Not Everything In Life Is About Your Career
There’s a contradiction in writing this that I’ll acknowledge upfront. My day job is writing, and as much as I enjoy the catharsis of putting my mind to paper, there’s a reality that one of the reasons I write outside of work is to improve at my career and create more opportunities for myself.
So, before defeating my argument that our lives shouldn’t be all about work, not means to ends but ends in themselves, I do acknowledge that in some ways writing for me is work and I’m living in contradiction.
But I share my thoughts on the dangers of living a life geared toward work because I know how easily I can fall victim to this idea. I’ve had and flirted with it in many ways. I’ve lived through phases where I believed that every book I read had to have an impact on my career or move me forward in some direction. Phases where every form of entertainment had to do the same. I even remember saying things to friends like, “I could be Kendrick Lamar and not be satisfied,” and “every minute that I’m not getting better is a waste of time.”
I can see these sentiments in hindsight as the naivety of being young. I know that their roots are ambition and that there’s a positive there that will always be an element of what drives me. But they come with their dangers, because not everything in life should be about career. There’s more to our being, elements to it that often outweigh the importance of anything we’ll accomplish in the professional world.
The Western world seems to tell us otherwise. We’re bombarded with images of successful people, given encouragements to always be at our best and constantly improving, and various forms of what people think to be spirituality are actually pseudo-career enhancing pieces of advice disguised otherwise. Some of the happiest people I know are poor with little career success to show for. They directly counter the idea that career success is the pinnacle of happiness.
Psychologists have cited their findings that humans are more wired to pursue than to achieve, a realization that you’re familiar with if you’ve ever felt the emptiness after a big win. One of the reasons is because we are human beings, not human achievings. Finding satisfaction in pursuing is because we’re engaged in things that are constant, similar to how our being feels constant while we’re alive.
What it means ‘to be’ is a question that no one seems to have answered successfully. We think, therefore we are, of course. Cogito ergo sum, as Descartes said. We’re ephemeral, but we have abstract needs that have no relation to the material world. Modern scientists tell us that we’re only neurons and atoms firing into random directions, creating us and our realities. But even if they can explain these causes accurately, they don’t sufficiently explain any reasons. It’s one thing to know how we work, it’s another thing to know why we exist at all, and no one has successfully answered that question.
Part of our existence is the realization of self, the ‘I’ that exists as an ‘other’ to the people around us. And both the I and the other form for us a being that isn’t only material. It’s a being with understanding and longing for abstract things like love, home, belonging, community, beauty, meaning, and purpose. These words lack explanation or sufficient definition in a solely material world. We can’t find either how they work, or for what reason these abstract needs exist at all.
Whether you’re secular or religious, your experience as being human knows the fact that we can’t live without these abstractions, and that we do have some sort of soul, even if the soul of our experience isn’t the soul of religious ideas.
We aren’t fulfilled or at peace without these longings. And if we pursue or end up with the opposite of one of the longings, getting a negative side instead, like lust instead of love, loneliness instead of community, or emptiness instead of meaning, we’re aware that our souls aren’t fulfilled. The soul in us not only longs for certain things, but it’s of course only fulfilled by the positive side of those longings. Millions of lustful partners isn’t as fulfilling as one committed spouse, no matter how much the world pretends otherwise. But unfortunately, in a world devoid of meaning, one that is only material, we’re usually confused which side of our longings we should chase after.
As I’ve titled the post, I’m aiming to highlight that not everything is about work. But ‘work’ can be substituted for any inaccurately placed longing. It’s a recognition of the empty space that we can fill with the negative sides of our longings instead of the positive sides. It’s an empty space where we confuse our need for the things that are beautiful in the human experience with distractions that we think will land us in the beautiful arena. For one person the distraction is workaholism, for another it’s something else.
As Dallas Willard said, “The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it’s who you become.” Our ‘who’ that we should aim to become is a being with a fulfilled soul. That’s the opposite of the us that feels discomfort and longing and pain and depression when our soul has lost touch with what it needs and desires. The who to become is instead the us that feels the joy and comfort of getting what our soul needs.
None of us will always hit the perfect targets of what our souls need. We each sometimes get distracted by illusions and fake impressions. We stumble and chase for things that don’t align with what fulfills our souls. But by staying cognizant, thinking therefore being, realizing that the measures of our souls are realized in attaining what they long for, who we become instead of what we do, we give our souls their best chances to be satisfied.
