Figuring Out What's Next

Too Long Didn't Read (TLDR):

Though I can’t tell you the answer to “what’s next”, as I am still searching, I can help you understand the difference between a job and a vocation. I think coming to understand the difference between the two will help reframe when and why you might be asking what’s next and maybe help you decide if you even need to be asking it at all.

Where a job asks you to work for work's sake, a vocation calls you to work for some larger purpose.

A job is what makes you money: you show up to collect a paycheck. You check the boxes, leave, look forward to the weekend. As the buzz around quiet quitters remains persistent, many quiet quitters are working a job because, to no fault of their own, they needed something to pay just the bills, their life has not afforded them the chance to freely choose their path, or they have not figured out what is truly calling them.

A vocation calls you to work for some larger purpose. No matter where one sits on Sunday, if one even sits at all, we all can agree that working for the betterment of the world around us, making each other’s lives easier, is a higher purpose or calling worth living for.

Having a job is not a calling. We are not meant to work for work's sake. We are meant to bring, love, charity, forgiveness, and hope to a broken world. That can be done from a drive-through, the driving seat of a bus, in front of a classroom, in a cubicle, online, in person, from home, or on the oil rig. It can be done from anywhere. It is done when the job is no longer a job, but a vocation: a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action.

I do not think you can avoid a few jobs that just pay the bills. I do not think there is a formula or set of steps that will guarantee finding your vocation at first go: no matter what the catchy book titles, Instagram posts, or podcasts tell you.

The simple fact is you will likely have to endure times of uncertainty and times you do not enjoy. To avoid this suffering is to avoid what makes life and the process of finding your vocation truly a life-giving process. I am not glorifying struggle, yet everything worth having involves some level of fight. To not struggle is to not live. To not toil is to remain fixed where you are. So, to those getting ready to figure out what’s next, expect a bit of adversity. Do not sidestep it. But know nothing is forever, it truly is for now.

I am still not sure how to find a vocation exactly, and that is okay. As every cliché states, we live in an age more connected than any other. With that in mind, I would love to hear from you and people in your network. What do you do: are you working a job, searching for meaning, found your calling? How did you end up here? What advice would you share with someone in high school, college, entering the workforce, or at any stage in their career? Rarely is there one story, reason, or answer!

The Full Scoop

As just over half my 26th year passes by, often, I find myself blankly staring off as the overwhelming feeling that haunted my senior year of college creeps back into my life.

What's next?

By the end of this academic school year, five years will have passed since I started teaching as a volunteer at Rockhurst High School with the Jesuits and ASC program, four years since I started full time with Strake Jesuit College Preparatory of Houston, and I will have completed a masters in Ed. Leadership in Catholic Schools through St. Louis University.?

What’s next?

This question lingers, haunting every new day, appearing when moments seem to be the most cliche and nostalgic, making it near impossible to fully enjoy the present experience.?

What’s next?

The question is one that I wager every person my age and younger asks themselves continually.

What’s next?

The question itself is incredibly complex. To ask what’s next implies there is a set plan or step-wise process to systematically journeying through life. Much like my students who diligently complete task after task, my own life, perhaps in its entirety, has been lived completing task after task in hopes that the tasks will end: all but assuming that each task I complete shortens my list of to-dos or my checklist of life objectives. As many of you know however, the tasks never really end. Instead, you are no longer told what to-dos are left or what order you should make your way through the imaginary checklist.

What’s next?

I would argue for much of all our lives, the answers to this plaguing question were pretty standard and followed the same progression: progress well in grade school, get good grades in middle school to get in to a good high school, get good grades in high school to get into a good college, get good grades in college to receive a diploma and get a job that will not even look at your grades, do good work at your job to make money.

But what’s next.

Our lives, for 23 years, build on a highly stressful intellectual progression, and, suddenly, much like New Year’s Eve, crescendos: the pageantry and gowns, celebration and recognition, the anticipation and release all come to a halting stop, and we sit, stand, lay, exist in the same spot we were just one year ago. To dispel the thought that as an educator I may be dissenting against the school system, I am not: I find my college graduation day, diploma in hand surrounded by family, spending the evening with all my friends, still the best day of my life. I love learning: it’s a simple as that.

Yet, I still wonder what’s next.

Since picking up Eat Pray Love my sophomore year of college, I have read Epstein, Grant, Ferris, Harris, Carnegie, Greene, Clear, Duckworth, Sinek, Burnett and Evans, and every other optimization, create your life, do great things author you can name. I cheekily classify this genre not as disrespect to the brilliant authors, both listed and unlisted, and not to cast doubt on their findings, work, and ideas. What is found in the covers of these books are well researched, fact based, unequivocal answers to how to do x or y, but no one answers what’s next.

Though I can’t tell you the answer to “what’s next”, as I am still searching, I can help you understand the difference between a job and a vocation. I think coming to understand the difference between the two will help reframe when and why you might be asking what’s next and maybe help you decide if you even need to be asking it at all.

Where everyone is looking for a vocation, I think most end up disgruntled with a job.??

We all know deep down, no matter how hard we fight, that we must work in order to sustain ourselves and those we love. The farce of never working a day in your life, for me, created this search for how to optimize my work so that I literally never worked at all: the irony is that at the point in publishing this, I am teaching an extra class, rewriting curriculum, coaching a fall and spring sport, completing a master’s degree, completing 4 different internships to complete 100 course work hours for my masters, all while trying to never work a day in my life.

Almost to perfectly, in my most recent grad school class, we read a summary of Robert Evans’ 1996 book THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCHOOL CHANGE: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-life Problems of Innovation.

Within the second paragraph, the summary made the claim that often the personal lives and needs of educators intrudes on their performance in the classroom.

Maybe my inner linguist is toying with the semantics a bit, but the use of the word intrudes, with the emphasis on the lives hampering performance, seems to highlight the issue many, educators, and non-educators, face in their work.?

For many, we strive to figure out a way to do our jobs and then do our lives: to segment these two parts into?different places.

When I moved to Texas, I bemoaned the fact that I spent copious amounts of time at work and subsequently my only friends were "work friends". Moving to a new city, miles from any family or close friends, somehow the idea of my friends being those that I worked with lessened the value or quality of the relationships: yet four years later, these friends have made me laugh the hardest, grow the most, and carried me in times of need.

Back in 2019, when I wrote that you should Stop Doing What You Love. Its Killing You, I identified two types of people:

Person one would be the person who does in fact segment their lives. Originally, I noted these people absolutely hated their job; however, let us instead say these people are not really investing beyond the minimum in order to maintain a life and existence completely separate from their job. They are doing the bare minimum to get by. Interestingly enough, this seems to be the big buzz with quiet quitting currently.

Person two would be the person who does not segment their life from their work. Though they do not live to serve their job, the have blended their life and their work as they are deeply enthralled by what they do. Spending time outside of the office or investing resources beyond the basics does not bother them. Originally, I noted these individuals adopted the overused, and failed, phrase Do What You Love and Never Work a Day in Your Life, and, because of their love, they are running themselves into the ground at an exponential rate.

I need to backtrack a bit on what I said about people falling into category two. I was young, naive, and as my mother said, "lack life experience".

If you read the article and take the chance to see my mind some three years ago, you will see the typical "disenfranchised American college student who goes abroad and thinks an excess of leisure is the solution to the inevitable necessity to work".

Though the points made are relevant, figuring out who you are and what you like so you can live fulfilled life, making sure you are taking care of yourselves, taking breaks, and not making drastic career changes on a whim, there are some points I got wrong.

I use the word job and vocation synonymously.

Where everyone is looking for a vocation, most end up disgruntled with a job.?

The job is what makes you money. You show up to collect a paycheck. You dreadfully roll out of bed, feign a smile and laugh at coworker jokes. You admonish being asked into a meeting or any duties as assigned roles: you check the boxes, leave, look forward to the weekend where you run away from responsibilities on Saturday and fight the scaries on Sunday wondering where you went wrong in life. Many quiet quitters are working a job because, to no fault of their own, they fell into the "get good grades and get a good job trap". Returning to the seemingly backwards idea that our personal lives intrude on our performance at work, it seems jobs intrude on our performance in life: I struggle to imagine living a fulfilled life in these circumstances.

I am not here to say the modern school system, created to offset the need to keep children occupied after child labor laws were enforced with a curriculum set by wealthy business owners who needed efficient workers, is the issue. A problem, yes, but the sole issue no.

In my opinion, based on articles, blog posts, tweets, reels, tik toks, and influencers, the larger society pushes this idea that what you do for work should not be your life. I think this is wrong. I think this thought process was created at the same time the foundational aspects of the modern school system was: years ago.

The pseudo-marxist outlook that the boss or company is this evil entity hell bent on driving its workers into the ground for profit seems a bit misguided.

See, if you work a job, where you have no interest in what you do, who you do it with, who you do it for, or why you do it, the frustrations?that arise from living an unfulfilled life will manifest and direct themselves at whomever is forcing you to work: ignore the fact you took the job.

Yes, this does not address education inequalities that lead to job access or generational wealth disparities that force certain people to take job as opposed to finding a vocation: so, my snide remark may be a bit misplaced.

However, what I do want to focus on is the need to differentiate a job from a vocation. Maybe this has been done before, and I missed that note, but I hope that I can save someone the trouble of having to wait for 26 years to begin to think about the difference.

Where a job asks you to work for work's sake, a vocation calls you to work for some larger purpose. As a Catholic, I believe that is to God, but for those who are of other faiths, or no faith at all, that purpose is different. However, I do think we all can agree that working for the betterment of the world around us, making each other’s lives easier is a higher purpose or calling worth living for.

I think every job CAN do that.

I remember being at a Pick n' Save back home in Milwaukee. I was a high school student on the cusp of graduation, pondering the next four years of my life and beyond. I watched an elderly man bag my groceries and asked my mom, “how can we go to all this schooling, just to bag groceries? Something seems off.” It would not be until I later worked at a grocery store that I saw how bagging groceries, taking a cart to someone’s car and unloading it, or even casually having a conversation with a customer was more than it appeared.

Bagging the groceries for the busy parent, taking the thanksgiving supplies to the car of a grandmother, or talking to the gentleman who shops every morning at the same time since his wife passed, these all can be a vocation: they call us to work for the betterment of the lives of those around us. Not everyone sees it that way, nor did I when I was going through it, and that is okay, but that awareness is what shifts going to work because I have to, to, going to work because I want to.

Not everyone has the luxury of getting to pick and choose the job they have. Circumstances may dictate you have to get a job right away to pay for x, y, or z. You are working the job to meet some unfulfilled need in your life, and that is okay too. For most of us, this is where we are anyway.?

However, as soon as that need is met, it is imperative to move to find a job that meets the larger need to feel like you are doing something. That feeling will be different for everyone.

As a teacher, I have struggled to rectify that my job calls me to bring work home, not have full weekends, take care of other people's children, or a whole host of other things. But the truth is I don’t have a job. I have a vocation that calls me to serve to make the lives of others easier, and, for that reason, I love what I do and will continue to place the educational needs of my students as a priority. Once again, this will look different for everyone. Moreover, there does still exist a need for self-care and boundaries, but those boundaries that I talked about in 2019 shouldn’t stop you from doing what you are called to do.

Yes, I will state hearing that call is exponentially easier, and has a bit more insurance if you are someone who prays or has any sort of faith life. Yet, formed or not, we all possess a conscience that will guide us. Having a job is not a calling. We are not meant to work for work's sake. We are meant to bring, love, charity, forgiveness, and hope to a broken world. That can be done from a drive through, the driving seat of a bus, in front of a classroom, in a cubicle, online, in person, from home, or on the oil rig. It can be done from anywhere. It is done when the job is no longer a job, but a vocation: a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action.

Some three years later, I am not sure if doing what you love is actually killing you. Likely, doing a job for the sake of paying bills is killing you. Though I write to those who are coming up in the grade centric, get a job society, as well as those like myself wondering what’s next, I do not think there is a way to avoid the very real step in life of deciding what you want your life to look like.

I do not think you can avoid a few jobs that just pay the bills. Can you fall into your vocation? Yes. However, I do not think there is a formula or set of steps that will guarantee that: no matter what the catchy book titles, Instagram posts, or podcasts tell you.

I think I have looked in books and to the worldly thinkers hoping for a magic bullet: they all seem to tout headlines that will change your life, but I don’t think there really is a way to change your life in the drastic, near instantaneous manner some seem to posit.

The simple fact is you will likely have to endure times of uncertainty and times you do not enjoy. To avoid this suffering is to avoid what makes life and the process of finding your vocation truly a life-giving process. I am not glorifying struggle, yet everything worth having involves some level of fight. To not struggle is to not live. To not toil is to remain fixed where you are. So, to those getting ready to figure out what’s next, expect a bit of adversity. Do not sidestep it. But know nothing is forever, it truly is for now.

I am still not sure how to find a vocation exactly, and that is okay. As every cliché states, we live in an age more connected than any other. With that in mind, I would love to hear from you and people in your network. What do you do: are you working a job, searching for meaning, found your calling? How did you end up here? What advice would you share with someone in high school, college, entering the workforce, or at any stage in their career? Rarely is there one story, reason, or answer!

I hope this was time well invested and provided you some tidbit to takeaway. I chuckled when I considered ever making a LinkedIn as an English major in college, but here I am, writing to you all. But hey, life is funny like that.