Ok now to answer the question:
I believe to decide what one must do it should align with three categories: Belief, behave, belong.
Belief-- Does your career align with what you believe to be valuable, beautiful, and true?
Behave-- is it a company culture/atmosphere in which you can thrive, grow, and develop as a moral being who exercises integrity, justice, and compassion to those around you?
Belong-- do you enjoy the people around you? Is this a community into which you can add creative ideas, purposeful dialogue, and increase others' capacity to learn and improve? Is this a community that will help you grow as well into a person you desire to be? Do you like the types of people this company/institution creates? Are they whole people who care for others? Or are they selfish, nasty people who pick their nose all the time?
All in all: Choose a career path that best aligns you with the purpose you are created to fulfill as a human being--which is a soul, who has a body, that believes something about God and the world around them; behaves in a morally good or corrupt way in the world around them; and belongs to a community of people in which you can thrive or un-thrive.
Now here is the tricky part of this. With this question we are already getting into the realm of worldview and matters of faith. EVERYTHING COMES DOWN TO WORLDVIEW. Not faith in an abstract, blind leap into the great unknown. (That is foolishness). Faith in a system of thought that makes satisfactory sense of God and the world he rules. It is clear that I possess a worldview that believes God to be not a distant deity but a powerful, just, holy, compassionate, loving Creator and sustainer of what he has made.
Additionally, we must recognize that the Bible has something very significant to say about the topic you raise: Vocation. In many ways, we could read the Bible as a book all about Life and Vocation. Here is what I mean:
In the beginning of the Christian story-- God set out to fulfill a JOB of creating the world and creating humans. He worked for 6 days and then rested on the 7th. (There is much debate whether or not it is literal day or is it a million years according to science..... not the topic we will discuss right now).
God created Adam, the first human, to work a job that involved both production and upkeep. His life was to find purpose and meaning by aligning himself with God's idea of life and work and career. By this work he would actually show the world what God is like through his work and creative ability. Just like God worked the world in creation and sustains this world in love, so also Adam was called to work in the garden and keep it from decay. This is the reason why human beings love to make culture---art, movies, music, theology, poetry, scientific discovery, medicine, buildings, gardens, writing books, reading, etc... The Christian worldview sees the different jobs/work that humans do and says-- "Look! That is exactly what Adam was doing in the garden!". Part of being human is to work and keep... work and keep. Why? Because God has designed us with those amazing capacities.
The problem is sin. Satan comes in chapter 3 of the Christian story and tempts Adam and Eve to no longer submit themselves under God's loving leadership. They listen to Satan and try to become their own gods. The result was disastrous. one of the results was this: HARD, PAINFUL WORK! Now our lives our filled with boredom, angry bosses, getting fired, living without a job, the sadness that comes form not receiving a paycheck, disgruntled employees, unjust labor laws, disgusting labor conditions in poor countries, greedy CEO's, people trying to find ultimate satisfaciton in long hours, perfectionism, etc., etc. Something has gone horribly wrong with our understanding of Work and Career.
The Christian worldview sees all the sadness of those who struggle to find jobs and hate their work and says, "Look! This is exactly what happened when sin came into the world through Adam. God said that our work would be toilsome and hard and filled with unrest."
So what am I saying? Our generation needs to find a worldview that satisfies their longing to discover a life, career, and network that aligns them with how they have been wired.
Does that make sense?
I just spent WAY too much time on this!! I gotta go write my paper now.
By the way, I never got to the good news of how Jesus has come to redeem work and give us a beautiful and just way to go about living life and discovering what type of work is really best for us as humans.
What do you think, Noah? How should our generation decide what to do with their life and work?
