“Find Your Calling” is Terrible Advice
There’s a great Pete Holmes joke that goes, “There was a time that if you didn’t know where Tom Petty was from, you just didn’t know.”
He’s right. That time was about 20 years ago. I remember those days, but my younger sibling doesn’t. The other week I explained to a friend what dial-up-internet is, and she was only born a year after I was. It’s no wonder that my grandparents never bothered to learn how to use smartphones. They watched technology improve so quickly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that they probably assumed that 5 years after the iPhone came out, someone would invent glasses with a computer in them, Spy Kids style. And guess what? They were right.
We now live in a time where the concept of not knowing something doesn’t really make sense. Have a question about literally anything? Spend 10 seconds on your phone and you can likely find the answer. There are experts at anything, everywhere you look. In the midst of this, we’ve all been told by parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, YouTubers, graduation speakers, and self-help authors that we should find our “calling in life.” Considering that curiosity and wonder have been effectively replaced by instantaneous access to virtually all information, I’ve started wondering how exactly we are supposed to do that.
When I was in high school I took one of those “career tests” and it told me my skills and interests were a 100% match for a career as a chimney sweep. Nevermind the fact that this test matched me with a career that was basically rendered obsolete with the invention of the electric fireplace, the test also gave me 25 other career results that were at least an “80% match.” It also recommended dozens of different skills, experiences, and college degrees that I should pursue in order to turn one of these results into my career. In the eyes of my high school guidance counselor, this test probably seemed highly useful. In my experience, being told at 16 that I might make a pretty good teacher, youth pastor, mechanic, politician, dentist, and chimney sweep — but to just choose one of the above — was paralyzing.
In the age of instant access to all information, how are any of us supposed to “find our calling” in the first place?
It’s obvious that students today struggle with this. 1 in 3 college students change their major at least once, resulting in only 41% of undergraduates graduating in 4 years. It’s not hard to understand why. 30 years ago, students might read a few flyers, talk with their parents and friends, and possibly consult an academic advisor about what they want to do after college, and make a decision. Today, students receive input from social media, TikTok influencers, strangers on online forums like Reddit, and sites like LinkedIn, as well as friends, family, and teachers about what their calling might be.
In his book Born a Crime, Trevor Noah said, “You can only dream of what you can imagine,” and today’s students have the technology available to imagine hundreds of different callings at once. How can we expect teenagers to sift through all of the noise, choose something, and believe it’s their one true calling?
I work with college students for a living, and I’m not terribly concerned with whether my students find their career calling while attending our university. Call that a hot take, but I’m entirely convinced that they have been hardwired to worry about those things since they were kids. I’m more concerned with equipping them with skills to use their free time purposefully once they graduate.
There is enough content on Netflix, YouTube, and social media to consume all of my students’ free time without giving them time to stop and think about whether they really signed up to have all of their time sucked up by these things. It seems like the more my students spend defaulting to these platforms in their free time, the more aimless they report their free time feeling. The bigger problem is that no one is teaching them how to deal with that issue because the assumption is that they need to worry about getting “a good job” and everything else will work itself out.
The thing is, I’ve seen student after student land great jobs and report that they still aren’t happy. That’s a pretty clear indication that “find your calling” is terrible advice.
Instead of spending 100% of my time trying to help students find their calling, I believe I owe it to the young people in my life to prepare them for a successful life outside of their careers. I’m convinced that training students to develop healthy and productive free time habits is equally as important as training them for successful careers. Ultimately, when we lack meaningful pursuits in our free time, we spend our time outside of work feeling indecisive, unproductive, and purposeless. That’s not a recipe for showing up to work full of energy and motivation, regardless of whether you’ve found your passion or not.
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If any of these ideas made you stop and think, I invite you to join me on my mission to help people fill their free time with purpose. I’ve developed 3 rules for eliminating aimlessness in free time, and I write guides for purposeful free time activities, like reading, yoga, cooking, and meditation.
I was inspired for this article by Cal Newport’s work in his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Adam Grant’s “Work Life” podcast.
