I'm part of Generation YOLO and I'm proud of it.

I don't want to join the rat race.

Not be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom,

ugliness.

I don't want to be a moron, robot, commuter.

I don't want to become a fragment of a person.

I want to do my own thing.

I want to live (relatively) simply.

I want to deal with people, not masks.

People matter. Nature matters. Beauty matters. Wholeness matters.

I want to be able to care.

- E. F. Schumacher (from Good Work)

I am part of Generation YOLO. I am someone who appreciates how short life is and will not be content to live a life without meaning, soul and purpose. I am proud – and also grateful – to be that person, growing up in a time and place where I can think beyond basic sustainance.

It has been exactly 2 years since I walked away from a mind-numbing desk job that hollowed me out. By the time I'd decided to take the leap, I felt I had no reason to get up in the morning. My passions and talents had been left to wilt like an old banana peel whose flesh had long been gobbled up. My monkey brain was a constant churn of words like 'alienation' and 'anomie'. Yet I was only 28 and therefore still young enough to be wide eyed and hungry for life. It was a truly horrifying time. The feeling I had been wasting my time and energy on a job (and getting there through a year of unpaid internships) that made me feel less than human while barely paying the bills wasn't even half of it. Welcome to my version of a classic 21^st century tale about a 20-something trying to make it in London. 

It could have been much worse. I could have stuck to my guns for a further year (that is, if my job had survived the cull at the company that was to happen less than a year after I threw in the towel). But for what? The only people I had to appease by remaining on route to a 'respectable profession' like Editor at a publishing house were my loving parents. They'd given me everything to ensure that I would live out the dream of their generation: doing something 'respectable' (code for 'conventional'), preferably by using my intellect rather than my creativity or, God forbid, my hands – and, more crucially, having a coveted job for life.

Of course, the idea of having a job for life is no longer a reality. I completed graduate school in 2009 just as the economies of the developed world were crashing and banging into the most devastating recession since the Great Depression. Five years on and we're seeing growing numbers of 30-year-olds in the UK 'boomeranging' back to Mum and Dad's because they're either jobless or their salaries are too meagre to cover the costs of living in London. Life isn't quite like the baby boomer years.

What was truly horrifying about my quarter-life crisis was that I had no idea What Next. All I knew was that I could no longer linger in the depths of misery. I stank of the stuff and it made me ill. I had to try something new there and then. Luckily it only took a couple of months for the penny to drop. With support from M and, more grudgingly, from my parents, I handed in my resignation and set off on a voyage to the unseen lands of volunteering in my local community. In my eyes, volunteering was the best way for me to try my hand at, well, anything, without having to sign on the dotted line. Freed from the tunnel visioned confines of a 9-5 admin job, the world quite suddenly became abundant. My new 'job' would be to explore this brave new world and I duly took it up with gusto.

About a week after my last day at my old job, I joined the communications team of a small charity that focussed on running mentoring projects for society's marginalised. By giving my time freely, I not only received ample opportunities to build and explore skills I never knew I had; I also felt for the first time since moving to the UK that my efforts were appreciated in the workplace. The only snag was the odd ignorant contempt I got from certain people who consider unpaid work not 'work'. It's an attitude that is not only contemptuous of volunteers but also of the millions of mothers and fathers whose unsung unsalaried household work, according to one source, is valued at £30,000 a year! Just because this kind of productivity is not reflected in the national accounts doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

One of my dreams at the end of my twenties was to work with children. I'd always admired people who had a knack with kiddies, me not being one of them. Or so I thought. So I singlemindedly focussed on overturning this conviction by getting involved in a couple of local children's projects alongside my communications work for the mentoring charity. My efforts with the children were amply rewarded a year later when I was offered a paid position as a special needs assistant at a primary school in North London.

I wish I could end this post here with a fairytale ending – but it was not to be. Despite being quite a natural at it, after a few months on the job I realised that working with children in such an intense environment was just not for me. My doubts were amplified by some fundamental misgivings I have about the English school curriculum and the style in which children – with special needs or not – are taught in this country in the mainstream. Needless to say, the decision to withdraw from the position was yet another difficult one. I had become fond of the child I was assigned to work with and I also had to face the palpable bewilderment, if not outright disapproval, about my decision from my colleagues who thought it stupid to walk away from a job in troubling economic times. But I had to be honest with myself. My ability to fully shine in the job was hamstrung from the start. I did not want to be there. Period. Also, by withdrawing at an early stage, I reasoned that it would be less traumatic for the child who had yet to become attached to me.

At the same time as I was pursuing this 'calling' to work with children, I harboured ambitions of becoming a yoga teacher and qigong instructor. I attended yoga sessions 4-5 times a week to get my body and soul well versed in the yogic tradition and, together with M, we did an 8 week qigong teacher training course with the venerable Shifu Yan Lei at the Shaolin Temple in London. In a marketplace that's already saturated with yoga teachers, I thought, what better way to distinguish myself than by fusing together the two ancient healing traditions? Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you wish to look at it), not one student passed the qigong teacher training course as the Shifu (master) quite rightly has high standards. The Shifu's exacting standards is in welcome opposition to the yoga teacher training industry which churns out 'qualified' teachers to the rhythm of a cash register. My cynicism aside, it's now clear that my yoga teaching ambitions are wholly premature. I started doing yoga at age 28, and thought I wanted to become a teacher after only my second session on the mat. If I am to pursue this path, I see myself completing the teacher training when I'm more wised up and have meditated more, or at least after I've actually made it to India ;-)

So where am I two years after my departure from the bricks and mortar of office work? Perhaps to your disappointment, I have no fast answer to offer. But that's life isn't it? I am still feeling my way to the holy grail of “growing a vocation”, as Roman Krznaric says in his excellent little book How To Find Fulfilling Work (more on this below). 

In fact, this post was prompted by an existential crisis I had on the eve of my 30^th birthday in which I again sunk into a black hole of uncertainty and insecurity. After my stint with the children, I'd considered doing further study, thinking that this would open up even more avenues of possible pursuits. But then I realised that my existential confusion actually stems from the fact that I have too many options! This is compounded by the fact that I live in a city where almost anything is possible. (I'm aware that I'm making a first world complaint. Please don't hate me.) Why shouldn't I become a circus freak, a busker, a surgeon, a fire breather, a pastry chef, a kayak instructor, a reiki master...? The plethora of possibilities is like a spinning hall of mirrors atop a carousel. So the questions are what possibilities are aligned to my 'True North' and what are mere distractions? How can I pick out the melodies from the white noise?

This little crisis of confidence was precipitated by my feeling that I was running out of time. Social convention almost everywhere in the world expects a 30-year-old to be sure of herself, if not well into in a career already. And then there is the not-too-trivial question of bearing children. Argh! I kept thinking how both my parents and M only have so much patience while they wait for me to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

So here I am reliving my life from 2 years ago. Stumped and frustrated. During the darkest hours, I even began questioning whether this whole YOLO business isn't just pie-in-the-sky entertained by a privileged few, with no grounding in hard economic reality. Thankfully I had the sense to snuff out this flicker of doubt as soon as it emerged with the more compelling, eternal question: Why settle for less by taking any old job that fritters away your gifts and passions only so that you can live for the weekends and the next holiday or save for a future that may never come – in the way you expect? I reminded myself that I did not decide to set sail onto the high seas of possibility, negotiating currents and rips at the edge of my comfort zone, only to return to the land of lost opportunities. No siree!

After I regained some balance from this existential wobble, it occurred to me that while I still can't answer the question “What do you do?” with an answer that will placate the person asking it, one important fact that sets me apart from my self of 2 years ago is that I am a lot wiser.

So wise in fact that while reading Krznaric's book How To Find Fulfilling Work, I kept thinking: “Well, this is nice. Why didn't I write this book myself?” Everything Krznaric mentions in it are thoughts that I independently arrived at through my own soul searching. But before I go on to highlight a selection of points of concurrence with Krznaric, I'd like to share the greatest lesson of all from my soul voyage.

Life evolves, culturally, historically as well as biologically. So rather than deny it, deal with it! The ancient Greeks and Buddhists were really onto something and yet we forget this wisdom in our bid for security and predictability. But to wish to stand still against the winds of change brings with it all sorts of problems. These are nowhere more evident than in the employment industry. People who once thought they had jobs for life are now dispensable. If their jobs haven't already been shipped off to the developing world, they are probably in line to be usurped by uber-diligent robots who don't require sick leave and pension schemes. People whose skill sets have fallen behind the curve of innovation and global trends are also finding themselves knocked off their perch of security. Schools in the UK are only beginning to wake up to this fact by making computer programming a core subject. 

Nothing stands still, least of all in the prevailing capitalistic system whose evolution runs on 'creative destruction'. There is absolutely no controlling the future. The individuals who will thrive are those who are best at adapting to change.

As individuals, we all age and our mindsets and circumstances change accordingly. The aspirations we have when we are 25 may very well be different from those we have when we are 45. So why should we be expected to apply ourselves in the same ways across the decades, not least in terms of work?

Like Ken Robinson and other progressive thinkers, I blame our education system for perpetuating the cultural myth of a career for life. The school system in the UK is set up to shoehorn 16 and 18 year olds into professions before they are mature enough to understand what it is that they will want to be doing 5 years hence. Heck, research has shown that our brains don't fully mature until we are 25, let alone 18 when we are expected to choose law or psychology or fine arts. I'm doubly glad that I didn't spend 6 years in medical school, incurring a crippling amount of debt while at it, only to graduate without a wish to practise medicine. For this, I have my parents to thank. They encouraged me to get a general humanities degree because they prized a 'broad' education that would give me 'options'. But while my degree qualified me for almost no job in an economy that prizes specialisation, it gave my mind an ample amount of flexibility on how to think and negotiate my way around the world. Despite the ups and downs I've experienced for not having a set career plan, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Now for some wisdom gleaned from Roman Krznaric's book that I happen to have thought up independently. (I'm still patting myself on the back for this).

Striving for the good life is a moral enterprise

Unless you're unfortunate enough to be living in a subsistence economy, society in much of the West has been moving away from a kind of grin-and-bear-it serfdom towards what Krznaric calls the 'Age of Fulfilment'. This idea of 'fulfilment through work' actually stems from the advent of individualism in Renaissance Europe, the poster child of a person so fulfilled was Leonardo Da Vinci. In other words, the ideal is not a new one. Only that Western culture moved backwards with the advent of the industrial era. Workers were treated like cogs in a machine, beavering away in their silos, doing the same old backbreaking labour for 14 hours a day only to line the pockets of a new ruling class.

According to Krznaric, more than half of the working population in Europe and the US consider their jobs unfulfilling probably for similar reasons as our Victorian ancestors. But even without such stats, it is apparent that in a place like London, people are starting to wake up to the fact that being stuck in a job that might pay well but makes one miserable and therefore more likely to engage in addictive behaviours (from impulse shopping to binge drinking) just isn't good enough anymore. It's neither good for the individual nor for a society made up of miserable self-medicating individuals. Working for money and status is the new form of enslavement. The more money you earn, the more money you'll want so you have to work harder to attain it. It is what Martin Seligman calls the 'hedonistic treadmill'. There is no end game to the rat race unless you walk the plank.

Albert Camus reminds us that “Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”

Our multiple selves need multiple outlets

One of the legacies of the Victorian era has been the invention of job specialisation via the division of labour for the greater efficiency of the capitalistic machine. It therefore denies that each and every human being has a range of talents and even 'multiple selves'. Again, Leonardo Da Vinci is the archetypal example of what happens when you allow the marriage of multiple talents and passions with work. He is what Krznaric calls a “wide achiever” who did many things at once, rather than sticking to one specialism. He was variously an artist, inventor, a scientist, a musician and a philosopher.

Like so many of us, I was conditioned to think that the 'correct' way to live is to work my way up the ladder in one profession, one that you can identify your being with at cocktail parties (I'm an anaesthetist, I'm a human rights lawyer). And yet, since I took my soul on a voyage, I have been meeting people almost on a daily basis who are X-cum-Y-cum-Z types. Needless to say, they tend to be of the creative ilk – the artist-cum-barista-cum-yoga teacher or the burlesque dancer-cum-social enterpriser. I find my belly fires up every time I talk to people about their hyphenated careers whereas those who yarn about their standard singular vocations – filmmaker, musician and author, excepting – leave me cold. (And that's why I don't go to cocktail parties anymore.) 

Krznaric's talk about being a “serial specialist” is also comforting. A person may not have three jobs on the go, but as life evolves, he trades one career for another as his needs and aspirations change. Krznaric writes about a woman who started out as an aerospace engineer for NASA only to retrain as an urban planner when one day she found herself rather riled up by a badly planned patch of American suburbia. Another woman was doing fabulously as a dotcom engineer for Sony when she began moonlighting for a independent media company that helps Palestinians get online and create news. This awoke her humanitarian streak, and she duly quit her high paying IT job in California, downscaled to a bedsit back in her native Ireland and set up her own magazine that focussed on changing the ruinous thinking that led to the Celtic financial bubble. She has since worked in various posts on sustainable economics and development.

Krznaric himself has variously been a telephone salesman, an academic and journalist, a community worker, a tennis coach, a self-employed gardener and carer for his twins.

As for me looking back over the last decade, I am proud to announce that I have been a fundraiser for Greenpeace, a staff writer for a magazine, a freelance blogger, a special needs assistant, an assistant Chinese martial arts teacher, a mentor to children and the elderly... If I may say so myself, my work history shows that I have at least lived a little, and that I have made a difference in a small way. And it's only just the beginning!

Doing more than one thing also gives you an insurance policy against changing economic tides. What's that proverb about not putting all your eggs in one basket? If your day job as a librarian gets automated, at least you still have your guitar making business to fall back on...

When I was telling a good friend of mine about Krznaric's book, she aptly said: “It's no longer about having a career, but about having projects.” Well said, my friend :-)

What makes a job meaningful? Money isn't it.

Krznaric talks about three important characteristics of meaningful jobs; ideally, a job will be a blend of all three. These are: 1) doing a job that gains you respect (because its worthwhile), 2) doing something that will make a difference (the ethical career) and 3) doing something that indulges your passions and uses your talents. On the first characteristic, Krznaric writes about a man in Australia who worked in refrigeration and then, quite accidentally, became an embalmer when he discovered a buried passion for embalming (no pun intended). The kind of respect he gained was from the relatives of the deceased who saw the care he took to give the deceased their last bit of dignity. Another (more obvious) example of a profession that gains one a lot of respect is fighting fires.

At the moment, I can see myself doing something that aims to make a positive difference to others (hence all the dilly dallying with children) as well as one that cultivates my passions and talents. I clearly find I express myself best and most creatively with my writing, and yet, I also have a musical talent that has lain dormant for the better part of a decade. I recently started teaching myself the classical guitar and, in less than a week, I have learned an entire exercise that is part of the ABRSM Grade 4 syllabus. M has given me the idea of uploading my progress weekly on this blog. Watch this space!

What makes a job fulfilling?

Krznaric says that ideally it's a job that has meaning (see above), gives one flow (the giddy feeling of being so engaged in the task at hand that time stops), and freedom (whether that is being your own boss or having the time to be creative). For some people, a fulfilling job can be cleaning office buildings (Ken Robinson talks about a woman who gets flow from doing just this in his recent book Finding Your Element) while for others, it can be planting and harvesting kola nuts. One should never judge nor should they. Happiness is truly the greatest measure of success no matter what you do.

Act now, reflect later

It's what Da Vinci called discepolo di esperienza or being a disciple of choice. This is the subject of Krznaric's book that interests me most because it so faithfully mirrors my own approach to finding my way. When I quit my job in 2012, I wasted no time in plunging myself into various projects and causes. I sidestepped career advisors and dubious personality tests for what really counts: experience. How otherwise can you know whether you will like or dislike doing something if you've never tried it? As Krznaric puts it, you can't know what it's like being a carpenter just by reading a book about the profession. By way of example, he tells the story of a Belgian woman who, for her 30^th birthday, gave herself a year to try out 30 different jobs. While supporting herself part-time as a freelance events manager (the profession in which she felt she had reached a dead end), she shadowed and volunteered in widely different vocations: from fashion photography to bed-and-breakfast review writing to running a cat hotel.

For understandable reasons, most people contemplating a career change will want to think hard and plan their move before taking the leap. But Krznaric says:

“The problem with the 'plan then implement' model is simple: it rarely works. What generally happens is that we find ourselves in new jobs that don't suit us, because we haven't had any experience of what they are like in reality... Alternatively, we spend so much time trying to work out what the perfect career would be, ceaselessly researching or getting lost in confused thoughts about the best option, that we end up doing nothing, overwhelmed by fears and procrastination trapped by the paradox of choice...”

Ah, the bane of having too much choice. This is where the 'reflecting' part of the 'Act now, reflect later' equation comes in. Lest we become like the greedy monkey who tries to grab a handful of peanuts out the jar and then gets his hand stuck, it's important after one has experimented with different jobs to take a step back and evaluate the fruits of one's exploration. For some people, like myself, this might include seriously narrowing down the field of possibility to prevent paralysis by the “paradox of choice”. After some reflection it occurred to me that I am drawn to creative and community work, and so I should keep my explorations within these admittedly broad perimeters. 

While not everyone will have the luxury to quit their jobs and take a year out to volunteer and shadow in alternative industries, Krznaric counsels that one can either build branching projects – that is, test the waters by moonlighting in work unrelated to your 9-to-5 – or get talking to people who are already doing what they may want to do and learning about what these professions are like on a day-to-day basis.

In fact talking to people in fields unrelated to yours is a big part of changing careers. If you're a lawyer wishing to leave the law and you continue to associate only with lawyers, you're pretty much blinding yourself to what's 'out there'.

Krznaric says: “As I know from my own experience, our worldview is a psychological straitjacket that restricts us from pursuing new possibilities.”

In the last 2 years, I have talked to a wide variety of people who are doing things that I could imagine myself doing. I have met actors, film makers, yoga teachers, nutritionists, writers, freelance designers, special needs teachers, musicians, cafe owners, criminal lawyers, psychotherapists, life coaches... Even if the perfect vocation doesn't present itself from such conversations, there's plenty of inspiration to be gained from just getting to know how other people live and how unconventional life can get. Importantly, opening up my social circle has taught me that I'm not alone in wanting a meaningful life.

Finding a vocation is like finding true love or is it?

This is where Krznaric and I depart – at first blush.

I always thought that finding the right vocation is a bit like finding love. The 30 jobs-a-year experiment resembles speed dating. The existential angst of not having 'found' the perfect career is of the type I had when I thought I'd never find him.

But Krznaric says that, actually, one doesn't 'find' the perfect vocation like a proverbial needle in the haystack.

“There is a widespread – and mistaken – assumption that a vocation usually comes to people in a flash of enlightenment or moment of epiphany. We're lying in bed and suddenly we know exactly what we're supposed to do with our life. It's as if the voice of God has called to us: 'Go forth and write Chinese-cookery books!... It's an enticing thought, which, in effect, takes the responsibility away from us: someone or something will tell us what to do with our lives.”

Rather, the perfect vocation is something that one grows and grows into by having an overarching goal or purpose.

“A vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment – meaning, flow, freedom – but that also has a definitive goal or clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.”

In a sense, this concurs with what my friend said about having projects, which are by nature goal-driven, rather than a career. One sets out to build something or to get better at something or to discover something, whether that is building a school, becoming an ace guitarist or discovering a cure for lupus.

Aristotle, as ever, is wise on the matter: every person should have “some object for the good life to aim at... with reference to which he will then do all his acts, since not to have one's life organized in view of some end is a mark of much folly.”

And from the other end of the philosophical spectrum we have Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

While the idea of 'growing a vocation' might lack the romantic spark of having a 'calling' or 'destiny', Krznaric assures those of us who are still at a loose end that “You shouldn't worry at all if you don't feel you have a vocation... while they are relatively rare, with the right approach it is quite possible for a vocation to emerge in your life.”

The "right approach" being to start acting now (Just do it!) and to do so with an undying self-belief. Marie Curie wrote of her philosophy of work: “We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”

The bottom line is that a vocation - and greater purpose - will not emerge in your life if you cling on to a way of life that is well passed its sell-by date because you lack self-belief. No matter what everyone else says, your life is yours to live and... YOLO!

I just want to thank all the friends and family who have supported me on my journey thus far. I couldn't have kept calm and carried on without you!

Watch this space for the next instalment of the voyages of my soul.