A short Good Life Project monologue in which Jonathan Fields names the way meaningful work fades into a yearning discontent for many people in mid-life, and proposes that the price of never choosing is itself a price worth examining.
Transcript
I keep wondering when it happened. We all start into life with the best intentions, excited by the possibility of finding something to do with our lives that fills us up. Something that excites and inspires us, and yet over time for so many that sense of hope and anticipation fades into discontent and surrender especially when it comes to our work. And yet it's so often the thing we give up on the fastest the idea that work could be a powerful source of meaning and fulfillment and expression once you're a few years in it just seems to fade like an impossible dream. The thing is, no matter how you landed in this moment, we're all starting to realize everything has a price, even the choices we make by never choosing. In the case of work, that price is a kind of a yearning discontent like we know we're made for something different, something bigger, something more like we have so much more to give so much more life to be lived, so much more joy excitement and purpose, but we've got no idea how to access it, let alone what it even is. So we just keep on keeping on hoping to feel different one day but never doing anything to actually make it happen. So the question is, what will we do with this moment? Because faster than you can imagine, it'll end. And if we don't harness its energy, then we will have just lost not just an opportunity to reclaim a piece of our own humanity but of humanity at large. Do we walk away and start over? Well, that's what a lot of people have started to do, and will continue to do en mass in the coming years. A big percentage of the population will be looking to change jobs. Problem is, for most, this option it's not so easy or realistic. Plus truth is, for most people a new job won't actually change much of anything. The way you feel, it'll stay the same. The way you dream of work making you feel, it'll remain a dream. Because the answer for most folks it's not a new job or boss, team company, or career. In fact, those other factors we so often blame for feeling the way we're feeling, they're not the enemy or even the source of our dissatisfaction, well most of the time at least. The real answer, it's an inside job So I spent the last two decades really of my life immersed in the study of human potential and fulfillment, especially in the context of work, in no small part because of my own experience working in human hours, suffering extreme burnout, having no sense of purpose beyond making it through every given day, and eventually watching my immune system collapse, leading to a massive abdominal abscess that required emergency surgery. So I came out of that experience shaken but also awakened and with a fire in my belly to better understand how to do work differently. Since then i've launched and built a series of wellness companies, I've devoured a mountain of academic research and I've had the incredible gift of access to hundreds of world-renowned researchers and leading voices from nearly every domain that touches on human flourishing in an unending quest to understand what moves the needle and jettison what doesn't. And over time I began to realize, in the quest to find and do work that fills us, we tend to focus narrowly on our job field role or pursuit. We pretty much come up with every way imaginable to tweak these elements, and despite this, we're no more fulfilled than we were a generation ago. In fact, the data shows were way less satisfied, more burned out, emptier than ever, disconnected, disengaged, and less happy and motivated than ever before. And, I began to wonder, what are we missing? I knew there had to be something else, and along the way, especially in the context of work, I came to believe something I never imagined I'd believe. I began to see patterns emerge that crossed all the different fields, experiences, information, and experiments that I had been immersing myself in for years. And a deeper more primal realization began to emerge. We all have a certain DNA level imprint for work that makes us come alive, work that fills us with meaning, drops us into that transcendent state of flow, work that inspires and excites us, and work that fills us with purpose and possibility, and fully expressed gives us that feeling like we were doing the thing we're put here to do. So I started mapping out these imprints and somewhere along the way, I gave them a name, Sparketypes, which is really just a fun way of saying the impulse for work that sparks you. These imprints almost always lie hidden underneath all the surface level jobs titles and industries that for so many have had the effect of obscuring and distracting us from seeing them, but they were always there, like some secret source code that determines what energizes and animates you and what stifles and empties you. We never looked for them because we didn't know they existed. So I started asking people about these imprints and I spent years gathering information testing and developing refining and beta testing an assessment that could both deepen my understanding of the Sparketypes, while helping people discover theirs. And since then more than 500,000 people in organizations have completed this assessment generating over 25 million data points and stunning levels of insight nuance and understanding, and yes validation. And we've learned that when you align what you do your work with this innate impulse, the world begins to feel right. You come alive. We're in a moment right now, and the feeling that our work is giving us, it's not the feeling we want to define the rest of our lives. This moment we're in, it's a hard place to be, but also a powerful place to be, on the precipice, invited to reconsider how we will choose to participate in the co-creation of the rest of our lives. It's time for a reclamation, of work and of life you