One of the symptoms of a fractured culture is that the individual members of that culture or that society don't feel a sense of agency any longer (the ability to make decisions and act independently). They feel dispossessed from sovereignty and from the freedom to exercise their wills in ways that are meaningful. And we definitely occupy a culture like that now.
It begs the question, what is meaningful work? And how would I discern what that is?
That is tethered to another matter about what is good for the individual and what is good for the collective. We're constantly in a cultural battle between those two.
If we come all the way back, we ask questions first at the level of the individual: What kind of work am I suited to doing?
Unfortunately that is a question that many people hop over in the immediate aftermath of their education, and they enter into work that is oriented to the interests of the culture: making more money, more social capital in your position, pursuing credibility and status, et cetera.
As I say those things, you are probably already fatigued by the knowledge that you are following those impulses in some way.
Am I made for the work I am doing?
Is there something I was better suited to?
How did I actually make the decision for my career in the midst of my education?
Passion
I might invite you to ask the question, what are the interests of my heart? What are the things that I can't help but to think about? When I remember and recall my youth, what populated my mind, my interests, my hopes and my dreams?
Compared to your neighbor, you have particular interests in particular needs. Name those and enumerating those is a good idea.
Skills
What gifts and capacities do you have that can serve those interests? What are your natural abilities? Some of us are good at art, others of us are good at accounting and engineering, and others of us still are good in the human services and in the humanities.
These are the features of our personality that we can't help but to have. We had them at birth. This becomes a little bit of a roadmap for you.
Application
Which can lead to the next question: what kinds of work are there to occupy in our daily lives that could be aligned with who you are, instead of merely the interests that we're told by culture to have?
But what if we’re already far down the road?
That might bring us to this precipice: you might already be oriented in a career, and some of you may have been here for a decade already. It may feel like golden handcuffs because you like your salary, and yet, you’re losing a bit more of your soul every day.
You don't necessarily have to begin with planning to quit your work. But to ask, “what would be the next good thing that I could do?” A subtle change that I could make tomorrow that is aligned to the features of life that we were just speaking to and what that might look like for someone who's working your specific job in downtown Chicago?
A small change
Maybe you work in a cubicle at an enormous company. You don't feel like you could put a dent in the wall of change, but you do have a neighbor in the cubicle next to you that they've never met before.
I invite you to simply refuse to pass this person by without an authentic inquiry into their lives.
I'm gonna get to know them in some way, and maybe I'm gonna sustain that throughout the week. I'm not gonna let these five days go by without similar inquiries. I'm going to become more present to the people in my workplace.
And what good will that do?
You answer the call within yourself, which is the call of love in your life, and immediately that culture is beginning to change.
The beauty of it and the dignity that is connected to this is that the change wasn't something you had to wait to be enacted, it was something you gave your consent to. There is dignity connected to that immediately. You gain dignity in that action.
And the change in character connected to that is immediate. While your work structure may not be changing in terms of your role and its duties that's there to be discerned in a longer period of time, what you can change besides is what is immediately available to you in relational terms.
I urge you just to try – see what it feels like. Notice the change in yourself. How did you feel about your day?
We can make those changes effective immediately wherever we are, and we can be benefited by them and we can benefit others by them.
A story on moving outside ourselves
I was with the owner of a very successful business–a man in his early thirties–just a couple of days ago. He's a part of a group that he and his wife run together, and it involves gathering once a week with other people in their age demographic, in their early thirties. And one of the things that he was lamenting was the erosion of the social fabric. People have lost how to relate with their neighbors.
No doubt social media has had a big part to play in that: the movement of people into more and more digital spaces and augmented spaces away from just the basics of being human in bodily form in the company of others.
One of the things that was part of this lament for this young business owner was that they didn't know how to move beyond themselves any longer. They were obsessively focused on their wants. He was noting how impossible it is to experience communal forms when every individual is running their own empire without regard for their neighbor.
You may notice that we see that in other places too. Professional sports as an example: Not only is a young person drafted into their sport, but they also immediately have to begin developing their own brand. It's the cult of the self.
What might be the antidote to that? How could relationships be healed?
There is no substitute for the human benefit to the individual of taking keen interest in somebody else's wellbeing. The thing that wasn't happening in this community group setting was individuals being able to move beyond their selfish interests. This ends up being a very fear-based existence to only be looking out for yourself.
What it implies is that you don't have trust beyond your own agency. That's not the only worldview out there. There are other worldviews that say we are swimming through a universe that is presided over and inhabited by a creator that has our wellbeing and our best interests in mind.
And those disposed to that view are never running their own show. They're always in a dynamic collaboration with something beyond themselves, something that transcends them. You may have different views about that. There are a lot of different views about that. But to be able to rely on something beyond yourself is always the beginning of healthy change in communal forms.
The capacity to serve my neighbor in their needs is always the means to liberation from the fear and the petty interests that I might hold otherwise.
