Vocational awe is always harmful; Information Wants To Be Free, December 22, 2022

Meredith Farkas, Information Wants To Be Free; Vocational awe is always harmful 

"Vocational awe for the individual can feel very very good… until it doesn’t. That sense of purpose is a powerful drug. I came into this profession with a healthy dose of vocational awe after leaving another helping profession, which means I should have known better but didn’t. Vocational awe is more than loving your job or caring about doing a good job. It’s a deep sense of identification with your work where your work becomes a core part of your identity. It’s more than a job; it’s something you were called to do (by God, but like the protestant work ethic, it’s mostly lost its religious connotations). It drives you to go “above and beyond” for your job and you feel good about doing it. For people who have experienced trauma and/or oppression, this deep identification can feel very good when you’re doing well in your work. Each achievement or accolade is another opportunity to feel a sense of self-efficacy, of worthiness. I remember that feeling well. But the flip side is that when things go wrong, you also see that as a referendum on your worth. If your sense of self is wrapped up in your work, having a boss who doesn’t like you, being demoted, being laid off, being mistreated by toxic colleagues, can cause deep wounds to one’s psyche. I’ve written in the past about my own experience with this and how it led to the worst depression of my life. I’ve also heard from so many people who had a similar experience and how it broke them. How they went from happily going above and beyond to questioning their own worthiness. No job is worth that. Crocker and Knight write about this phenomenon and the costs of making one’s self-esteem contingent on performance in one area of one’s life in the article “Contingencies of Self-Worth” (which Jennifer Crocker has written about extensively in other publications as well) and argue that “contingencies of self-worth are both sources of motivation and areas of psychological vulnerability.”

Tying your sense of self to your job can also be problematic when you are unable to devote the same amount of yourself to your work as you used to. Perhaps when you just had a baby. Or your spouse is diagnosed with cancer. Or you develop a disabling chronic illness. People whose sense of self-efficacy is tied tightly to their identity as a good worker struggle much more with the idea that they need to shift their priorities."