Voluntary Simplicity

Andrea Runyan

Originally published by The Stanford Daily, July 20, 2006

At a networking party I went to last weekend, people brought up the increasingly widespread conviction that people should choose jobs that contribute to their life goals and that they enjoy work more than whatever they do when they’re not at work. I agree. Ideally, people should spend their lives doing things they enjoy and believe in. But I think this approach to jobs actually has a few drawbacks.

First, if you expect to fulfill your life purpose through a job, you might neglect or fail to create life goals unrelated to work. The very question, “What job is my calling?” implies that one’s calling is precisely a job — and no more.

But there might be other things you want to do with your life that you can’t get paid for. To demonstrate how the question “What do you want to do with your life?” usually means “What paid career do you want to have?” my friend and I took to answering it with blatantly non-lucrative goals like “I want to be a housewife,” “I want to reduce the work week,” or “I want to lead the socialist revolution.”

I can think of only one person I’ve met who was living with a non-paying primary life goal — Martin Krieg. We met outside Palo Alto Whole Foods as we were getting on our bikes. As usual in friendly exchanges including at least one Stanford student, the conversation came around to what I wanted to do with my life. I described some of the careers I reluctantly was considering, followed with “but, what I really care about is ….”

“Forget about the first part of that sentence,” Krieg said, “and focus on what you really want to accomplish. Is helping some investment firm make more money what you really want to do with your life?”

Krieg himself had worked as an accountant before being paralyzed in a car wreck, leading doctors to assume he’d never recover. He managed to rehabilitate himself through biking and with his new lease on life decided to work on his real goal — making “heaven on earth” in the form of a national bicycle highway from Boston to San Francisco. He and others have made considerable progress on this project, which you can check out at http://nationalbicyclegreenway.com/. His experiences suggest a method of choosing what to do with your life; perhaps an even better question than the standard, “What would you do if you had only x months or years left in your life?” is “What would you do if you recovered from nearly dying?” In a way, this is what we should be doing anyway, since we’re all recovering from nearly not existing, and being alive is quite unlikely and precious for all of us.

In any event, it’s unlikely someone would think of making a national bike greenbelt, or indeed, doing most of the things people would do with second leases on life, if they were doing a job-first query about what to do with their lives. I feel like too often, we go through lists of jobs, trying to pick the one that matches our goals best, rather than going down lists of our goals, trying to think of what jobs would help us to achieve them.

Secondly, I think the assumption, “There’s a job out there that I could enjoy — I need to find a job that I enjoy” can lead people to assume that whatever it is they love most must be a profession. Even as we try to find jobs that we enjoy, we shouldn’t forget that some of the things we enjoy aren’t jobs and never should be, like hanging out with friends and family.

There’s an interesting exercise that circulates in Voluntary Simplicity circles: List the ten activities you most enjoy. Then list the ten activities that occupy most of your time. Compare the two lists.

So in conclusion, while it’s good to look for a job that contributes to life purpose and enjoyment, it might be an even better idea to choose life goals and identify what you enjoy first, and then choose a life path that will help you to pursue those things.