Professional Callings

The term “Vocational Awe” refers our the tendency to imbue certain professions (and those who work within them) with assumed moral correctness, and perhaps even virtuousness.

So this might include librarians, teachers, some types of medical professionals; people who do hard, important, and often revered work—though generally for little pay and with even less job security.

This is generally considered to be not ideal, as while these sorts of people and these sorts of jobs are arguably fundamental to the continued operation of society, the assumption that they’re doing moral work (and that this moral nature of the job is perhaps more important than the actual labor they perform, and what they’re paid for performing said labor) can sometimes leave them prone to abuse.

After all, they get to do something they can feel good about, and which they know is positive for society. Why should they be paid livable wages, when they already get to enjoy that sense of fulfillment (which many people working in other jobs will never be able to experience)?

This concept overlaps with the idea of professional callings: the notion that each of us has a career path that would be perfectly aligned (or aligned enough) with the things we think are important, work we like to do, and stuff we believe makes the world a better place, so that the work doesn’t feel like normal work—it feels like the labor we were put on this planet to perform, and is thus more enjoyable or fulfilling.

Research into this concept was sparse until recently; there’s a chance the Covid pandemic contributed to this, as it led to a wave of firings, shifts to remote work, and other discombobulations within the professional world. But there was a study back in 1997 that showed, across a range of professions and personal backgrounds, that in any given profession and workplace around a third of people will tend to perceive their job as being just a job (a way to pay the bills), another third will see them as careers (a means of getting better jobs in the future), and the final third will perceive their work as a calling.

The researchers didn’t find any consistent demographic differentiators that would explain how folks are segmented into these three groups except for the amount of time they’ve been doing the job.

This implies that simply working a job longer could, over time, allow us to find more purpose or fulfillment in our work (seeing things we didn’t originally see in it when we first took the position), allow us to find more satisfaction in the outcomes of said labor, or perhaps just discover a mental stance that allows us to reframe the sacrifices we make for the job so that we’re not miserable about it all the time (“This work is important, so the time I spend at the office isn’t wasted, it’s vital, and I can feel good about that”).

It would be difficult to concretely determine, for each calling-oriented worker, which approach helped them reach that point of relative professional gratification, as this is the sort of thing we may stumble into, or may do subconsciously as a protective mechanism (as opposed to deciding we’re going to make the best of an otherwise imperfect situation).

But it can be useful to consider our professional paths from this angle, as it can help us better determine why we’re doing the work we do, while also presenting a potential opportunity to glean more value from our jobs, if we’re willing to stick with them longer term.