For a Thriving Career, Focus on Vocation First 

Editors’ Note: The twenties are hard years for many: anecdotal and empirical evidence shows again and again that twenty-somethings report a unique level of overwhelm, anxiety, and restlessness. Recognizing the challenges particular to young people in areas like career and marriage discernment, friendships, and family formation, our editors have put together a week-long series of articles with practical advice for those navigating this challenging decade.

I’m a child of ’90s optimism. My parents were the first generation in my family to rise out of poverty, and I was the first to go to university. I was raised to think that I could be truly happy if I would only pick a dream career and chase it until it became a reality. I’m the product of a culture that places a moral premium on self-expression, and I’ve experienced its consequences, both positive and negative.  

My story is very typical of my generation. I’m grateful to have been given the freedom of choosing my career, but I was never taught how to make that choice well. Like many young people, I spent my mid-twenties paralyzed by the fear of choosing incorrectly. Now, I see that the limitations and constraints placed on our career choices by duties of care to others are the path to real freedom. 

How We Got Here 

How should someone in his or her early twenties discern a career in our current cultural moment, when the number of options before us can be utterly paralyzing? First, we need a basic understanding of how we got here. In a chapter written in 2015, Actually, You Can’t Be Anything You Want (And It’s a Good Thing, Too), political theologian William Cavanaugh recounts the trajectory from a medieval culture of self-sufficiency based on subsistence farming to our culture that idolizes freedom. He traces this shift through the upheavals of the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, which drastically affected the way we work.  

Cavanaugh agrees with Max Weber that the distinctively Protestant focus on industriousness, alongside the rise of capitalism, contributed to a shift in our understanding of the concept of vocation away from vows made to specific persons and toward the role one chooses to play in a commercial context. He then goes on to detail the impact of the enclosure of common lands in England. As land was progressively privatized, the agricultural lower classes were no longer able to use common land freely to cultivate grain or raise livestock. As a result, they were pushed into the kind of factory work made possible by the Industrial Revolution.  

Over time, both in the U.S. and the UK (as well as across many Western countries) the factory has been replaced by the cubicle for the office worker of the corporate world. For many, the choice is really between one office job and another. It’s undeniable that, overall, we now have more career options than someone born into a medieval farming community. “The result, of course, has had tremendous benefits, at least for the winners in the process,” writes Cavanaugh, who goes on to say:   

The abundance and availability of material goods has reached undreamed of levels in developed economies. Millions have been pulled out of poverty. Individuals have escaped the limitations of local cultures, and for those with access to good education there is an enormous range of different kinds of employment from which to choose. 

These are clearly positive outcomes, and yet the change has come with new challenges, too. First, equating your career with your vocation makes your job a fundamental part of your identity in a way that leaves you vulnerable to experiencing a loss of purpose should that job be one day taken away. Second, as Cavanaugh argues, choice cannot simply be equated with freedom.  

Jobs, Dreams, and Vocations 

Drawing on the work of psychology professor Barry Schwartz, Cavanaugh concludes that, despite having more choice than previous generations, we’ve become increasingly unhappy since the 1960s. Young people now feel the pressure to “maximize” their lives by pursuing the most impressive job, the biggest house, and so on: but making the “optimal choice” in every situation is hindering us from making good choices. The pressure has paralyzed us. “What happens when young adults who have been marinated in this type of cultural messaging come to the range of questions surrounding vocation?” Cavanaugh asks. “They are often told not only that they can and must choose their life, but that they must maximize that choice and choose their best life.”  

I have experienced the consequences of this maximizing mindset firsthand. Earlier than I can remember, I decided that my dream career was to be an English literature professor. It took two back-to-pack pregnancies a continent away from home and a brief stint as a frustrated PhD student to realize that I was allowed change my mind. Despite having negative freedom (i.e., freedom from restraints), I never acquired an understanding of positive freedom (i.e., the ability to achieve a good goal) because I couldn’t discern between good and bad choices. I clung to that career, even though it proved incompatible with my family life and intellectual interests, because it felt safe.  

I’ve since realized that my mistake was confusing the categories of careers and vocations. A career is a series of (progressively better paid and more prestigious) jobs one holds in a particular field. It’s based on contracts that dictate fair remuneration for wage labor. It may be very important, even fulfilling, work, but it remains subject to changing external circumstances. You may develop a health condition that suddenly prevents you from continuing your career, for instance, as with a pianist who suddenly suffers a hand injury. You may enter a line of work that becomes obsolete with advances in technology. Career choice comes with a built-in degree of unpredictability.  

By contrast, vocations are–or should be–permanent. For example, marriage (and consequently parenthood) is a vocation, and so are the vows taken in consecrated religious life in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Vocations are not based on contracts that dictate payment for work, but on lifelong promises between people. They’re fundamentally about mutual service. “Marriage vows and religious vows,” Cavanaugh explains,  

are closely linked to the question of vocation precisely because they move in the opposite direction of the common logic of choice. Making a unilateral and binding commitment to another cuts off a whole range of choices. 

Careers are vulnerable to change due to unpredictable circumstances. We should expect them to shift. Vocations, on the other hand, serve to anchor us for the duration of our lives. 

A vocation may not provide the same short-term ego-boost that a well-paid career does. There’s no prize for being the best spouse of the year. What a vocation does, however, is draw us “outside the confines of the self,” as Cavanaugh puts it. It can show us, in Aristotelian terms, the end to which we were created, our telos, which is to lead a virtuous life. Developing virtuous habits can, of course, happen in different vocations, but it’s likely to be facilitated by being in service to other people, rather than focusing too narrowly on the elusive concept of self-realization. It’s only by following our vocation that we can achieve eudaimonia, happiness in the true sense of the word. 

Careers Serve Vocations, Not the Other Way Around 

What does this mean in practice? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the desire to use your talents in a professional capacity. Many of us may not feel called to join a religious community, or we may not meet a spouse until much later in life. One may experience a calling to serve others through his or her career in a way that is analogous to a vocation, for example, in the case of a teacher or a doctor, or someone working in other care-based professions.   

Nonetheless, we must remember that careers should exist to serve the carrying out of vocations, not the other way around. When I left academia a year into my PhD, I thought I was abandoning my chosen dream career forever. Two years later, I recognize there’s a better way to narrate my life choices. When I finally stopped conflating my talents (research and writing skills) with the pursuit of a specific job (university professor), I realized that there were other kinds of meaningful work I could do that are more compatible with family formation in my specific circumstances. Despite my having no formal training in journalism, writing has become my job. It has allowed me to be more present at home while my children are very small, which in turn positions me to give my children a sense of rootedness in our local community. 

And it shouldn’t just be women, to be clear, who adapt their careers to the demands of their vocations. Historian and sociologist Christopher Lasch argued in his posthumously published book Women and the Common Life that, while we can’t return to the kind of self-sufficiency based on subsistence farming and household production (as outlined by Cavanaugh) we should “insist on a closer integration between people’s professional lives and their domestic life.” “Instead of acquiescing in the family’s subordination to the workplace,” Lasch continues, we should “insist that people need self-respecting, honorable callings, not glamorous careers that carry high salaries but take them away from their families.” 

Biological differences mean that women have less time than men to discern the vocation of marriage and children, and the demands of childcare are naturally greater for women, as pregnancy and infant nursing are responsibilities men cannot share. However, in the longer trajectory of family formation, a father’s regular presence in and contribution to the life of the household is just as important to the well-being of the marriage and of the children. A father may discern to forgo a promotion that would allow for an additional vacation a year but would mean working weekends, or to turn down a more prestigious job offer in another city for the sake of not moving his school-aged children across the country. Making these kinds of decisions is not a failure to maximize your potential. It’s an example of the necessary subordination of careers to vocation. 

Practical Advice 

I can’t tell you what career you should choose. They all come with their own set of advantages and sources of frustration. There are, however, habits that can help us make better choices. The first habit is to cultivate a rich intellectual life. As philosopher Antonin Sertillanges suggested in his 1921 classic The Intellectual Life, a rich intellectual life is possible with only two hours a day of dedicated reading and thinking. You may wonder about the practical application of this habit, for instance if you’re hoping to go into tech jobs like software development or mechanical engineering. But reading widely, from literary classics to books covering history or core concepts in theology, is essential to character formation. Initiatives like the Catherine Project exist precisely to aid those no longer in formal education to continue in their pursuit of truth through the study and discussion of great books. 

A liberal arts education won’t train you for a specific job, but it will encourage you to develop a moral framework which will in turn help you navigate difficult career choices. I’ve seen this happen recently in the UK, where I live. Many medical professionals have expressed discomfort at the idea of introducing assisted dying, which is now unfortunately set to become law. But it’s only the doctors who have given thought to the philosophical underpinnings of their profession who have been able to articulate why they believe that assisted dying violates human dignity.  

Even if you’ve developed a consistent worldview and a solid moral foundation, you may still struggle to pinpoint what job might suit you. Another helpful habit is to be open to the counsel of family, friends, teachers, and spiritual directors. Because our society now highly values autonomy and self-realization, we can forget that our choices affect not only us, but those in our community. The people close to us have a stake in our well-being. If several of your loved ones mention to you that you don’t seem to be flourishing in a particular career, it’s important to reflect seriously on their insights. Conversely, many close to you may notice certain skills or talents and suggest a career you would not otherwise have considered. 

Finally, it’s important to practice a sense of hopefulness for the future. For example, you may feel that you are in control of your life, excelling in graduate school or in your first postgrad job. What happens if, at this point, you meet someone with whom you start discerning marriage? You can decide to hold on to that sense of control by putting off marriage and children until you finish that PhD, or get that promotion, or buy that nice house. In some cases of severe financial instability, it may indeed be prudent to delay a commitment to marriage. But there’s a difference between recklessness and calculated risk. If you’re called to marriage, resist the urge to delay that vocation until you’ve optimized your career. Having duties to a spouse and children will inevitably affect your career trajectory, but that’s a good thing: it will make you a more hardworking, patient, and resilient person.  

We all share the common calling to serve one another, and our vocations are specific ways of answering that calling. It is around that vocation that your life should be organized, whether it takes the form of marriage and family, or a celibate life in service of your local community or church. You should use your talents, but if a job is requiring you to focus on yourself to the detriment of those to whom you owe a duty of care, such as family and friends, it is not one worth having.  

If you take anything away from this essay, let it be this: your job is not your telos, and your career–however fulfilling it may be–will never be your vocation. If you prioritize vocation, you may even find that a career path opens up that you wouldn’t otherwise have considered. 

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