By Sheldon Greaves

I had the pleasure of having lunch today with some friends, among whom was the inimitable Dr. Missy Bird of Bird Girl Industries. Missy is in the business of helping people who want to shake up the world for the better by offering workshops on developing and using the tools of effective politics and change. If you’re in the Corvallis area, you might want to check out her upcoming workshop on Finding Your Voice.

Anyway, the conversation today was about callings, which is how many people who want to make changes describe what drives them. In a rare spark of clarity, I blurted out that we have a bias towards careers when we should be talking about callings. Missy loved the thought, and whipping out her phone and an app called Word Swag assembled this nifty meme:

Frankly, I’ve always thought that the whole “careers” thing was a kind of a bad joke. It’s particularly true when talking about college as preparation for careers. Which one? Most people have several careers in their working lives, and fairly often they have little to do with whatever they studied in college. I think one reason why certain industries are reluctant to hire anyone who has reached middle age is because that’s when a lot of people realize with a jolt that their working lives were spent on so much bullshit.

The other side of the coin is that when you feel called, deep and strong from the bottom of your gut, it’s usually about something that matters. A lot of people don’t like that. Others have noticed a growing resentment towards people who do jobs that involve a calling. In other words, jobs that matter. I’m thinking of nurses, public school teachers, government workers, firefighters, community organizers… it adds up to a long list. But the resentment is real. Anthropologist David Graeber in his wonderful book Bullshit Jobs describes how some people justify paying these people less because they get to enjoy meaningful work (I know, I don’t get it either).

There is also the danger that if you work out of passion, you are easily exploitable. True, but since there hasn’t been much of a wage increase for American workers since 1979, most of us are already in that bucket. It just makes it worse when someone is being exploited in a way that might make them abandon a calling instead of a job. You can’t tell the universe to, “take this calling and shove it!” Doesn’t work that way; just ask Jeremiah.

We speak of “Vocation” which is a word in transition; it means both a sense of being called (which the root of the word means), and a profession, whether one feels called or not. Let me suggest, immodestly, that the day of careers are passing. This is an age where we can no longer afford the luxury of meaningless work, of meaningless lives without calling. These are times that demands a long, loud reply. They cry out for people who hear the calling to go out and inflict goodness on the world.

Are you listening?