Is Your Work a Job or a Vocation?
What is your feeling about your work? Do you hate it but stick with it because you need the paycheck? Are you resigned to the drudgery of it but live for the end of the day or the weekend? Are you in love with your work, prizing its meaning, its ability to use your talents and contribute to the greater good?
Freud says that “as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men…the great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.” Feeling aversion for a task that one must perform can lead to depression, isolation, addiction, troubled social relations, etc.
On the other hand, says Freud, work grounds us in reality and “gives us a secure place in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing…narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic drives on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.”
Wow! There’s a mouthful. But Freud is suggesting that work that one values can release one from psychological burdens and give us a special satisfaction, which is, in fact, “a path to happiness.”
This view is similar to the idea that Happiness is finding work that needs doing, that you can do, and then doing it!
Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing” is about the songs of work: the songs of the mechanic, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker, the farmer, the mother, “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else…Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs” as each goes about the work of measuring his plank, heaving the stones, singing on deck or while cutting wood or plowing or tending to a child.
What work causes you to sing or whistle or hum? What is the job that gives you a satisfaction like none other?
A Chinese philosopher once said, “If you choose a job that you love, you will never have to work a day in your life.”
What kind of job would allow you to echo these words?
Robert Frost said that “The Object in Living is to unite my avocation and my vocation.”
What job would unite your avocation and your vocation? Have you found that yet? How will you go about finding it? What work will bring you true joy?
