Are you trapped by “vocational awe”?
Be your own healthcare quarterback, a poem of forgotten passwords, & career change encouragement (Issue #335)
In writing about the on-going enshittification of tech jobs last month, mentioned a phrase that has been pinging around my brain ever since: “Vocational awe.” He defined it as “the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done.”
Librarian and academic Fobazi Ettarh coined the phrase in 2018, writing about burnout and low salaries among librarians and library staff; it’s since come to be used as a critique for a wide range of industries where the moral importance of the mission can be used to ask for sacrifices from workers, from non-profits and nursing to education and journalism.
For many people, there’s a hierarchy of needs at play at work. Finding a job that pays? Step one. Finding a job you like that pays? Now we’re talking. All that plus a job that makes the world a better place? Jackpot. That’s the dream, right?
But here’s where things get tricky: That third layer, the mission, can be used to undermine the first two. Employers — or whole industries — lean hard on the nobility of the cause to excuse low salaries, long hours, scope creep, and overwork. If your work is for a good cause, the logic goes, shouldn’t that be reward enough?
That’s vocational awe in action, it turns purpose into pressure. And it’s especially potent in fields where the mission is the draw — where people don’t just work a job, but feel called to it.
So what can you do? Two useful pieces of advice:
- Calibrate your expectations. In “The Burnout Puzzle: The Role of Expectations, Boundaries, and Ego,” Harvard Business School executive uses the analogy of the difference between a thermometer (rising a falling with the temperature) and a thermostat (detecting changes and adjusting): “The difference between burnout and resilience lies in how we manage our internal thermostat.”
- Understand the bigger picture (including yourself). I love the question that posed at the end of her story from last year, “Making meaning” and the struggle between finding meaning in work and being consumed by it: “Where can my work support the things that give me meaning — and what are the ways that it can’t?”
It is possible to both believe deeply in the mission and believe you deserve better. Those things aren’t in conflict. In fact, they’re both essential to making the mission actually work.
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What else we’re reading
- A nurse in the U.S. walks through how and why medical errors happen in the healthcare system, and gives this sage advice: Be your own quarterback for your healthcare, never assume the system is working for you. ()
- just received her doctorate in Information Science/AI ethics (congrats!), and documented her 297-week journey through academia on Medium by sharing the weekly “mission statements” she wrote for herself along the way — an inspirational experiment any of us could learn from, but also really interesting for seeing how her considerations re: AI and machine learning evolved during that nearly six year period.
- A lovely poem for the often-online amongst us (aka all of us), We Made a Bed from Forgotten Passwords by . Here’s the first stanza:
We made a bed from forgotten passwords,
threadbare phrases left behind by sleepy minds —
a mattress stuffed with half-remembered logins,
security questions whose answers
we stopped knowing long ago.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Do you want to change your career? Just do it, says Amy Ma, even if the statistics seem initially disheartening. “Don’t be afraid of probabilities. Even 99.999999% is not 100%. If you’re worried about the outcome, stop thinking about the outcome. Just do it for fun, for your mental health, for the chance to live without regrets.”
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