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Comment by fortes | Hacker News Reader

Most interesting quote (in my opinion):

Job vs. Calling

The distinction is artificial but worth drawing. A job will never satisfy you all by itself, but it will afford you security and the chance to pursue an exciting and fulfilling life outside of your work. A calling is an activity you find so compelling that you wind up organizing your entire self around it — often to the detriment of your life outside of it.

There’s no shame in either. Each has costs and benefits. There is no reason to make a fetish of your career. There are activities other than work in which to find meaning and pleasure and even a sense of self-importance — you just need to learn how to look.

Having something that is both a calling & a job may be a luxury or a curse. I have yet to find it, so they've been separate for me so far.

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This too: some of your anxiety is caused by your desire for the benefits of each -- job and calling -- without the costs.

I think every young person, including myself, tries to have it all and we don't realize that something has to be sacrificed. For awhile I wasn't willing to fully dedicate myself to my startup because I knew that to do the best I could it would have to become my life. What killed me was that I had just graduated and felt that I would lose all my great new friends and lose my weekend social life. It took me a couple months to realize -- So what?

Unless it's your health or spouse/kids, pretty much anything is worth the perceived "sacrifice" when you're pursuing your own calling. Waking up each day with that enveloping purpose and drive is such an awesome feeling.

Unless it's your health or spouse/kids, pretty much anything is worth the sacrifice when you're pursuing your own calling. Waking up each day with that enveloping purpose and drive is such an awesome feeling.

The flip side, which I think I am on the verge of experiencing, is that to sacrifice having the feeling of purpose and drive might end up costing you your health and/or family.

Never underestimate the toll that denying yourself can have on your health and relationships.

That is a hard lesson to learn. Good luck.

One technique is to have a set time set aside where you focus totally on, say, family. For me, it is Sundays at 3pm. I have a videoconference with my folks, and for that hour I am theirs, completely. The benefits to having a regular schedule increase the potency of the interaction, as it provides an anchor, rhythm and excuse.

As for your health, well, my grampa used to say "your health is your wealth". That is still a lesson I am trying to learn.

Unless I'm misreading you, it looks like you're addressing a different problem. The parent comment was about how sacrificing your deeper needs (presumably in service of family, or a concept of family) can backfire and end up harming the thing it was intended to preserve.

My first line sympathizes with the truth that denying yourself is detrimental.

In my next bit I am suggesting that you do not need to sacrifice your "deeper needs" (to use your language) in order to have a meaningful family life. Further, I am suggesting that there are auxiliary benefits to the particular technique that I propose.

Ok, I see. I think I did misread you then.

You're not the only person I've heard from to experience that feeling, although you are the first I've heard from to be so candid about the costs of such sacrifice. Others I've discussed these feelings with still feel an unerring duty to sacrifice themselves to their families. It seems that the prevailing wisdom of families would be that feelings of family instability are a result of not sacrificing enough, and that one ought to sacrifice more. I fear at least one may not realize what is happening until he loses what he is sacrificing himself to. I get the vaguely foreboding sense that his situation is not all that unique. Thank you for this. Although I shouldn't need such validation, it helps to hear someone else say what I've been wondering about for some time; it helps counter the rhetoric of those who suggest I will be a bad parent for wondering how much sacrifice is really healthy for the individual and the family, and not immediately answering as much as humanly possible.

Aye, this also has truth. I always hold the opinion that my parents sacrificed too much, they set out and worked long hours in hope to provide a better future for themselves and me. However they did not revise their thinking, and even 10 years down the road when finance was no longer an issue they're still inexplicably drudging along, all in the name of sacrifice.

This illustrates that sacrifice prolonged has dangers, namely it dulls purpose, and gives you an excuse to choose a passive approach to life.

This type of sacrifice is different in the sense you're sacrificing for 'a better life' as opposed to sacrificing for 'your purpose' or the purpose of your family. And its very dangerous to sacrifice for 'a better life' per se, because we humans are never satisfied ;p

Aye this has truth, looking back I pretty much wasted my university years playing games because I was not willing to sacrifice the comfort of living with parents and moving out, which would have forced me to work and given me more purpose.

As a result I learned little (of coursework anyway), my health deteriorated (played too much games), and there was tension in the family relationships because you can sense when someone is wasting their lives.

Which is the long version of: Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)

I wasted life even whilst knowing it was wrong, but what you have to do is give yourself a purpose, and getting that purpose is the hardest thing.

If I could have added more points, I would have.

I'm trying to work my way out of a life of feeling dread every Sunday evening. Several solutions that look right for me: 1. start my own business 2. get back into a small company, possibly a small non-profit, and have lower pay but greater creative input 3. go into teaching 4. some combination of the above

I thought about going to graduate school and trying to get into academics. The thought of researching and teaching is appealing. However, I'm not encouraged by what I've read recently about the costs involved with it.

As an aside a colleague of mine is to the point of waking in cold sweats because he hates the job so much. I'm not that bad......yet.

I don't hate my job. I hate the person I am at my job, I have no passion for my company's mission, and I feel like I am missing out on something better.

I don't intend anything I say in regards to jobs or callings as advice, just as a data point. When I took the safe route 11 years ago, I never imagined what I was risking.

At this point, I regret not believing in myself and not having the courage to try - even if it meant failing - much earlier in my life. I settled for a sort of half-life, in which I am happy in my personal life but not in my career or in my greater contribution to the world. For me, that's just not sustainable for another 30 years.

That shows some remarkable insight. Yes, the job is what it is; the company is what it is. You aren't a match. The question is what are you going to do now? Having a family I don't have the luxury of picking up and doing something else on a whim. My plan extends over a few years with small steps along the way. People in "mid-career" can still change but they need to be patient, have more of a plan, and have a spouse who is supportive.

Very much so. This is a particularly insidious problem, because it starts out small and for reasons that nobody would question - indeed, that everyone praises. A few years go by and then poof, ten years go by, by which time what's really keeping you down is the power of habit, much more so than other people. As Gene Clark sang, The longer you're in one place, The harder it gets to leave.

Since you say "which I think I am on the verge of experiencing", I'll mention a couple of things I found helpful in struggling with this. One is Jerry Weinberg's profound statement, "Never mistake the end of an illusion for the start of a crisis." That's important because those two things call for different kinds of action. The other is that relationships can shift. If you make changes, the system that has been in place can adjust and rebalance, even though it's hard and "it" doesn't want to because "it" always wants to stay the same.

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