There is a huge difference between a job and a vocation. A job is what we hold to earn money to meet economic demands. A vocation (from Latin vocatus, calling) is what we are called to do with our life's energy. It is a requisite part of our individuation to feel that we are productive, and not responding to one's calling can damage the soul. We do not really choose a vocation; rather it chooses us. Our only choice is how we respond. One's vocation may have nothing to do with earning money. One may be called to nurture others. One may be called to be an artist in a time which does not reward art, but we are sustained by saying yes despite neglect, even rejection. Kazantzakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ wrestles with this dilemma. Jesus of Nazareth merely wishes to be like his father, a carpenter who make crosses for the Roman authorities. He wants to marry Mary Magdalene, live in the suburbs, drive a sports version of the camel, and have 2.2 children. The voice within, the vocatus, calls him to a different place. His last temptation, experiencing loneliness and abandonment by his father, is to renounce his calling and become an ordinary person. When he imagines his life that way he realizes he would have betrayed himself by betraying his individuation. In saying yes to his vocatus Jesus becomes the Christ. So Jung said that the proper imitatio Christi was not to live like the Nazarene of old, but to live one's individuation, one's vocation, as fully as Jesus lived the Christ.58 (This is what St. Paul meant when he said, "Not Christ, but Christ within me.")59 Our vocation is seldom a straight path, but a series of unfolding tackings and turnings. A newspaper recently reported that in any given year nearly forty per cent of Americans change their careers; not jobs, careers. This mobility and transition is in part the result of shifting economic opportunities, for sure, but many are changing their lives. We live longer today; there is nothing to prevent a person from having several careers, each activating another facet of the polyhedronal self. Economic necessity cannot be ignored, of course, but consider the choices. One can spend one's life in economic servitude, or one can say, "This is how I earn my living, a necessary trade-off with the creditors, and that is where my soul is replenished." I knew a man, for example, with a masters degree in philosophy who worked from three until eight a. m. every day delivering newspapers. It was a mindless job to pay the bills, but the rest of the day he was a free man. He found a balance between work and vocation and was served by both. Some are able to unite their work and their vocation, though they may have to pay an enormous price to achieve this. Ironically, sometimes a strong vocation requires even the sacrifice of ego desires. But for vocation one does not ask; one is asked. And a considerable part of the meaning of one's life comes from saying yes when asked. The ego does not run life; it knows very little.
— James Hollis
Hollis is tracking something that the aspiration toward meaning has been using as a bypass for a long time. The logic runs: if I find my calling, if I say yes fully enough, the longing at the center of ordinary life will be satisfied. The very etymology he cites — *vocatus*, called — already implies a caller and a distance, a gap the call crosses. Vocation does not close that gap; it names it. The man delivering newspapers until eight in the morning is not a solved case. He is someone who has negotiated honestly with the gap rather than pretending it isn't there.
What complicates the Kazantzakis image is that Jesus's last temptation is precisely the comfort of the ordinary — and Hollis frames the rejection of that comfort as individuation's demand. But the Nazarene's ordinary life, the carpenter's bench and the suburbs and the 2.2 children, is itself a longing, and that longing is not fraudulent. What the passage actually reveals, if you stay with it, is that vocational saying-yes does not dissolve desire but redirects it, and the redirection costs something that cannot be recovered. The ego's smallness is not the problem; the smallness is honest. It knows very little, yes — but what it knows, it knows with full weight.
James Hollis·The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife·1993