Open Friday thread: The vocational awe trap
I’m a little embarrassed, after a year of writing about work and identity, to have immediately fallen into the “vocational awe” trap in my conversation with Liz Haswell on Tuesday. To her credit, Liz set me straight. But it’s alarming how much I still default to language about work as a calling. If you missed this a few posts ago, “vocational awe” is a term coined by Fobazi Ettarh, an academic librarian and scholar, to describe the internalized beliefs that make us feel that our professions are “beyond critique.” If we believe that our work is a calling, then we feel guilty about advocating for a lighter workload, higher pay, or other forms of fairness. And so we keep quiet, blaming ourselves for our unhappiness and burnout.
As Liz suggested, this mythology can reinforce imposter syndrome. Real scientists never have any doubt about their purpose, so if I have doubts, I must not be a real scientist. A scholar always believes, without question, that research is a sacred endeavor, and so if I stop to wonder why I’m spending months producing an essay that maybe ten people will read, then I must be a fraud.
One of my high school teachers shared an urban legend about the great singer Luciano Pavarotti. One of his fans confessed to him after a performance, “I’d give everything to sing like you!” Pavarotti replied, “I already have.” We still elevate many professions to that Romantic height, measuring ourselves by a standard of greatness — the singular all-consuming passion, the writer shuttered in the attic, the scientist who never leaves the lab — that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Or that we recognize as unhealthy.
A friend who has been living abroad for many years, but who is returning to the U.S. so one of his children can finish school here, remarked on how much even youth baseball has been influenced by this. The time commitment required for practices, road games, and supplemental camps, not to mention the insane cost of equipment, makes it difficult for any young person to embrace a sport as an amateur. Every young athlete idolizes their heroes, but there is a kind of literalism about it now. If you’re not really grinding away with the humorless goal of becoming Shohei Ohtani, you’re not really a baseball player at all. And if you, as a parent, aren’t obsessing about the process — doing the work — even more than your kid, then why are you even bothering?
Writers are susceptible to this, too. Last year I tackled the canard that writers lose a book for every child they have. The assumption behind this myth is that real artists are like monks, sacrificing everything upon the altar of their craft. To wit, Willa Cather wrote to her friend Mariel Gere, in 1896:
There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; thats my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be. Its not an affectation, its my whole self, not that I think I can do anything myself, but the worship of it. That is about all that life has given me: it is enough. I dont ask anything more. I think I get as much good out of it as most people do out of their religions. I love it well enough to be a failure in it myself, well enough to be unhappy.
Many of Cather’s characters echo this defiant credo. If they can’t reach the very pinnacle of artistic success, then they’ll become broken people, drinking themselves to death like Thea Kronborg’s piano teacher, Professor Wunsch, in The Song of the Lark. “Wunsch” is German for “wish” or “desire,” and the aging musician is so tormented by his love of music and his abject failure that he sometimes flies into violent rages. Wunsch is an untrustworthy mentor — not the kind of person I’d want my children going to for advice. But Thea does not question his judgment. Wunsch tells her, “Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.” And so there is only one standard for an artist who feels deep desire: complete sacrifice. By this metric, if your art doesn’t require extreme pain, poverty, or isolation — if it doesn’t cost you anything — then it can’t really be art.
We have been having a related debate about literary careerism on
this week. My friend and collaborator Sam Kahn (of ) wrote, “Writers aren’t really writing for their era — or for anybody they know or may know. They’re writing for people who don’t exist yet, they are attempting — assuming that some mode of literate transmission survives — to convey the truth of themselves and their era for people who will never experience it themselves. Both of these are holy tasks.”I believe this, on some level. My voice didn’t count for much when I was growing up. I was expected to conform to beliefs that were not my own, to question my instinctive preference for rationalism over charismatic displays of piety. Writing became my voice and still is the primary way that I have found to belong in the world and to feel that I have some power and agency. So Cather’s conviction that her craft was not an affectation, but her whole self, resonates with me. But why must craft constitute the whole self to be pure? The choice was clear for women in Cather’s generation: career or marriage. No one expressed the sentiment quite as clearly as Sarah Orne Jewett in A Country Doctor, where Nan Prince describes medicine as the “great gain and purpose of [her] being.” (I realize that career and craft are not interchangeable, but they are also not easy to disentangle from one another)
The tension between career and family is still strongest for women (just look at the impact of the pandemic), but men struggle with it, too. Commercial nonfiction often requires an immersion experience, like Barbara Ehrenreich’s undercover work in Nickel and Dimed, where she took a series of minimum wage jobs to illustrate how unsustainable service work is as a livelihood. When I directed a first-year seminar, I invited Sonia Nazario to speak about her incredible book, Enrique’s Journey, and while I was inspired by her courage in retracing the path of children migrating from Mexico, I remember thinking that the project was pretty selfish, too. Not every family is equipped for that level of sacrifice. Among the book ideas I’ve ruled out over the past year are: a year as an oil roughneck in North Dakota, middle-aged professor transitions to law enforcement, returning to firefighting as a smokejumper. If these all sound like over-the-top masculine narratives, perhaps that’s because I’m projecting what the book marketplace might want from me. And do I really want to tell any of those stories? Not really, except maybe the smokejumper one. This is part of the challenge for a writer: following the ideas that tease the mind versus worrying about what will sell. I know there is a book idea out there that will allow me to satisfy my own curiosity while remaining available to my family. And weighing all of those factors is not a betrayal of the craft.
I’m not sure I’ve reasoned my way to a conclusion here, which may be a good thing for our weekly discussion thread. Here are a few questions to get us started, but I hope others emerge!
Is there an equivalent to the great artists or scientists of the past in our time? Or have we simply stopped believing in “greatness,” at least in the way it was once measured?
Do you love something so much that you are, like the young Willa Cather, willing to be a failure at it? Do you love that craft or vocation so much that you are willing to allow it to make you unhappy?
If most of us are chipping away at more modest goals because art and science have grown more democratized, why do we continue to feel guilty about that?
Is there a way to be ambitious, to do more than dabble in our craft, without needing to go “all-in”? How do we escape the Antonio Salieri trap of deeming ourselves the patron saints of mediocrity if we fall short of genius?
I’ll admit that I don’t have good answers to these questions. I’m hoping you will!
I’ve been loving reading your pieces. Your autobiographical writing is beautiful. I especially enjoyed the one about church and baseball. I also admire the ability of writers to put themselves out there. I write a lot but I haven’t had the courage to try to publish because people on the internet are so quick to be critical or contrarian. But to get back to the topic…the word “awe” feels misleading. Awe is an inner experience that makes us feel small but in a good way. It gives us perspective on our mortality and reference for the mysteries of life and existence. Overworking is a behavior that is usually tied to feelings of insecurity and striving for external validation. Sometimes this overworking is because we want to feel big and important from acknowledgment and accolades. The state of awe and the behaviors of overworking don’t match. It feels like vocational awe is really pointing to an economy that takes people who once had awe and asks them to engage in endlessly meaningless tasks like hours of checking and responding to emails so they can achieve some external legitimacy. If we truly felt awe, we would be more still and slow down and evaluate the meaning and importance of our tasks.
Oh, wow, Joshua, I'm reeling with this. I was the young writer whose education was utterly grounded in the concept of greatness, whether in trying to write great books (and failing except for maybe 500 pages of the hundreds of thousands I've published) or in seeking out and reading the greats (of which there are more than enough to occupy my entire life). And, frankly, I don't see much of this push for greatness in contemporary fiction. In fact, there's active hostility toward the concept, especially because it's usually associated with white male writers. But then I think of Emily Dickinson, who could very well be the greatest poet in human history, who devoted herself so completely to her work, writing hundreds of poems, while publishing only a handful in her life. Did she suffer because of her greatness? Did she consciously pursue greatness? Was she lonely? Did she sacrifice for that greatness? I think she did.