Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by Hollis James

Author:Hollis, James [Hollis, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gotham
Published: 2005-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Career Versus Vocation

“I chose what I was told to choose:

They told me gently who I was . . .

I wait, and wonder what to learn . . .

O here, twice blind at being born.”

David Wagoner, “The Hero with One Face”

HOW MANY TIMES have we asked the question: What am I to do with my life?” So often the question is answered by the grim necessities of economic reality, or by the internalized voices of Mom, Dad, or culture. When I was a college professor, I heard student after student say, in so many words, “I want to study X, but Mom and Dad said that they would only help if I was a business major.” When I suggested that they could find a way to pay for their own education, they resisted, and not because they were lazy, but because they feared the loss of parental approval. I always wondered if such parents really thought they were helping their children by enlisting them in their own security needs, and by ensuring that the children they professed to love would be miserable in their work lives. Freud once noted that two requisites are necessary for sanity: work and love. Surely he meant the right work, just as much as the right love.

By midlife the limits of what intimate relationship can provide are typically evident, as are the evolving roles in the family. For many, next in line as a carrier of projected satisfaction is career. More of our conscious energy is directed toward our work than any other venue. Stand on Main Street on a Monday morning and observe what mobilizes such frenetic, purposeful energy—economics, the unquestioned deity who dominates our culture. While all of us have to find a way to support our material existence, our work also carries a larger invisible burden, the presumption that it will provide our lives with meaning and energize our spirits. Sometimes it does. By midlife, however, many find that their work drains rather than energizes them. They suffer vague discomfort, find themselves bored, wistful, longing for something else.

The sham we perpetrate when we insist on our young people preparing for a lifelong career means that we wish them to arrive at midlife about as unhappy with their lives as their parents. I strongly advocate the study of a liberal arts curriculum for all persons, because we can always learn the tools of a trade on the job, and in this era of constant change we may practice many trades before we’re done. Making a living is the easy part, but far more critical is what liberates us from the limits of our family and cultural history. What values, what ways of critical thinking and discerning evaluation do we possess to enrich our lives? What understandings of history allow us to escape its binding repetitions? What personality development and differentiation will we carry with us through all the days of our journey? These rich, intrapsychic companions will seldom if ever be served by the constricted aims of careerism and vocational narrowing.

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