Excerpt:“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky, “all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”

How to Find Fulfilling Work

by Maria Popova

On the art-science of “allowing the various petals of our identity to fully unfold.”

“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,” wrote Dostoevsky, “all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” Indeed, the quest to avoid work andmake a living of doing what you love is a constant conundrum of modern life. In How to Find Fulfilling Work (public library) — the latest installment in The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living, which previously gave us Philippa Perry’s How to Stay Sane and Alain de Botton’s How to Think More About Sex — philosopher Roman Krznaric (remember him?)explores the roots of this contemporary quandary and guides us to its fruitful resolution:

The desire for fulfilling work — a job that provides a deep sense of purpose, and reflects our values, passions and personality — is a modern invention. … For centuries, most inhabitants of the Western world were too busy struggling to meet their subsistence needs to worry about whether they had an exciting career that used their talents and nurtured their wellbeing. But today, the spread of material prosperity has freed our minds to expect much more from the adventure of life.
We have entered a new age of fulfillment, in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning.

Krznaric goes on to outline two key afflictions of the modern workplace — “a plague of job dissatisfaction” and “uncertainty about how to choose the right career” — and frames the problem:

Never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles, and been so unsure what to do about it. Most surveys in the West reveal that at least half the workforce are unhappy in their jobs. One cross-European study showed that 60 per cent of workers would choose a different career if they could start again. In the United States, job satisfaction is at its lowest level — 45 per cent — since record-keeping began over two decades ago.

Of course, Krznaric points out, there’s plenty of cynicism and skepticism to go around, with people questioning whether it’s even possible to find a job in which we thrive and feel complete. He offers an antidote to the default thinking:

There are two broad ways of thinking about these questions. The first is the ‘grin and bear it’ approach. This is the view that we should get our expectations under control and recognize that work, for the vast majority of humanity — including ourselves — is mostly drudgery and always will be. Forget the heady dream of fulfillment and remember Mark Twain’s maxim. “Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.” … The history is captured in the word itself. The Latin labormeans drudgery or toil, while the French travail derives from the tripalium, an ancient Roman instrument of torture made of three sticks. … The message of the ‘grin and bear it’ school of thought is that we need to accept the inevitable and put up with whatever job we can get, as long as it meets our financial needs and leaves us enough time to pursue our ‘real life’ outside office hours. The best way to protect ourselves from all the optimistic pundits pedaling fulfillment is to develop a hardy philosophy of acceptance, even resignation, and not set our hearts on finding a meaningful career.
I am more hopeful than this, and subscribe to a different approach, which is that it is possible to find work that is life-enhancing, that broadens our horizons and makes us feel more human.
[…]
This is a book for those who are looking for a job that is big enough for their spirit, something more than a ‘day job’ whose main function is to pay the bills.

'Never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles, and been so unsure what to do about it.'

As we turn the corner of the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, Krznaric reminds us of the pivotal role the emancipation of women played in the conception of modern work culture:

If the expansion of public education was the main event in the story of career choice in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth it was the growing number of women who entered the paid workforce. In the US in 1950 around 30 per cent of women had jobs, but by the end of the century that figure had more than doubled, a pattern which was repeated throughout the West. This change partly resulted from the struggle for the vote and the legitimacy gained from doing factory work in two World Wars. Perhaps more significant was the impact of the pill. Within just fifteen years of its invention in 1955, over twenty million women were using oral contraceptives, with more than ten million using the coil. By gaining more control over their own bodies, women now had greater scope to pursue their chosen professions without the interruption of unwanted pregnancy and childbearing. However, this victory for women’s liberation has been accompanied by severe dilemmas for both women and men as they attempt to find a balance between the demands of family life and their career ambitions.

Another culprit Krznaric points to in the stymying of our ability to find a calling is the industrial model of education:

The way that education can lock us into careers, or at least substantially direct the route we travel, would not be so problematic if we were excellent judges of our future interests and characters. But we are not. When you were 16, or even in your early twenties, how much did you know about what kind of career would stimulate your mind and offer a meaningful vocation? Did you even know the range of jobs that were out there? Most of us lack the experience of life — and of ourselves — to make a wise decision at that age, even with the help of well-meaning career advisers.

Krznaric considers the five keys to making a career meaningful — earning money, achieving status, making a difference, following our passions, and using our talents — but goes on to demonstrate that they aren’t all created equal. In particular, he echoes 1970s Zen pioneer Alan Watts and modern science in arguing that money alone is a poor motivator:

Schopenhauer may have been right that the desire for money is widespread, but he was wrong on the issue of equating money with happiness. Overwhelming evidence has emerged in the last two decades that the pursuit of wealth is an unlikely path to achieving personal wellbeing — the ancient Greek ideal of eudaimonia or ‘the good life.’ The lack of any clear positive relationship between rising income and rising happiness has become one of the most powerful findings in the modern social sciences. Once our income reaches an amount that covers our basic needs, further increases add little, if anything, to our levels of life satisfaction.

The second false prophet of fulfillment, as Y-Combinator Paul Graham has poignantly cautioned and Debbie Millman has poetically articulated, is prestige. Krznaric admonishes:

We can easily find ourselves pursuing a career that society considers prestigious, but which we are not intrinsically devoted to ourselves — one that does not fulfill us on a day-to-day basis.

Krznaric pits respect, which he defines as “being appreciated for what we personally bring to a job, and being valued for our individual contribution,” as the positive counterpart to prestige and status, arguing that “in our quest for fulfilling work, we should seek a job that offers not just good status prospects, but good respect prospects.”

Rather than hoping to create a harmonious union between the pursuit of money and values, we might have better luck trying to combine values with talents. This idea comes courtesy of Aristotle, who is attributed with saying, ‘Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.’

Krznaric quotes the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, who wrote over a century ago:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, arms stretched out wide, is the quintessential symbol of the Renaissance wide achiever.

And yet, Krznaric argues, a significant culprit in our vocational dissatisfaction is the fact that the Industrial Revolution ushered in a cult of specialization, leading us to believe that the best way to be successful is to become an expert in a narrow field. Like Buckminster Fuller, who famously admonished against specialization, Krznaric cautions that this cult robs us of an essential part of being human: the fluidity of character and our multiple selves:

Specialization may be all well very well if you happen to have skills particularly suited to these jobs, or if you are passionate about a niche area of work, and of course there is also the benefit of feeling pride in being considered an expert. But there is equally the danger of becoming dissatisfied by the repetition inherent in many specialist professions. … Moreover, our culture of specialization conflicts with something most of us intuitively recognize, but which career advisers are only beginning to understand: we each have multiple selves. … We have complex, multi-faceted experiences, interests, values and talents, which might mean that we could also find fulfillment as a web designer, or a community police officer, or running an organic cafe.
This is a potentially liberating idea with radical implications. It raises the possibility that we might discover career fulfillment by escaping the confines of specialization and cultivating ourselves as wide achievers … allowing the various petals of our identity to fully unfold.

Krznaric advocates for finding purpose as an active aspiration rather than a passive gift:

“Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies,” wrote Albert Camus. Finding work with a soul has become one of the great aspirations of our age. … We have to realize that a vocation is not something we find, it’s something we grow — and grow into.
It is common to think of a vocation as a career that you somehow feel you were “meant to do.” I prefer a different definition, one closer to the historical origins of the concept: a vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment — meaning, flow, freedom — but that also has a definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.

And yet fulfilling work doesn’t come from the path of least resistance. He cites from Viktor Frankl’s famous treatise on the meaning of life:

What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Marie Curie didn't find her vocation. She grew it.

For a perfect example, Krznaric points to reconstructionist Marie Curie:

Curie was absolutely committed to her career. She lived an almost monastic lifestyle in her early years in Paris, surviving on nothing but buttered bread and tea for weeks at a time, which left her anemic and regularly fainting from hunger. She shunned her growing fame, had no interest in material comforts, preferring to live in a virtually unfurnished home: status and money mattered little to her. When a relative offered to buy her a wedding dress, she insisted that “if you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.” Before her death in 1934, aged 67, she summed up her philosophy of work: “Life is not easy for any of us,” she said. “But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

But while Curie’s career embodies the essential elements of meaning — she employed her intellectual talents in the direction of her passion for science, which she pursued with “Aristotelean sense of purpose” — Krznaric debunks theeureka! myth of genius and points out that Curie’s rise to vocational fulfillment was incremental, as she allowed her mind to remain open rather than closed in on her specialization, recognizing the usefulness of useless knowledge:

Marie Curie never had [a] miraculous moment of insight, when she knew that she must dedicate her working life to researching the properties of radioactive materials. What really occurred was that this goal quietly crept up on her during years of sustained scientific research. … Her obsession grew in stages, without any Tannoy announcement from the heavens that issued her a calling. That’s the way it typically happens: although people occasionally have those explosive epiphanies, more commonly a vocation crystallizes slowly, almost without us realizing it.
So there is no great mystery behind it all. If we want a job that is also a vocation, we should not passively wait around for it to appear out of thin air. Instead we should take action and endeavor to grow it like Marie curie. How? Simply by devoting ourselves to work that gives us deep fulfillment through meaning, flow and freedom. … Over time, a tangible and inspiring goal may quietly germinate, grow larger, and eventually flower into life.

A quick yet disproportionately enriching read, How to Find Fulfilling Work is excellent in its entirety. Complement it with this timelessly wonderful 1949 guide to avoiding work.

Excerpted from How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric. Copyright © 2012 by The School of Life. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. Reprinted by arrangement with Picador.

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Staying Sane: The Stories We Tell Ourselves And How TV Unchains Our Lesser Angels

September 7, 2014, 6:16 am

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Alan: We become what we perceive. Embroidering this theme, C.S. Lewis held that we grow through pretense - by "putting on" guises to which we eventually conform. I do not recall if Lewis discussed Paul's enjoinder to "put on Christ" but it is a case in point. When I contemplate the paralysis and incivility of American politics, I see a nation whose naysayers refuse to "put on hope," preferring instead to circle wagons, dig trenches and say "No!"

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"American Conservatives and Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html

"Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/republicans-for-revolution-study-in.html

How To Stay Sane: The Art of Revising Your Inner Storytelling

by Maria Popova

“Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life.”

“I pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity,” Jack Kerouac professed in discussing his writing routine. But those of us who fall on the more secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanity-preservation tool than prayer. That’s precisely what writer and psychotherapist Philippa Perry offers in How To Stay Sane (public library; UK), part of The School of Life’s wonderful series reclaiming the traditional self-help genre as intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living.

At the heart of Perry’s argument — in line with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s recent meditation on memory and how “narrative truth,” rather than “historical truth,” shapes our impression of the world — is the recognition that stories make us human and learning to reframe our interpretations of reality is key to our experience of life:

Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the present to provide us with structures for working towards our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the language of our left.
[…]
We are primed to use stories. Part of our survival as a species depended upon listening to the stories of our tribal elders as they shared parables and passed down their experience and the wisdom of those who went before. As we get older it is our short-term memory that fades rather than our long-term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.
I worry, though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war and atrocity.

Perry goes on to cite research indicating that people who watch television for more than four hours a day see themselves as far more likely to fall victim in a violent incident in the forthcoming week than their peers who watch less than two hours a day. Just like E. B. White advocated for the responsibility of the writer to “to lift people up, not lower them down,” so too is our responsibility as the writers of our own life-stories to avoid the well-documented negativity bias of modern media — because, as artist Austin Kleon wisely put it, “you are a mashup of what you let into your life.” Perry writes:

Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.
[…]
The meanings you find, and the stories you hear, will have an impact on how optimistic you are: it’s how we evolved. … If you do not know how to draw positive meaning from what happens in life, the neural pathways you need to appreciate good news will never fire up.
[…]
The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news.

Yet despite the adaptive optimism bias of the human brain, Perry argues a positive outlook is a practice — and one that requires mastering the art of vulnerability and increasing our essential tolerance for uncertainty:

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[…]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.

Another key obstruction to our sanity is our chronic aversion to being wrong, entwined with our damaging fear of the unfamiliar. Perry cautions:

We all like to think we keep an open mind and can change our opinions in the light of new evidence, but most of us seem to be geared to making up our minds very quickly. Then we process further evidence not with an open mind but with a filter, only acknowledging the evidence that backs up our original impression. It is too easy for us to fall into the rap of believing that being right is more important than being open to what might be.
If we practice detachment from our thoughts we learn to observe them as though we are taking a bird’s eye view of our own thinking. When we do this, we might find that our thinking belongs to an older, and different, story to the one we are now living.

Perry concludes:

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck.

Complement How To Stay Sane with radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s 1948 list of the six rules for creative sanity.

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New Yorker Cartoon: Knowing The Price Of Everything And The Value Of Nothing

September 7, 2014, 6:30 am

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"As you go through life, take time to monetize the roses."

***

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New Yorker Cartoon: Raising Baby And The Meaning Of Life

September 7, 2014, 6:38 am

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“I need to talk about my inner life.”

***

Alan: I once read a book called "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism."

Homo sapiens - especially the male of the species - prefer abstraction to diapers.

"Natural History is the antidote to piety."

Gregory Bateson

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New Yorker Cartoon: Coming To Terms With Life After Apocalypse

September 7, 2014, 6:42 am

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“It’s O.K. for now, but ultimately I’d like to work somewhere other than a post-apocalyptic world.”

***

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New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, September 8, 2014

September 7, 2014, 7:03 am

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"I love the theory. I just don't think veganism's working for me."

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Ian McEwan Novel Sympathetic To Jehovah's Witnesses' Opposition To Transfusion

September 7, 2014, 7:20 am

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NPR Audio File

http://www.npr.org/2014/09/05/346060805/in-the-children-act-the-electrifying-human-dimension-of-a-legal-drama

***

Ian McEwan's novels tend to be so well-made that they ought to come with a literary equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. You know you never have to worry about the writing; it's always first-rate. And the structure of a McEwan novel tends toward near-perfection too, with careful attention paid to the shape — and shapeliness — of the book. And you always feel the whole thing was put together by an unusually sharp intelligence. So when reading a novel by McEwan, you can probably take for granted that all of that will be in place.

What also frequently characterizes his books is the emphasis on a single, central event and its echoing consequences. That's true again now of The Children Act, a short, concise, strong novel in which a judge's ruling decides the fate of a teenage boy in ways she never intended or imagined.

But what's different here is that McEwan has, surprisingly, taken on a fairly familiar ripped-from-the headlines question: Who gets to decide the fate of a teenage boy with leukemia, whose family happens to be Jehovah's Witnesses, a religion that forbids the blood transfusion he desperately needs to stay alive?

But this being McEwan, the novel bears little resemblance to any newspaper article, Lifetime TV movie, or "issues" novel written by a more ordinary writer. Instead, though McEwan has described to the press parental decisions to let children die because of religious beliefs as "utterly perverse and inhumane"— what makes this book fine and masterful, what makes it a McEwan novel, is the human dimension revealed by the legal dilemma at hand.

Fiona Maye is an English judge of 59 whose husband comes home one evening to announce that because of the current state of near-sexlessness in their long marriage, he is considering having an affair, and he wants her blessing. Shocked and furious, she tells him to leave. This disturbance takes place on the very same night that Fiona has been presented with the Jehovah's Witness case. She decides that she needs to meet Adam, the critically ill 17-year-old refusing treatment, in order to rule on whether he is mature enough to understand all the ramifications of his momentous refusal.

I wasn't entirely comfortable with McEwan's long description of Fiona's childlessness, which seemed to run along familiar career-woman lines. But as usual he has done his legal, medical and ethics homework, and it was the only part of the book that didn't feel true.

When we meet the real, in-the-flesh Adam, as opposed to hearing about the paper description of him from the court briefs, the novel soars. "It was a long thin face, ghoulishly pale, but beautiful," McEwan writes, "with crescents of bruised purple fading delicately to white under the eyes ..." And a little later, "Then, as the door swung closed behind her with a pneumatic sigh, she gathered he was telling her how strange it was, he had known all along that she would visit him."

From the moment of this meeting, the novel seems guided by an elegant geometry. The pain of the faltering marriage is replaced with the tensions of the intensity between a middle-aged, distinguished female judge and a dying, sensitive boy. From this point on, the previously cool British novel, tightly constructed and insightfully written, enters the realm of passion and becomes memorable.

At 221 pages, this is one of McEwan's short novels, lacking the luxurious sprawl of Atonement,which many consider his masterpiece. Instead, it's a book that begins with the briskness of a legal brief written by a brilliant mind, and concludes with a gracefulness found in the work of few other writers. And in the end, it left me with a very particular reassuring feeling. I couldn't help but feel: Ian McEwan, I'd know you anywhere.

Meg Wolitzer is the author of The Interestings. Her YA novel, Belzhar, will be published in September.

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Billy Collins' Dog Poems. TED Radio Hour

September 7, 2014, 7:36 am

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More From This Episode

What can animals teach us about ourselves?

Animals And Us

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Animals And Us.

About Billy Collins' TED Talk

What do our dogs think when they look at us? Poet Billy Collins imagines the inner life of a former canine companion.

About Billy Collins

Billy Collins is a two-term U.S. Poet Laureate who captures readers with his understated wit and profound insight. Collins lives in Somers, N.Y., and is an English professor at City University of New York, where he has taught for more than 40 years. He's the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Aimless Love and Horoscopes For The Dead.

Web Resources

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California Blue Whale Population Bounces Back To Pre-Whaling Level

September 7, 2014, 7:57 am

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A California blue whale, 65-feet-long, swims off the coast of Baja California (Gilpatrick/Lynn/NOAA)

Blue Whale

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_whale

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the baleen whales (Mysticeti).^[3] At 30 metres (98 ft)^[4] in length and 170 tonnes (190 short tons)^[5] or more in weight, it is the largest existing animal and the heaviest that ever existed.^[6]

An adult human being can squirm through a blue whale's aorta.

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California blue whales bounce back from whaling

Rachel Feltman

Washington Post

Good news! According to a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, the endangered California blue whale population has probably returned to near pre-whaling levels. Bad news: They're the first set of blue whales to do so, and we still keep hitting them with ships.

The blue whale is a magnificent beast in the truest sense of the word. At close to 100 feet in length and weighing in at around 200 tons, they're the largest known animals on the planet. And they weigh two to three times as much as the heaviest known dinosaurs. A casual exhalation can send water shooting 30 feet high from out of a blue whale's blowhole, and their hearts weigh as much as a car. Despite that massive size, they can swim gracefully and (sort of) quickly: When agitated, they achieve speeds of more than 20 miles an hour.

But commercial whaling -- the hunting of whales for meat and oil -- hit worldwide populations hard. The hunting of blue whales for commercial purposes was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1966, and since then only illegal whaling (and incidental deaths related to other fishing, shipping, and pollution) have threatened the species. We know that the blue whale population in the North Pacific (most often spotted in California, as the whales migrate there during the summer) has now reached about 2,200, the largest known on earth. Researchers previously assumed that the pre-whaling population must have been much higher than that, but the authors of Friday's paper disagree.

The researchers used historical data to estimate the number of whales caught from each population between 1905 and 1971. They now estimate, based on the relative number of whales that were caught in the North Pacific, that the current population is actually at 97 percent of the historical one.

If California has always had a relatively small blue whale population, it explains why the area's population growth has slowed in recent years: It may be almost back to normal. The researchers believe that our nasty habit of running into whales with our ships (at least 11 were struck along the west coast last year) isn't actually a major concern. They believe that the population can maintain its stability regardless. "It's a conservation success story," lead author and University of Washington doctoral student Cole Monnahan said in a statement.

Still, the researchers said, it would be really, really great if we could stop ramming into endangered whales with our ships. California may have reached its capacity for healthy and happy blue whales, but we don't want to backtrack. As for the rest of the world's blue whale populations, there's still a long way to go.

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