Committment Hierarchy
R. A. Snider, developing
There are categorical differences between the things we do, and people have a habit of jumbling these things up. I posit a commitment hierarchy, populated in ascending order by interests, hobbies, occupations, careers, and callings, and men and women are forever confusing them with one another; not so much interests and hobbies, but certainly occupations, careers and callings. “Career”, a word for which I’ve developed an intense dislike bordering on hatred (for its persistent misuse), is one of the great idols of the modern age. (Honestly, what farmer ever called farming his “career”? To be certain, it is his career, but he’d hardly call it that. It’s simply what he does, and has always done, and will always do until his days are done.) It has become practically synonymous with “religion”, or “god”, in the minds of 21st century working men and women, some sacrosanct thing that must never be questioned or criticized, lest we offend someone’s sense of self-worth, or cause one to question the value of what they dedicate so much of their life to, willingly or not. A man, or increasingly, a woman, utters the word “career”, and we must all be expected to hold up our open hands, palms outward, to demonstrate we mean no offense, and oh, please forgive us for suggesting that what you’re actually laboring at is a job, an occupation, nothing more; an equitable exchange of your labor for wages earned, as though that were not honorable enough in itself. So to organize and define:
An interest is nothing more than that: an interest. Some subject, any subject, for which we possess an affinity. Some posit that we do not willingly choose our interests, rather that they choose us, and there is some merit to this, and one only has to recall his or her forced march through the suffocating fog of public school educations to find some support for this. Try as you might, you just weren’t going to be interested in civics, or trigonometry, or home-ec, but you were still expected to pretend that you were, and hammer out your assignments and pass your tests accordingly.
Interests aren’t nearly so much work as “non-interests”. When you’ve an interest, you’ve got something in front of you which you are hungry to explore and learn about, and figure out what makes it tick. Interests can be anything at all from sports to construction to gardening to tax law to deeply obscure pockets of specialized history, or literally anything else that can be conceived in the mind of Man, and when interest in something gets enough active attention from us, it becomes more than an interest. It becomes a hobby.
A hobby is an interest that receives a more significant amount of our activity. An interest in fishing easily becomes a hobby when you buy your first rod and tackle and put yourself out on the lake to catch fish, more than once. Hobbies, like woodworking, playing guitar, oil painting, quilting, gardening, etc., can receive quite a lot of our attention and activity, and can vary significantly in intensity and dedication from casual to obsessive, but it’s never anything more than a hobby until you find a way to significantly monetize it. Once you do that, if you do that, you can convert it into an occupation. A job.
An occupation is what most working adults have, and what millions mistakenly call a career. It is not a career. An occupation, or job, is work that you engage in according to a more or less fixed schedule, and execute according to the standards of the trade, or company, or practice that represents the physical, occupational and conceptual environment in which the work must happen. In other words, it’s the work you clock into in the morning, and out of in the evening, go home from, and forget about until the next day. It’s a job, and you get paid, or “compensated”, for your labor according to the terms you and your employer agreed upon, usually an hourly wage. Sometimes it’s a monthly salary. Sometimes it’s piece-rate, and you get paid for what you accomplish rather than the time you spend with your caboose in a task chair, and your eyes glued to a monitor. It’s usually not something that follows you home and requires more of your time in the evening when you should be relaxing with your family or friends or significant other, and shouldn’t plague your thoughts into the night. This is, perhaps, a definition only half-refined, but it’s a pretty functional one.
For some reason, however, “occupations” and “jobs” don’t sound prestigious enough for many working men, women, and adolescents, in a society that’s had the importance of college educations and university degrees so grossly exaggerated to them by virtually everyone around them that anything short of complete embrace (read: drinking the kool-aid) is regarded as somehow lazy, unambitious, unintelligent, low, or worthy of some other likewise negative judgment. To be “working class” was once regarded as honorable. It still should be. Competent professionalism isn’t reserved exclusively for the degreed. It’s entirely in the mind of the man or woman or adolescent who is doing the work. Samuel Bissoondial, a former educator-turned-data manager from Guyana, for whom I worked at the turn of the century, told me more than once that “there is dignity in labor”. And he meant it.
A career is, compared to an occupation, a much rarer bird. Webster defines it variously as “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling (emphasis added)”, or “a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement especially in public, professional, or business life”. The latter is a bit ambiguous, and seems to overlap some with “occupation”, but what’s clear is that a true career is something you are given to. You don’t always clock out of a career at the end of the day. It follows you home, or it holds you at the office or studio well into the night. People with careers are judges, attorneys, physicians, architects, professors, politicians (though they should not be, in my opinion. Throw them all out after two terms at most, and reintegrate them into the working masses to very well earn their own way in society again, if they ever did to begin with), and such like. It’s not an all-inclusive list, but you get the idea.
People at large, especially in the western world, change occupations frequently, but they rarely change careers. You had a job at KFC frying chicken. It wasn’t a career. You quit that when you got tired of smelling like fried chicken all the time, and you got a job working at the Amazon fulfillment center slinging boxes. It wasn’t a career. You quit that for obvious reasons, and got a job in a call center taking customer calls or collecting bills. Congratulations. You switched from blue collar to white collar, but the wages weren’t any better than Amazon, and the only way up was out because the managers at the call center died at their desks, telling themselves that they had a “career”. You see where this is going. The work you did wasn’t low, or unworthy, or meaningless. It just wasn’t always exciting, sexy, prestigious, or highly paid. But it was work, and it earned money, moved the economy, and paid your bills, more or less, so why think of it as less worthy than the work of an architect? Or an attorney? Or a physicist? The only real difference between an occupation and a career is the degree to which the work owns you, and there are a lot of career professionals who are imprisoned in their work, and profoundly unhappy. Don’t think so? Doctors in 1980s-era communist China were not allowed to retire. Ever. Even in late 2000s, career professionals in India stayed locked in their respective lines of work whether they liked it or not, and many of them didn’t. At all.
A calling is a different matter entirely, owing to its source, and though it abides at the very top of the commitment hierarchy, it does so much like the detached and luminous peak of the pyramid on the back of a one-dollar bill; it’s still part of the greater structure, but it’s also above it, shining, one could say, with the light of divinity. This isn’t mere poetry. The source of a true calling is authentically divine, though many will call a “calling” what is only a career or an occupation for which they have a profound interest. This combination makes for a much more rewarding line of work, but it is not a calling. A calling may also be, or become, a career, but what sets it apart is its source: a Calling comes only from God.
When you start talking about callings, you venture into moral and spiritual territory, and not just professional. What the Chinese called “the mandate of heaven” is an excellent example, and a genuine calling is just that. Moses changed occupations, even careers, when he fled Egypt to escape a murder charge and wound up living in the desert for the next forty years. He went from being adopted Egyptian royalty to herding sheep. Neither his erstwhile royalty nor his work as a shepherd were callings. They were not divinely ordained or commanded, as such. But when God spoke to him out of a burning bush, He gave Moses a mandate, a mission, and Moses the shepherd now possessed a calling. Do we see the difference?
Often, those who speak of their work being a calling exaggerate, or use the term tongue-in-cheek. But someone with a true calling gives himself or herself to it so completely that it comes to defines their very identity. It isn’t just what they do, it’s what they are, and they will pursue that calling come hell or high water no matter how much or how little the pay is, and will even pursue it at a cost, sometimes, even at the cost of their life.