On Vital Work
Crooked Timber, No. 6
“I’d like to find some work that challenges the vitality of what I’m feeling in my life.” - Matthew McConaughey, Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
There are certain points in life where it becomes glaringly obvious: my previous way of doing things, of seeing things, of spending my time - none of it will ever be the same. In many ways, these are hard lessons to learn, especially if you are routine oriented. If you feel as though having a regular cadence to your days is important to getting done what you want to get done. For me, much of where I enjoy spending my time, of centering the rhythm of my days, revolves around work.
It is no secret that we have an interesting relationship with work in the United States. For many, work is how we sustain our lives and lifestyles. For some, work is pure hustle - a way to expend energy to maximize outcomes, which are largely centered on building wealth, power, or prestige. For others, work is a calling. Maybe it is best in this instance to call it a vocation rather than employment. The idea that intrinsic to the thing we spend the majority of our time doing every week might serve a deeper purpose that adds value beyond the material. Whatever your feelings around work, much of our lives and society revolve around those “day jobs” we do in order to satisfy our own ends.
What I have found lately is that my personal relationship to work is shifting. Which is to say that, while I still find deep meaning in my job, what I am seeking to get out of it has changed. For context, my work largely centers on helping connect individuals to mental health and well-being resources online and in their communities that improve their overall quality of life. Which is a coded way of saying that I do SaaS sales for a behavioral health tech company, which for some reason is a description that carries an undertone of smarminess I don’t totally love. But, I digress.
The main point I’m trying to make is that, when you experience this radically life altering perspective, that shift ultimately permeates your entire life. This is not a revelatory thought, nor is it necessarily deviating from much of what I’ve written about in my few posts on this blog. However, it is something that has continually crept up in my life, and it is something that I have been attempting to work through almost every day.
Which brings me back to the concept of vital work. You know how some things pop up in your life that get stuck in your craw for reasons you can’t explain? I had that experience when I was served up a conversation on YouTube between Matthew McConaughey and Rick Rubin on Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast. Early in the conversation, McConaughey describes a period in his career where he was experiencing stagnation in the midst of great success, which was ultimately misaligned with his personal life. How, even though he was gaining materially and growing his career, the day-in and day-out work he was doing, where he was aiming the trajectory of his career, was not in line with the depth of his personal experience.
In the context of this conversation, McConaughey was talking about how the experience of fatherhood was so deeply intense for him that it completely changed the way he was viewing his career, his life’s vocation. The notion that we might crave work that “challenges the vitality” of what we feel has been a focal point for me lately. In much the same way that fatherhood shook the frost off what McConaughey needed from his work, my recent jump into fatherhood has helped reorient and reframe my experience so immediately that it has left me picking up the pieces around my own feelings of purpose and meaning.
On the whole, I view it as a positive to still be thinking about work in terms of purpose. For me, it shows that I remain tethered to the idea that where I invest my energy, where I choose to spend my time, and what I continue to work on is geared towards the goal of leaving my little corner of the world better than I found it. However, on the flip side, the how of how I am thinking about doing this is shifting.
Thinking more about the idea of craving work that “challenges the vitality of what I’m feeling in my life” ultimately connects back to understanding my underlying purpose - what I am hoping to do with this brief and fleeting life. Work is work, yes. But work can also be much more than work. Work is creation, a calling, a way to improve the world. A way to build something out of nothing. And yes you can profit from that work, but ultimately I think - at least for me - for work to be of much use, it has to be attached to something that gets at the root cause of what it means to be human. To help others alleviate a little bit of their suffering and find ways to amble on through this human experience together.
Why I ultimately think McConaughey’s quote about work resonated so strongly with me in this moment is because it was a reminder that the vitality of my work comes in its deep connection with others. For me, work is no longer a self-serving endeavor. Again, yes - I might have taken my job initially because it offered a more interesting 9-5, a unique and innovative company culture that I could contribute to, and a way for me to feel as though I was doing something worthwhile with my time. However, the experience of fatherhood in concert with the growing understanding that my life is intimately connected to the whole of everything that exists beyond myself has cemented that idea that true vitality comes when we expand the reach of our energy to connect back with the broader world.
Perhaps it is overly romantic or naive to view work and your job as something that can bring richness to your experience. Where capitalism exists, does that precipitate the web of entanglements that comes from things like profitability, revenue, growth, and expansion? Does capitalism inherently negate the other benefits of work: purpose, improving the world, helping to alleviate suffering, strengthening our communities, and saving lives? In my biased view, each of those things can co-exist, but it takes a lot of tight-rope walking and self-reflection to keep your intentions pure, your methods focused, and your aims in check.
Which brings me back to my initial point: it is important that we combine our work with our intentions and do the necessary work to keep those things aligned. Whether you’re a CEO, a barista, a salesperson, a landscaper, a designer, whatever: you bring your own perspective and intention to the table each day. Nobody can define what vitality of experience looks and feels like for you except you. Nobody will understand just how much you are contributing to the world around you except you. This is why, to me, it is important to frame the meaning of our lives within the context of the larger whole. If you alienate yourself, if you focus on your own hustle, if you place a barrier between you and the world, you are ultimately cutting yourself off from a depth of experience that can permeate and uplift your entire life. You are preventing yourself from building connections with others, from cultivating a community, from imbuing your work with meaning, and ultimately from knowing just what in the hell you are doing with this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver).
Ultimately, I think what this comes down to is reminding ourselves first and foremost what’s important to us, what our values are, and what we want to get out of our experience. It is too easy to let things like salary, trajectory, and prominence overshadow things like values, humanity, and community. Which is not to say that having financial stability and a career path are not important - they certainly are. However, if that is all we focus on, we are not opening ourselves up to finding other ways that we can leave a lasting impact and positively benefit the lives of those we serve and work beside. For me, that is the whole point: to use work as a vehicle to positively impact the world and help those that you serve in your networks and communities have just a slightly easier go at it. That, in my opinion, is how you align your life’s work with the vitality of experience in your life.