The surprising cost of unfulfilled vocational callings
What if pursuing your passion isn't always the answer? What if having a calling to work you can't pursue is actually worse than having no calling at all?
That's the counterintuitive finding from a 2015 study by Gazica and Spector that challenges our cultural obsession with "finding your calling." While careers advisors and motivational speakers tell us to discover our passion and follow it, this research suggests that discovering a calling you can't follow might be the worst position of all.
The three calling groups
Gazica and Spector surveyed 378 American academics and sorted them into three groups based on their responses to calling measures:
Answered calling: Those currently living their occupational calling
Unanswered calling: Those who perceive a calling but aren't pursuing it
No calling: Those who don't feel called to any particular vocation
The researchers then compared these groups on work engagement, career commitment, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, physical health, and psychological wellbeing.
The obvious finding (and the surprising one)
Unsurprisingly, people living their calling reported better outcomes across the board compared to those with unanswered callings. Higher engagement, more commitment, greater satisfaction. All the good things we hope to get out of our working lives!
But here's where it gets interesting: The no calling group consistently outperformed the unanswered calling group. People who felt no particular vocational pull reported better work attitudes, higher satisfaction, and critically, better physical and psychological health than those yearning for work they couldn't pursue.
In fact, only the unanswered calling group showed significantly worse health outcomes compared to the other two groups. Having a calling was only beneficial when it was met.
Why this matters for your career
Gazica and Spector frame their findings through a long-standing psychological theory that people have three basic psychological needs: competency, relatedness, and autonomy. When these needs are met, we experience wellbeing and optimal functioning. When they're frustrated, we suffer.
Living your calling presumably satisfies all three needs, especially autonomy. But having an unanswered calling creates a fundamental misalignment between who you are and what you do. Your need for autonomy remains chronically unmet. You're stuck doing work that feels incongruent with your sense of self.
Those with no calling? They're free to meet their basic needs through other domains. Their work doesn't have to be their identity. They can find meaning elsewhere without the constant gnawing sense that they're in the wrong place.
The problem with passion
This study exposes a dark side to our cultural fixation on vocational calling. We tell young people to find their passion, discover their purpose, identify their calling. But what happens when they do — and then can't pursue it? When structural barriers, financial constraints, or family obligations get in the way?
According to this research, they might be worse off than if they'd never identified a calling at all. We've created a generation of people cataloging their unfulfilled vocational yearnings while working jobs that pay the bills.
To be clear, the data here are correlational, so we can't know whether having an unanswered calling causes poor outcomes or whether people experiencing poor outcomes are more likely to fantasize about alternative careers. Moreover, how do we know someone's calling is truly "unanswered"? Maybe they're working toward it. Plus, the dataset is limited to a small sample of US academics.
But despite all of these limitations, the pattern is striking enough to warrant concern. And more importantly, several other studies have been released further showcasing these potential downsides of pursuing a calling.
Where our research connects
This paper directly informed and inspired our lab’s ongoing work on vocational calling, especially in high-burnout careers. A couple of years ago, I published a theory of multiple kinds of callings that tried to explain some of these counterintuitive findings on the positive and negative implications of callings. Now, we’re working on investigating vocational calling from several angles: pre-college influences, early career trajectories, and the phenomenon of identifying more than one calling.
But we need better longitudinal data to test these ideas empirically. We need to understand when and why callings emerge, track how they change over time, and find out what happens when people actively try (versus passively wish) to pursue them.
Perhaps more importantly, this research may change how I advise students about careers. Instead of encouraging everyone to find their calling, maybe the message should be more measured: If you have a calling and can reasonably pursue it, great. But if you can't, don't torture yourself with counterfactual fantasies. Find meaning elsewhere and build a life that works for you and your context.
That's a less inspiring commencement speech, but it might be more honest.
Read the full article here: Gazica, M. W., & Spector, P. E. (2015). A comparison of individuals with unanswered callings to those with no calling at all. Journal of Vocational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.08.008
Learn more about our research on vocational calling: https://www.statslabatcmc.com/research
