and meaningfulness) from mowing the lawn even though there’s a machine between me and the work. But if I only had to press a button and the lawn was mowed automatically by robots, I wouldn’t feel much personal accomplishment at all because pushing a button doesn’t take much effort or skill. In fact, I might have to make up for my uselessness by watching a bunch of TV in all my leisure time.
And that’s the point: anyone can push a button so I am unnecessary… unless I built the robots. That would be a different thing.
Even the people who invented cake mixes (which I assume wasn’t hard) figured out that consumers would feel more proud of their cakes if they got to add the eggs and butter themselves instead of just putting powder into a mixer.
The point is, the further a person is from the work, the further he is from feeling a sense of pride from the work.
The killing blow comes here: our factory worker isn’t there for the work; he’s there for the money. He measure’s himself by his money instead of by his work and so there is little connection between himself and the work. I’m not saying a person can’t feel good about making sure the Coke gets into the can; I’m saying that the more machines that separate him from actually creating the Coke, the harder it is.
And I’m not just guessing. I’ve worked in a factory and watched plenty of my distinguished colleagues hone their ability to fit the least amount of work into the largest container of time imaginable. And why not, right? They don’t own it. Their salary was based on time spent, not quality or quantity of the product. For a while, pay wasn’t even based on what job they did. Naturally, everyone’s internal motivation (work ethic) overcame their external motivation (money) and the work flourished.
Office people would never be so shameless. They would at least attempt to clear the cookies from the browser. If finishing the tasks in your queue isn’t rewarded with going home early, the incentive to work quickly dies a slow death. It’s like motivating a guy with cash while also asking him to motivate himself against the cash motivation.
Here’s what Dorothy Sayers had to say about the topic – and this was about 70 years ago:
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a housebuilt upon sand.
The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind were serve for our unpaid work – our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure – and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people.
We should ask of an enterprise, not “will it pay?” but “is it good?”; of a man, not “what does he make?” but “what is his work worth?”; of goods, not “Can we induce people to buy them?” but “are they useful things well made?”; of employment, not “how much a week?” but “will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?” And shareholders in –let us say – brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at shareholders’ meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: “What goes into the beer?”
I get the feeling that if Sayers was commenting today, she wouldn’t be asking, “What are you passionate about?” so much as, “Is what you’re passionate about worth being passionate about?” If it is, she’d probably say it was all but your duty to do it.
As she points out, whether or not it’s worth doing is a question for theologians rather than for economists as it deals with absolute values – which are set by something (or Someone) above the things themselves.
There would be protests and strikes – not only about pay and conditions, but about the quality of the work demanded and the honesty, beauty, and usefulness of the goods produced. The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.
VOCATION vs. PROFESSION
Perhaps the answer has been quietly hiding under our noses the entire time but was so covered with dust that we didn’t realize we were only reinventing it. It’s like those people who invent new slogans just like the ones they heard all their lives. “Minimalism!” they cheer while their parents yawn and nod knowingly about what they called “voluntary poverty” – which is only doing for a long time what Seneca recommended doing for a short time. He called it “the practice of poverty.”
Follow your passion? How about following your VOCATION?
“A strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation.”
As you might recall from vocabulary class, vocation is usually set in contrast to Profession, which one qualifies for via prolonged training in order to get paid.
Personally, I was shocked to find out that my own job is uncomfortably stuck between these two vocabulary words: I haven’t been formally trained and I’m also not naturally gifted at it… which technically makes it a provocation, I think. Unless I’m the provocation…
Back to Sayers: work should be your interest, that is, something you’re interested in because it suits you. Therefore, to serve God in your work it would need to be suitable work according to your giftedness. I believe that “God is not glorified by technical incompetence” were her exact, surgically accurate words.
The first, stated quite briefly, is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature. The employer is obsessed by the notion that he must find cheap labor, and the worker by the notion that the best-paid job is the job for him”
She’s dropping all kinds of mics. So, is your passion also your purpose? I hope so. If it is, feel free to resurrect vocation. If it isn’t, maybe you haven’t found a deep enough passion.
Just in case you’re not convinced by all the quotation marks, here’s one more set for good measure:
Your vocation is where your greatest joy finds the world’s greatest need”³
And here finally we almost come to an end. I know, I feel the same way. But we still haven’t approached the important questions of… what if you’re literally stuck in a job that’s miles away from your vocation? Can one still derive meaning from an apparently meaningless job?
Footnotes:
- Come to think of it, he’d probably have a lot to say on the topic. I will explore this further. Next time, we’ll talk Frankl.
- To go by the Creed, “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
- Either Rev. Goams or Frederick Buechner.
†This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.