Job, career and calling explained. Why the same work leaves one person satisfied and another unravelling.
Your dissatisfaction is likely a mismatch between what you want work to hold and what that job was built to hold.
What interests me about the note above is what this reflection is asking for. Both sides make a compelling case, and both are presented as though there’s only one objectively correct answer. It’s a reasonable thing to want, because an answer would tell you what to do and how to feel about your work.
There’s vocabulary for this
There are three words that we tend to use interchangeably, but actually describe three different relationships to work:
Work as a job
Work as a career
Work as a calling
The terms comes from Habits of the Heart, by the sociologist Robert Bellah and four other colleagues. They interviewed around 200 white middle-class Americans about freedom, success, justice and what made a life good. The book that came out of it is really an argument about how American individualism over-emphasises personal freedom at the cost of social responsibility, leaving individuals to improvise meaning alone.
Work shows up as one of the places where meaning is improvised. The authors write about three distinct patterns they observed in how people talked about what they did for a living.
Twelve years later, Amy Wrzesniewski and her colleagues set out to test whether these three patterns held up. They wrote a short paragraph describing each one and gave them to 196 employees across a wide range of occupations, from administrative staff to licensed professionals. They asked them to rate how much each of the descriptions sounded like them. What they found was that people sorted themselves almost equally across the three descriptions.
Then they did something even more interesting.
