Most of us were given the same instructions when we were young.
Study hard. Get a secure job. Work hard, and everything else in life will somehow work out.
I was raised on that story, and I believed it completely. I followed it all the way to the other side of the world. In South Africa, I finally built what I thought was a secure income. I even enjoyed the work. And then I was retrenched, which is just a polite word for fired with nothing.
What followed was one of the hardest periods of my life. I lost my car. I lost my house when the money ran out. I was bankrupt. The secure job had turned out to be the least secure thing I'd ever had, and I'd built my whole idea of myself on it.
How do I find my calling in life?
A calling is rarely found by searching harder. It tends to appear when you stop living by the story you were handed, "study, get a job, stay safe", and start listening to what already draws you. The shift is from doing work for the sake of the income to doing work that expresses who you are.
It isn't a formula, and I'm wary of anyone who sells it as one. But I've seen the same movement in enough lives, including my own, to trust its shape.
What's the illusion most of us are living in?
That security comes from outside.
The idea is simple. If you do the right things, get the qualifications, find the stable employer, keep your head down, the world will hold you. Many people spend decades inside that promise. They do the job for the sake of doing the job, because the income is needed and the story says that's what a responsible adult does.
I'm not dismissing the need for income. When I lost mine, the fear was real, and the consequences were real. But what I found underneath the loss surprised me. The job had never really been the source of my security. It had been standing in front of the question I'd never asked: what do I actually want to give my life to?
That's the part of the illusion that's hardest to see while you're inside it. A job can give you income, structure and a place to go each morning, and those things matter. What it can't do is tell you who you are. When people hand that question over to their employer, they often don't notice until the employer hands it back, suddenly, through a restructure or a redundancy or a quiet sense that twenty years have gone by.
When the job went, that question was all that was left. It took me a long time, and a lot of pain, to hear it clearly.
Why is it so hard to hear what calls you?
Because the voice of the story is so much louder.
Most of us were never taught to listen for our own direction. We were taught to follow instructions, meet expectations and be sensible. Rare are the people who were raised to follow what moved them. I certainly wasn't.
So when something in you stirs, a pull toward a particular kind of work, a subject that lights you up, a problem you can't stop caring about, the old story tends to shout it down. That's not practical. Who do you think you are? What if it doesn't work? And the quiet pull goes back underground.
Finding a calling, in my experience, is less about discovering something new and more about removing what's been drowning it out. The fears, the inherited rules, the identity of the sensible one who doesn't take risks. When those come off, the pull that was always there becomes much easier to hear. That's closely connected to the question in what should I do with my life, and to the particular kind of identity crisis that follows losing a job.
What does it feel like when work becomes a calling?
It stops feeling like work in the old sense.
For me, the calling turned out to be helping people change from within. Releasing the fears, anger, sadness, guilt and shame they'd carried for years. Resolving the conflicts inside them. Removing the limits they'd accepted as permanent. It doesn't much matter which of those it is on a given day. What I notice is that the more meaningful the change is for the person in front of me, the more energy I seem to have afterwards, not less.
That's one of the clearest signs I know. A job drains you and the weekend restores you. A calling tends to give back something close to what it takes.
And the life around it changes too. In the words I've used ever since: today I do what I love, I work when I want, I travel when I choose, and I have real time with my family. None of that came from adding a new identity. I didn't become someone new. I came home to who I was before the story told me who to be.
How can I start listening for my calling?
This practice is a walk, and it works best alone, without headphones, for about thirty minutes.
Before you go, write one question on a piece of paper and put it in your pocket: what would I do more of, if nobody were watching and money weren't the first question?
Then walk. Don't try to answer it. Just let the question sit in the background while you move and look around. Most of the time, the answer won't come as a thought. It'll come as a small pull, a memory, a moment of lightness when some image crosses your mind.
When you get home, write down whatever surfaced, even if it seems small or silly. A subject. A kind of person you'd like to help. An activity you've always loved and never taken seriously.
Do this three times over two weeks, with the same question. You're not looking for a grand answer. You're looking for the thing that keeps showing up. A calling is usually more persistent than dramatic. If nothing shows up at first, that's information too. It often means the old story is still speaking very loudly, and it may need some gentle attention before anything else can be heard.
Do I have to quit my job to follow a calling?
No, and I'd be careful of anyone who tells you otherwise.
Most people find their way into a calling gradually, from inside the life they already have. They start making decisions from a clearer place. They follow the pull in small ways, a project, a course, a conversation, and let the next step show itself. Sometimes the calling ends up reshaping the whole career. Sometimes it transforms the job they already have. Either way, it starts with you and a decision, not with a leap.
What matters most isn't the speed. It's that you stop living by a story you never chose. When that happens, even ordinary work tends to feel different. It also helps explain why achieving goals doesn't always make you happy: the goals were often borrowed.
Where does this go next?
Back to who you were before the instructions.
I wrote a book about exactly that movement, called Unbecome. It's not a career guide. It's about removing the layers that stand between you and what was always yours to do, so that the calling doesn't have to be invented. It only has to be heard.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.