On a sunny afternoon in 2005, Steve Jobs exchanged his signature black turtleneck for a gown and red stole. Standing before the anxious crowd of Stanford graduates, he delivered the words that encapsulated the philosophy of the modern workforce: “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Jobs wasn’t the first to coin the idea “do what you love,” and he wouldn’t be the last. Sociologist Lindsey J. DePalma noted that the sentiment had already been growing for decades before Jobs took the commencement stage. Over twenty years later, the popular saying shows no signs of disappearing. A brief internet search brings up multiple books and even a dedicated website of courses that promise to “help you discover what makes you happy, monetise your passion and do what you love, for life.”
Today, thanks to the creation of job titles of Influencer and Content Creator, the idea that we can do what we love feels even more possible. We open up YouTube and wonder if we, too, could make a living out of building Legos, picking locks, or exploding stuff. That’s not to say that this belief only affects those looking to hit it viral on the internet. The rise of e-commerce has opened up the possibility of business careers involving any number of your favorite pastimes from embroidery to sticker-making. The push to turn passion into vocation affects seasoned workers as well as the young students standing at the start line of their future careers.
In his recent article, “How to Have a Day Job and an Intellectual Life,” John Ehrett touches on the consequences of this in young adults who felt forced to turn their intellectual passions into a career. Ehrett explains, “Somewhere along the way, smart young people seriously interested in relatively unmarketable ideas—in theology, philosophy, political theory, or what have you—have gotten the message that the only viable career path for them is academia.” The widespread counsel of “do what you love” served not only as an innocent encouragement, but as blinders that kept these students from imagining other possibilities.
Though finding delight and joy in your career isn’t a bad idea, it becomes problematic when we believe it is the only suitable option. In the same article Ehrett offers a few compelling reasons as to why one might not want to make their passion their primary profession, particularly in academia. What Ehrett diagnoses and seeks to alleviate stems from a broader problem that affects workers of all kinds. We have unknowingly accepted a diminished understanding of our labors. By buying into the utilitarian script of finding passion in our vocation, we have disregarded the existence of an immensely important category of life: avocation.
You probably can’t remember the last time you used or heard the word avocation. Usage has been in steady decline since the 1930s, yet for centuries it stood coupled alongside the more familiar and weighty word: vocation. In a time when work wasn’t primarily connected to passionate feeling but instead to necessity, the category of avocation provided an important opportunity. The word itself can be translated as “a calling away from one's occupation” into secondary interests. Farmers might make their living in the fields, yet enjoy carving wooden pieces of art in their spare time. Women might labor in their vocation as a mother or a teacher, yet enjoy rendering beautiful images with needle and thread by the fire. Avocation allowed room not only for a job that put food on the table, but for the opportunity to explore each individual’s God-given passions. Instead of competing, vocation and avocation moved together in a dance of two needed partners.
Eventually avocation fell out of favor and the word “hobby” rose in its place. Yet along with the exchange of words, we lost the fullness of avocation’s purpose. We began not to call away from vocations towards something meaningful, but instead turned our avocations back into labor. People became more interested in what they could produce, instead of the joy and delight of the process. Around the mid-20th century, German philosopher Josef Pieper warned about this “total work world” in which every action turned towards a utilitarian end. We’ve hardly heeded Pieper’s warnings, as contemporary writer Alan Noble has spent considerable time tracking the way this utilitarian perspective has pushed us to value efficiency in all kinds of avenues from Artificial Intelligence to mental health.
Today, this utilitarian way of life explodes within the realm of hobbies. We’ve not become content to only do what we love, but we have turned everything we love into something that must do—whether that’s providing money, subscriptions, or quantifiable change in our lives. We don’t only want to run, we need to complete a marathon and earn Strava points. We don’t merely want to decorate cakes, we want to earn some side money and potentially create a business. Traveling across the globe isn’t enough, we need to create a YouTube following on top of it.
It’s not that each of these decisions is always misguided. Goals, rewards, and additional income may be very helpful and even necessary depending upon your circumstances, yet beneath so many of these examples lies the erasure of avocation. There is no calling away from work, but a consistent calling towards further work and ultimately a utilitarian existence. Yet we weren’t ever made for such a life.
Our very creation from the dust of the ground was made out of superfluity (Acts 17:25). The beauty of golden-hour sun atop the grass and the detailed wings of a butterfly display to us each day that utility is not the only mark of value in this world. God has molded a world that upholds more than the efficient. Shouldn’t we follow suit and recognize, as Pieper implores, the common good of all people requires space for that which isn’t “useful work?”
Restoring avocation to its proper place forces us to adjust our distaste of it, for our utilitarian perspective has done a good job of degrading it. We brandish the word hobbyist on those who aren’t professionals. A hobbyist is often one who hasn’t given enough effort or enough time in order to be serious enough to be paid for it. In doing so we accept a dwarfed definition, that takes on its namesake—a hobbyhorse— and the idea that avocation is merely an “activity that doesn’t go anywhere.”
Yet this perspective veils the real potential in our avocations. True, they might not be our primary calling or earn us a paycheck, but they don’t need those requirements to form us in deeply meaningful ways. The times we call away from our vocation into classic literature expands our mind and schools us towards virtue. Our turning away into the dirt of the garden brings us opportunity for patience and worship of the God who made the tomatoes burst from a tiny seed. Our RC airplanes, furniture restorations, and weekly board games give us a chance to step out of doing, and into the humble act of receiving.
These activities may live in the margins of our lives, but it doesn’t make that passion any less important. Scripture continually reminds us of the value of faithfulness over grandeur and instructs us to not despise small beginnings (Zec. 4:10). All small steps add up. Imagine the growth you might see after spending just a short amount of time with watercolors every week? How much could you learn about woodworking by spending some weekends faithfully with the craft? How many academic books can you pour over during the stretches of time when you let yourself be called away from your primary occupation? These answers still involve some kind of measurement, yet to our utilitarian world, they will likely remain fairly insignificant. We should let them.
Steve Jobs’s commencement address may have held some truth about the nature of vocation, but it forgot to remind the listening graduates that many opportunities for great work exist outside of our 9-5. It rings out from the piano keys in a living room or in a sketch pad stuffed in the closet. It hides in the poem scribbled on a notepad, a novel on the nightstand, or in a tray of croissants. These great works were used by God to shape and build the person who called away from their vocation to another passion. To call such things “hobbies” is too small.