We have a framing issue. (vo·ca·tion: late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin vocatio(n-), from vocare "to call.") I like to read, take long walks, talk to my spouse in an unplanned, sporadic way because by their very nature, those things are not really "vocations". This is about what CALLS you to work, not about what's necessarily pleasurable or a pastime.
No, I understand that. What I'm saying is that I have no "calling" and do not expect to ever have a calling. I do development work because it makes me money, I am very good at it, and solving solvable problems feels nice, but if you dropped 10 million in my lap I doubt I would ever touch a line of code again.
Barring the vicissitudes of fortune, I'd spend the rest of my life relaxing, spending time with people I like, going about reading the same kinds of books I do now, perhaps traveling a bit, and perhaps if I was really bored I'd sit down and write a book of insights unlikely to be interesting or original. I wouldn't feel called to do anything.
Heck, if someone offered me 10k more to do some other non-development job and it wasn't more strenuous and didn't require more time out of my day, I'd do that. If they paid me to go to school and learn something I know next-to-nothing about like, I don't know, biochemistry, that'd be fine and I'd be just as happy.
I look around me and I really don't think most other people have a calling either. Maybe I'm wrong. They work because they have to get by, not because they love their work. The HN community (and therefore I assume much of SV in general) seems to me to extraordinary in that regard. Of course there are other people, professions, and communities with a disproportionate amount of those who feel they're called to their profession. But overall I think it's the exception rather than the rule.
So if I said I'd pay you x more amount than what you're currently making, to don a rubber smock and pack pickles for a living for the rest of your life, is it just a question of what x is?
Yes, absolutely. Indeed I was slightly happier back when I was doing menial physical labor, since it left my mind free to think, and when I got home, I was physically tired but not mentally exhausted like I am from days of coding binges and context switches.
But since X is probably about ~25k (which is what I'm shooting for as a developer anyway within the next 5 years), and I already make more than the average pickle-packer, I don't think that's going to happen. :)
Thanks for that clarification. Yeah I could never do it. Having a job like that would kill my spirit no matter how much money I made. It would be the ultimate "take the blue pill" decision I could make.
The concept of a vocation is a fairly recent invention, mostly arising out of the Protestant brand of Christianity. Work has been disdained throughout most of history [1]. Therefore, I would say that liking your work or finding your calling are not things that everyone can even do or has to do. The idea of a vocation strikes me more as intellectual rationalizations arising in tandem with the current economic mode of life.
That's very interesting. I suspect folks like Marcus Aurelius, Lao Tze, Socrates, Murasaki Shikibu and their ilk knew what a "calling" was long before there was a word for it.
I agree with GP - that's quite anachronistic. I can't speak for Murasaki Shikibu, since I haven't read her, but I think the idea is quite discordant with the published thoughts of the others you mention. Socrates, for example, might have believed he personally had a specific purpose in the world, but he would have understood that in a very different way than our conception of a vocation.
Really. Vocation is analogous with the notion of 'personally having a specific purpose in the world', according to the dictionary's first definition of the word.
