Hollis is making a hard claim here, not a comforting one: vocation does not relieve suffering, it relocates it. The person who follows what von Franz calls the instinct of truth will suffer isolation and rejection — probably more acutely than someone who settles for what is merely acceptable, because they will feel the gap between lived reality and inner necessity with a precision that comfortable compromise never allows. This is not the prosperity gospel of depth psychology, the "find your purpose and flourish" promise that fills airport bookstores. It is closer to the opposite.

The phrase that deserves the most attention is "the sacrifice of the ego." Hollis does not mean dissolution, not the loss of self in something greater, not transcendence of the personal. He means the relinquishment of the ego's preferred narrative — the one in which we are liked, safe, and approved of. Vocation asks for that specifically. What gets surrendered is not the self but the self's management of its reputation. The instinct of truth, wherever it presses from, does not negotiate with that management. And the "deeply felt sense that our life is right" Hollis describes is not happiness in any ordinary register — it is more like the particular gravity of standing somewhere you cannot honestly leave.