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Purpose: Blessing and Curse
Why knowing your calling in life can be both a good and bad thing.
My 52-year-old husband is in transition. Like so many pandemic casualties, he got laid off earlier this year from the company he was with for 21 years. He’s been feeling overwhelmed and is finding job-hunting to be terrifying. “My problem is, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so I don’t know what to look for,” he tells me.
One of my closest friends — a very well-paid HR executive at a prestigious international bank — was recently hospitalized after experiencing burnout (“Is that even really a thing?” I had thought when I had heard the news). She’s worked for this bank for almost 16 years now and as I chatted with her while she was in a hospital bed, she told me, “I hate more than 50 percent of what I do. It’s boring and purposeless, but I can’t stop, because if I do well, next year, I might get promoted and they’ll bump my salary up to as much as US$350,000 a year. I might consider leaving if only I could figure out what I really want to do”.
“If you’ll be bringing home that much money, who cares about purpose?” I said to her in jest. Of course, I don’t believe that for a second. As an avowed creative writer, when it comes to work, there is no other way to labor but with passion and a good dash of madness.
