Finding Meaning in Your Life’s Work
“Life is like being at the dentist. You always think the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already”. Otto von Bismarck
If you’re not too careful about what you want to dedicate your life’s work towards, you might end up doing something by default. And you might wake up one day in 30 years’ time and wonder how your career ended up the way it did. How can you best avoid this?
We’re used to living life in auto-pilot. It’s something that gets inculcated in our early years. Our parents send us to school (one which we didn’t choose, to be sure), and barring an inflection point in our teenage years where we are compelled to decide what college degree or university course we’re going to pursue, we spend the large majority of our time passively embracing whatever educational milestones we’re expected to attain. Many a time our only motivation is to keep up with our frenemy colleagues, or to assuage our insecurities about how we measure up in the world, using academic achievements as proxies for pseudo-validation.
The first crisis point typically attends to us the moment we graduate, or shortly afterward, where we realise that the degree we studied for positions us for a career we don’t actually enjoy. This is the first realisation that decisions matter, and regret might set in. Luckily, the ability to course correct at this stage more than compensates for any earlier scholastic misjudgments. As the old adage goes, a career is a marathon not a sprint.
That said, a post-graduate course correction does not guarantee job satisfaction several years down the line. We need to be careful to avoid the second crisis inflection point, which is when we realise that our career has gone down a road we never wanted, and sometimes by a time where it is too late to fully reverse the damage. We should be continuously checking in with ourselves to assess whether we are comfortable with the direction of travel of our work. This doesn’t mean that we need to hold ourselves to an impossible bar of daily satisfaction with our jobs, but we should occasionally project our careers forward based on our current trajectory and determine whether where we think we will end up fits within our narrative and what our values are.
We should also be wary of presupposing that there is some mythical career that is our destiny but for the lack of foresight that our inexperience engenders. I don’t believe that there is any “one” career we’re meant to pursue, any more than there is one potential romantic partner for us in the world. As we evolve, so do our interests and our passions, and we may choose to redirect our energy to solving new things that matter to us.
What is essential, I believe, is to carry out the introspection required to ascertain what it is that we truly care about, and to have that inform our career choices, rather than be passively led by whatever opportunities happen to present themselves to us. While we may be happy with a short-term opportunity, it may lead us down a path we’re ultimately dissatisfied with. Much better to project the future version of ourselves we want to be, and reverse engineer what we need to do to get there all the way to the present day. That way, we can be more confident that what we decide to do next has relevance to us, and will make any rough patches that we encounter along the way more tolerable. As Nietzsche once said, “he who has a ‘why’ can deal with almost any ‘how’”.
Above all else, it is important to remember that you are not your job. While it is important to carry out your working life with intention, it is fundamental that you do not tie your identity to your work. Who you are is so much more than that, and you should never forget it.