Called to a Conscious Career

Careers are currency.

The modern career has evolved to the form we recognise it now only since the end of WWII - though Jane Austen’s pre-industrial era novels offer the seeds of its germination. Through the lens of a contemporary, western democracy the common person’s objective toward cultivating a career extends as far as (supposedly) defining our identity and who we are in this world.

In modern times careers have bolstered the contours of social-standing and mobility, economic stability, global migration, social integration, democracy and ideas of prosperity. Aspirations to a career propels unprecedented demand for tertiary education in the 21st century. As a result, global citizenry is now afforded access to knowledge once closely guarded as ‘privileged’.

In the striving of marginalised groups for social, political and economic emancipation, the workplace has become the locus of activist voices and political transformation. Historians posit that the kind of social transformations empowered by modernity’s contract-with-commerce could likely only have been wrought by brutal uprisings, civil war and populist rebellion in eras prior to this one.

Everything from industrialisation to workers’ rights, urbanisation, globalisation and free-market enterprise are cited as spurs to our careered society. Perhaps the most significant shift this paradigm has fuelled is the expansion of the global middle class. OECD predictions are that by 2030, the size of the global middle class will have almost tripled to 4.9 billion, from 1.8 billion in 2009, and that present-day numbers are estimated at 3.2 billion.

These numbers are striking as they have come about against a stretch of time marking a recovery period from global recession (the Great Recession of 2008). This also “implies a tipping point where a majority of the world’s population, for the first time ever, live in middle-class or rich households” (ref: Homi Kharas), with one third of the world’s economy solely attributable to the commercial habits of the global middle class by 2017 (ref: Homi Kharas).

So, at this point you’re likely seeing the contradictions latent to the story of the earth’s most economically prosperous/educated population and era in human history. Not only are we confronting the simultaneous (and incongruous) effects of democratic and autocratic forces of power, but the fissures we knew were setting the planet upon a precipice for change prior to the global pandemic, are now offering us a full-frontal exposé of what their manifestations include. Early financial indicators are that the middle classes are most profoundly impacted by the economic reset of purchase-paralysis. For many this means their careers have been set adrift, and, as such, their lives.

But the pandemic is just half the story. It’s easy to let it hog the economic limelight. Because the predictable macro-economic world-of-work, as we knew it, was already on life support prior to lockdown. And while its familiarity as the-devil-we-knew fed into our action plans, it was evident that no amount of resuscitation would save the situation from its devolution. The emergent Gig Economy was already well on track by 2017, undermining the traditional labour-market of full-time workers (who rarely change positions and are focused on a lifetime career). Market disruptors were usurping deeply entrenched industries of their place in the markets by digital means.

So, in recognising a) the acceleration of human development over the last 150 odd years, b) the role of work, rapid-technology-advancement and careers in that trajectory, and c) the tidal shifts the world-of-commerce presents, it appears humankind stands at the onramp to its next stage of evolutionary advancement. With that framing in mind we note that this phase of humanity’s evolution, is distinct from those pasts by the sheer vastness of numbers on the planet (from 1 billion 200 years ago to 7.7 billion in 2019). The human collective, by that tally alone, a formidable planetary force.

It’s true that in unconsciousness, we present an existential threat to this planet. Perhaps none so great as when we take to our present-day formats for fulfilling narrow commercial and economic objectives, as a collective (contemplating the brutal parallels between colonialization and corporatisation of the planet). But if we see this crisis as the threshold to the birth of our species’ next phase of evolution, we have the opportunity to accept an invitation of cosmic proportions.

In navigating the maelstrom, a conscious awareness and deep desire for a loving world is arising from the ashes of our consumerism, mass individuation and its atomisation of our hearts from one other. We’ve called the collective expression of this desire activism. We see it at play when we acknowledge the elevating influence of people and movements such those evoked by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, The Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Jane Goodall, Sir Richard Attenborough, Greta Thunberg, The Arab Spring, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. This list relates not only the shift to the collective in voicing our deepest desires, but reflects the vocational orientation of those who have called our attention to these longings and spurred us to acknowledge our own.

The call to a more conscious, life-integrated expression of our careers is clarion.

Right now, we’re being invited to allow our work to become the vehicle through which we express our greatest longing and unique gifts in this world. We will afford ourselves and each other a holistic relationship with work. A career is merely one of 12 aspects to a rounded life. Included is your health & vitality, intellectual life, emotional life, character, spiritual life, love relationships, parenting, social life, financial life, quality of life, and life vision.

To know the truth of the evolutionary impulse that is your vocation, you will have: explored who you are in relation to all these aspects of your life; understood your driving beliefs and biases, and cleared your heart of emotional burdens.

In the process you will have awakened to the wholeness of who you are as a conscious creator within what we still call ‘commerce’, and the pivotal realisation that you. are. your. only. work.

Images sourced from vectorstock.com, and produced by Studiostocks | First published in Wellness Magazine (Jan-Mar 2021) | Ref: “The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class. An Update” Homi Kharas (February 2017)