I mentioned last week in Power in Practice that I don’t agree with the ideology of vocation and gave a few reasons as to why, and as a result my RAS started to show me how far I have travelled ideologically from the idea of vocation and why it sits so poorly with me. So come along and listen to my post vocational blues and the light I believe is at the end of the tunnel.
Post Vocational Blues
Why Not Returning to Theologies of Vocation is the Way Forward
The pursuit of vocation is hailed as the pursuit of what gives life meaning which sounds real nice—we all want to live meaningful lives—whatever that means. But vocation is by nature a theology of the human body, what it does and, ultimately, what it’s supposed to be doing. It is therefore subject to the Universality Principle we established in I Ain’t Got No Body.
Theologies of vocation tie our humanity to the pursuit of reasonable meaning; which is something we do or don’t do. An unreasonable person ends up being seen as subhuman; not pursuing culturally specific modes of mimesis. This is why vocation fails the Universality Principle and is not a theology of the human body; we can stop doing it. Anything we can start or stop at will cannot be a part of original creation. The standard of the Universality Principle, as we mentioned in I Ain’t Got No Body is our constant state of communication which cannot be silenced. The whole world cries out laden with syntax begging to be pieced together into sentences, paragraphs, books, tomes and libraries of such seeking after wisdom.
It may be that vocation itself robs us of attention to elements of our humanity substituting secondary interfacial structures that cannot exist without constant maintenance for the study and care of the primary interface.1 Here we encounter Angry God who demands daily sacrifices of appeasement for our shame.
Justifying Our Existence to Angry God
There is an element to this conversation of justifying our existence and placement via our vocation; a certain answering of the question, why shouldn’t God just wipe us off the face of the planet? It’s important to acknowledge whenever we come across Angry God in the course of our studies because it give us opportunity to address where the worship of a false god is our standard.
You’re part of this family. What you do reflects on me!
This is the exactly the sentiment I hear when people start talking about vocation. It’s like we’re all Trust Fund Babies who better marry the right person of the agreed upon sex and gender and better pass the bar and better go church once a month and better this and better that, otherwise we face legal disinheritance. Isn’t that how we think of Hell; like the grandest gesture of disinheritance of all time—like a blood feud with God that started at the beginning of time? Jesus then acts as our lawyer who negotiates with the Father to put us back into His will but watch out! This is quintessential worship of Angry God.
So in answer to the demands for sacrifice from Angry God we postulate that God must want something from us—and therefore it seems reasonable that if God wants something He will commission it and appoint people to the roles and tasks therein which when followed through give a nice little bump of dopamine as a reward for service. Miss the call of God? Didn’t follow your dream?2 Never met the one true love of your life? Too bad, so sad—you’ve wasted your life and will die a meaningless death having contributed nothing to the Kingdom of God. The same goes for all forms of vocation which come in the form of the question, “What does God want me to do?” with the pinnacle of success being given a proper vocational ministry from God to complete indispensable work for the Kingdom of God and for ourselves to become indispensable.3
Hold Up! Wait a Minute!
I know where your going with this. We can’t just stop…right? If we just stop thinking of what we’re doing right now as being a matter of Divine appointment and commission , what happens to the indispensable work we are doing? Well—we first consider whether or not it is truly indispensable. Every day people die in the middle of their so-called indispensable work. I don’t just mean theologians who die in the middle of writing books, I mean mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents who die and they were the only people who properly cared for this or that individual who will now die alone at home and be discovered a week later by their neighbours whose lasting impression of them will be the look of terror and the contortions of the pain of dying frozen on their faces. Death makes a mockery of rumours of greatness.
So, in effort to preserve the notion of vocation we take to the secondary interface to automate safety, legitimacy and provision which should shock those who truly believe in theologies of vocation—that God (key word) divinely appoints and commissions individuals for certain work at certain times and that this work is indispensable. We end up believing so strongly in the indispensability of a person and their work that we bifurcate them from the rest of the primary interface to conduct this work and raise up people to become them for the next generation. We need not think very long or hard about instances where we have said, “they could be the next Billy Graham,” and we understand completely that it would better for them to become the vocation that is Billy Graham than to be themselves and waste their lives. The language of vocation is seasoned with such unbiblical indecencies.
You may think that I’m picking on vocational theology but as the main iteration of the rumour of power that is the Divine Appointment Model but we must understand that claiming Divine Appointment is the rumour-est of rumours for validation to be put in a position of power over other people. It is the first rumour of power to be jettisoned in our time and place and rightly so.
The Universality Principle Applied
What’s the alternative? Is life ultimately meaningful or meaningless? Theologies of vocation have historically leaned towards the meaningful side of the argument which necessarily defines itself in relief of the equal, opposite, and culturally specific “meaningless” pursuits based on an endless list of activities and metrics. For instance, a game of backgammon at 3pm on a Tuesday is acceptable for 80 somethings—but put 18 year olds in their place and it’s seen as an immoral waste of potential! Theologies of vocation are, in this way, far more about upholding standard positions in society—the doctor, the baker the candlestick maker etc. Social structures regularly feign a disinterest in what vocation one chooses but choose a life outside of the system and all of the sudden life is no longer meaningful by which, of course, we mean useful. As a result we don’t have (good) vocational categories for people who fall between the cracks of our systems because they are designed to uphold the secondary interfacial structure of our societies.4 But, rather than make new categories, let’s look at a world without the ideology of vocation which isn’t actually that far away. Turn your attention, if you will, to all of the rest of creation.
Looking at the Opposite
What would life be like without the idea of vocation? Would we still seek for an ideal life of fulfilment, usefulness and meaning? Is this singular idea responsible for everything from the mid-life crises to the fretting high-school graduate worried sick about doing God’s will for their lives? What if life is meaningless—err…in the best way possible? Not meaningless in the sense that there is no meaning in or outside of us or if there is that we just can’t know it, but rather that it is meaningless in that it is like all of the rest of creation? For instance, we don’t talk about a tree being meaningless until it’s sawn up into boards, or a deer being meaningless until it is carved up into steaks, or a boulder unless it’s crushed into gravel—the rest of creation possesses purpose that is so integral to its being that it cannot be removed. A tree does not seek after fulfilment but soaks in its environment of light and heat and soil and water and grows to the limits of its environ. We could say that the tree used it’s resources well—but that seems a bit blasphemous—not to the tree of course, but to the truth of what is actually taking place. The tree lives in consensual relationship to the sun and soil, water and wind. It doesn’t sift the soil for certain nutrients or boil the water to make sure it’s clean, it doesn’t build a roof over its head to make sure it has the perfect amount of sunshine, nor question its perceived decisions wondering if it’s a good tree. It doesn’t postulate that it is the tree-iest of trees in the forest—these pursuits are full of vanity seeking safety, legitimacy and provision outside of God who gave it its place. So, what if learning the language of the primary interface replaced any notions of vocation? Let me give an example.
Scenes of Vocational and Post-Vocational Life
All that matters is that you do your best.
We all believe this to varying degrees but understand that some instances of best are better than others. It’s far easier to do our best in care of our vocation whose domain is the secondary interface. Policies and procedures help us to maintain high levels of repeatable results on a daily basis when it comes to our jobs and phrases like, if you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life, corral people into work that gels with their particular blend of mimetic formation and call it their calling and vocation.
In a few recent conversations with
who writes here on Substack, I have had opportunity to draw out the perils of vocational language. It was Camilla who posted a question of the day in Notes:We answered back a forth a couple of times which you can read here. I’ve modified my comments below for this essay.
TLDR; it was an instance where vocation dictated what best could mean. Our best is usually our capacity for the day to uphold the secondary interface—everything that requires constant supervision and maintenance in order to run smoothly. We might only have 80% to give so best might indicate that we divided our 80% into the categories that were on the top of our minds or else that we gave our all to one or two categories and did them really well while ignoring the others for the day—regardless we gave our all to something and therefore did our best. All of this is dependant on what we value which the study of mimesis tells us is usually what the people around us value.
The trainwreck comes in the form of what those secondary interfaces do to those behind us; the collateral damage of doing or not doing a task that falls outside of our capacity to accomplish. For instance, as a man I am culturally conditioned towards excellence in fulfilling job descriptions in a place of employment but sitting at home on my days off or in unemployment without a secondary interface to direct me, I default to primary interfacial activities—sleep, food, enjoyment, love and lose track of the secondary interfacial work that is mounting around me. To think about giving my all to doing the dishes and laundry and tidying up the things that are supposed to help me live a comfortable, meaningful life is exhausting and so generations before me coined vocational language around it that says that maintaining the secondary interface at home is women’s work. This standard, gladly, disintegrated but we now live in a post-apocalyptic landscape where it’s no one’s vocation to maintain the secondary interface at home and so we all do our best usually strung out on maladaptive coping mechanisms.
The easy answer is to reinstate degendered vocational language and forms—someone’s vocation is the secondary interface at home, someone else’s vocation is the secondary interface at work—but the easy answer still places the onus of the work on whoever is maintaining the secondary interface at home which is a 24/7 unpaid job vs. the paid 9-5 Monday to Friday 40 hour week of the lucky duck who gets to work. The harder and more integrated answer is that we pair down both secondary interfaces to their bare minimum getting rid of everything possible in favour of the primary interfacial care of one another. This means less hours devoted to work or home and more devoted to one another (actually to one another and not to artificially sustaining the secondary interface).
Here’s where community works in. A community of post-vocational people are not concerned with whose job it is to maintain the secondary interface and as a result it remains fluid to the occasion and easily broken down and stored away when not wanted. Primary interfacial care is the order of the day which can only be accomplished through people caring for one another’s actual primary interfacial needs. To be a part of a community like this is to eschew the world’s ideas of greatness, power and possession in favour of seeing one another exactly as we are in love. Our best in a post-vocational society is an entirely different kind of best. It is a best that concerns itself with consensual honour, respect and submission in love to our community of like-hearted people.
How this works out practically is a marvel and wonder that we can look to first nations people to discover5. It’s my suspicion that a culture revolving around care of the needs of the mind, body and soul of everyone in community would translate to a beautiful display of love to the world that we currently do not have because our best is directed entirely to the secondary interface.
3 Suggested Applications
Stop Using and Listening to the Language of Vocation.
This is easier said than done and requires a decent amount of unlearning in the fashion of making new neurological connections to ideas and language that supports the primary interface. It also won’t make you any friends. A part of the ideology of vocation is that it is our duty to the people we love to, frankly, abandon them for 40+ hours a week to make sure we provide for them properly.
Post vocational language will give previously unknown language and space to the care and integration of the body, soul and mind. Some of this language already exists, but forming categories of responsibility towards one another that only involve primary interfacial care of one another is a good start.
Start Listening to the Language of your Body
In an effort to learn post-vocational language start with listening to your body. When you find yourself using vocational language to describe the drudgery of doing your best at secondary interfacial work ask yourself if the work you are doing is absolutely necessary or if there is a way to pair it down or get rid of it entirely. This is like that practice in minimalism where you pack everything you own into a U-Haul and everything you don’t think to use in a month’s time is gotten rid of with very few exceptions.
Expand Your Attention to the Anthroheads of Others and of the Rest of the Primary Interface.
Once you get the hang of your new paired down and integrated life, you can start to work the care of the rest of the primary interface into your rethought process. How do we engage with people in a post-vocational world? How do we get to know one another and the primary interfacial needs that drive us? How do we position ourselves to enrich the bodies, souls and minds of our communities? We ask these questions in pursuit of understanding one another in ways we currently do not understand and have hot-keyed safety, legitimacy and provision to our socio-economic standing in society which tells us nothing about who we are in actuality. This means starting again at blocking out vocational community language and looking for fresh syntax to describe real primary interfacial life.
I say “robbed of attention,” because if it is a part of our humanity we never stop being it, though our attention can be drawn towards looking past our humanity in a metaphysically deceptive fashion.
As an aside this is just a secularised version of a theology of vocation. It’s probably not your dream and never was—it’s likely a holdover composite form of mimesis—sorry.
Discerning readers will recognise that I am reiterating what it means to be great in the eyes of the world as discussed in Power in Practice “it is important to understand the world’s greatness by contrast which is to have achieved every mimetic desire of this age and to become desirable oneself.”
Before you comment, I know! I realise that it’s talk like this that either makes me a philosopher or a conspiracy theorist! I hope by now I’ve proven myself the former.
Post-Publication Update: After this was release I came upon the essay How Air Conditioning Created Atheism by who writes The Bard Owl here on Substack. In this engaging essay McDonald explores the idea that we are conditioned to be comfortable and when we are not comfortable it is the conditions who are fault. He then looks to first nations people through the book Amphibious Soul (2024) by Craig Foster. I highly recommend reading this for your edification.