Nothing is more tragic than failure to discover one’s true business in life, or to find that one has drifted or been forced by circumstance into an uncongenial calling. —John Dewey, Democracy and Education¹

The language of work is polarized. “Labor” refers to work that is compulsory and toilsome, and indeed to any exertion that is painful. One of its obscure usages is telling, as “labor” is apparently the name for a group of moles.² Or consider the term, “job,” which suggests the fragmentation of work into discrete tasks.

Though its etymology is uncertain, the leading theory is that our term for paid employment came from an earlier use of “job,” meaning “the amount that a horse and cart can bring at one time.”³ While this is partly fitting, since we are in fact embodied creatures who must work to survive, we are also thinking, valuing beings. Work involves both the head and, if you will, the hooves. We envision purposes; we are moved to undertake projects. We do not simply gnaw away in the dark. If one set of work words positions us all of the way underground, another has us soaring above our physical needs and self-interest, heeding a divine calling or professing a sacred vow. Sometimes these high and low roads diverge within a single term. “Work” can refer to a larger project or just a paycheck.⁴ “Vocation” means alternately a spiritual calling and a manual trade.

This polarized vocabulary reflects deep dichotomies in our self-understanding. We contrast our duties and our inclinations (feeling compelled to add a negative prefix to distinguish our enjoyable avocations from our dutiful vocations). We build one campus to nurture the life of the mind and another to train the hands (then rank people according to the color of their collars). We divorce the spiritual from the material (contrasting such “ethereal things” as the good and the beautiful with the “real world” of supply and demand curves).⁵ Struggling to unite realism and idealism—so that we might see clearly both our condition and our prospects—we careen between fantasy (conjuring a simplified and sweetened reality) and cynicism (confusing the world with our dispirited, reductive readings of it).

Would that we could, on some calm philosophical shore, plot a direct route to the meeting place of genuine realism and idealism. But we are already at sea, guided only by the maps of our current moral imagination. For us seafarers, Aristotle says, “getting hold of the intermediate is difficult.”⁶ He suggests following Circe’s advice: “That spray and surging breaker there—keep your ship well clear of that.”⁷ Navigating between the Scylla of fantasy and the Charybdis of cynicism, the best we can do is “take to the oars and sail that way . . . grasping the least bad of what is available.”⁸ To break the spell of fantasy in our vocational imagination, we need targeted desublimations; to avoid running aground on the shoals of reductive cynicism, we need thick, recuperative narratives. A book such as David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs could help us paddle away from the tenacious delusion that white-collar work is somehow more important and intellectually demanding.⁹ Or, to avoid crashing into the conclusion that work is nothing but alienated wage labor, we might turn to the testimony lovingly gathered by Studs Terkel, showing that even the most modest of occupations contain veins of meaning and sources of pride.¹⁰ Whatever the maneuver, vocational discernment requires tacking between romance and reduction.

Consider the epigraph. Is this an example of sentimental distortion? Until recently, I hadn’t thought so. And I am still inclined to forgive Dewey’s hyperbole, his failure to note that many, in staving off even greater tragedies, must forgo the luxury of vocational choice. Indeed, part of what I find moving about this passage is how this topic rouses the ordinarily stolid Dewey to ardor. It is not Dewey’s effusiveness that gives me pause, but this very idea of discovering “one’s true business in life.” This might be just the place to heed Circe’s advice and pull hard on the rudder. For it may be that our stories about “the work we were meant to do” are just fairy tales whose true moral is that we are drawn to disavow the contingency of our choices and flee our finitude. It might be more honest to think of vocation, as one colleague recently put it to me, as an arranged marriage in which love at best comes later.¹¹ Is the very idea of “finding one’s calling” just kitsch?

Ultimately, I find the strong form of this deflationary view untenable. Unless we deny that practices differ in their demands and affordances, or unless we deny that people differ in their talents and interests and aspirations, the idea that there are better and worse vocational choices, and indeed that there can be vocational mistakes, seems not only reasonable but unavoidable. That said, the deflationary view does expose two necessary qualifications to the romantic idea of finding one’s calling. The first is that no one has only one calling. The second is that callings are made as much as they are found.

Ironically, it is Dewey himself (on the very same page no less) who gives us the most interesting argument for rejecting the idea that each of us has but one “true business in life”:

As a man’s vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by its association with other callings. A person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers and enjoys in other relationships—a thing which depends in turn upon the alertness and sympathy of his interests. What is true of an artist is true of any other special calling, . . . so that the scientific inquirer shall not be merely the scientist, the teacher merely the pedagogue, the clergyman merely one who wears the cloth, and so on. (308)

Notice how this differs from the usual appraisal of the specialist as deep but narrow. Specialism actually breeds shallow technicism. “In the degree in which it is isolated from other interests,” Dewey notes just before this passage, “an occupation loses its meaning and becomes . . . routine” (307). One can manipulate micropipettes or lecture students without ever really engaging the vocation of scientist or teacher. To access the “humane,” or extra-technical, dimensions of one’s vocation requires an experience-expanding “alertness” and relationship-deepening “sympathy.” However, to develop such qualities requires a life of “diverse and variegated” callings. Thus, not only does Dewey admit the possibility of having more than one vocation, he insists that it is impossible to have only one. “Insofar as one approximates that ideal,” Dewey pronounces, “he is a kind of monstrosity” (307).

This is not to say that everyone has multiple paid occupations. Dewey has a capacious conception of vocation as any practice whose purposive frame helps us open up the interest of the world, balance “the distinctive capacity of an individual with his social service” (308), and knit our experience into meaningful continuity. Without everyday practices—parenting, gardening, cooking, civic engagement, learning Arabic, playing the flute—that demand that the “idea of an end be steadily maintained,” experience would fragment into disconnected bits or grind into monotonous repetition (309).

If Dewey believes that each of us typically engages in “variegated vocational activities,” why does he speak of “one’s true business”? I chalk it up to a moment of rhetorical excess. In the very next sentence, he offers this qualification: “A right occupation means simply that the aptitudes of a person are in adequate play” (308). Here Dewey is careful to say “a” not “the” right occupation. However, the fact that none of us has a singular vocational match does not mean that there is no such thing as vocational mismatch, and here lies the pathos of the passage. Dewey is observing the everyday tragedy that, while each of us could have multiple vocations, many never find any congenial calling.

By “congenial,” Dewey does not mean “suiting one’s interests and temperament,” as if occupational choice follows an already completed process of personal formation. Vocations are themselves key catalysts of our growth. They direct and quicken our attention, activating from the welter of experience a world of significant actions and consequences. Thus, Dewey rejects the “conventional and arbitrary view” that we can discover “once for all at some particular date” what work suits us (311). An initial interest “only blocks out in outline the field in which further growth is to be directed” (311).

Treating this as a “definite, irretrievable, and complete choice” turns a dynamic process into a “rigid” role, closing off the “continuous reorganization of aims and methods” characteristic of full vocational enactment (311).

For Dewey, a vocation is an educative medium, a set of enabling constraints. If this sounds oxymoronic, it is because we tend to default to a negative conception of freedom, freedom from constraint. By way of correction, Immanuel Kant offers a vivid synecdoche: “The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space.”¹² This ambitious dove is about to learn the painful lesson that freedom abhors a vacuum. The idea of enabling constraints is perhaps most intuitive in the arts. One can say different things with paint on canvas, with chords on a guitar, with the human body choreographed in time and space. It is precisely because the medium pushes back that we can achieve forms of eloquence unachievable by other means.

This suggests a deeper notion of congeniality. Vocation is not the matching of two already fixed and finished things—a formed character and a known form of work—but a medium grounding a process of mutual disclosure. Though there is no pre-ordained vocational destiny, there can be a deep feeling of fit, a feeling that you have found your medium, one of them at least. Over time, we may come to experience a profound, twofold recognition: in me, the world is working out what it needs to be; in this worldly practice, I am working out what I need to be.

This brings us to the second qualification needed to rescue the idea of vocational fit from misty-eyed sentimentality. Finding one’s calling is not really about picking a line of work. It means finding a path within one’s work that brings self and world into fruitful relation. Vocations are made as much as they are found. They are discovered, but only over time and only by those open to the kind of “dialectical” bootstrapping described by Talbot Brewer where, even as we must invest to gain entry, it is only through deeper entry that we come to understand what that investment entails.¹³ Ultimately, vocational enactment is more important than vocational selection.

Am I then conceding that work is like an arranged marriage, meaningful only if and when one puts in the effort? Despite debunking the “one true calling” theory, I still resist the implication of this metaphor. I see three significant ways in which vocational choice remains far from arbitrary. First, the fact that vocational enactment reveals new aspects of self and world does not negate the importance of one’s prior history. We enter worlds of work along different vectors: interested in different aspects of the world, diverging in our ideas about what matters, varying in our formative momentum and inertia. What exactly will grow in the soil of a vocational medium is not predictable in advance. But that does not mean that it is arbitrary where we plant our hopes and our efforts. For each of us, some sites will prove fertile, others sterile.

Second, even insofar as we downplay the importance of what occupation we choose, how we choose remains of crucial significance. The romantic chooses decisively, saying, “this is what I was meant to do.” The danger is that, thinking that you have already found your vocation, you may never set out to discover it within your selected line of work. Work is work, the cynic replies, denying the very idea that vocational practices could be sources of meaning and transformation. And then the prophecy is fulfilled as the cynic proves unwilling to make the sort of investments Brewer describes.

Third, it is difficult to find any vocational medium in our rather late modernity, this world of isolated (and increasingly virtual) tasks in isolated cubicles. A decade before the publication of Democracy and Education, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously offered vocational advice to the “young poet,” Franz Kappus. Rilke warned Kappus to steer clear of “professions petrified and no longer linked with living,” to avoid any calling so “burdened with . . . conventions” that it leaves no “room for a personal conception of its problems.”¹⁴ A century later, what looms larger is the opposite problem: how few forms of work allow us to make contact with, as Matthew Crawford puts it, “the world beyond our head.”¹⁵ Much of contemporary work isolates us both from recalcitrant reality—offering us instead various virtual knobs for manipulating pre-selected variables—and from the joint structures of attention which disclose a common world.

With this, we have tacked back toward an idea of vocational fit that is at once realistic and idealistic. Without colliding into the cynical conclusion that vocational choice is arbitrary, we steered clear of the romantic ideas that vocational fit is singular and that it is legible in advance of the work. Without draining the pathos out of the drama of vocational enactment, we dispelled some of the fantasies around the idea of finding one’s calling. Vocation is not an already-booked appointment that one might miss, but an ongoing process of mutual explication of self and world. It is a medium in which one may discover a fuller freedom and fluency, a fuller connection to the natural and social world. Where and when one will find such a medium is uncertain. What is certain is that this search is all too often aborted or derailed—this remains a great tragedy indeed.