You Don't Need a Calling
An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto for a Life of Purpose
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
Stop searching for purpose and start being present.
"Pursue your calling." "Become the best version of yourself." "Make your life count." These messages inundate us at work, in our churches, in self-help books, and in our own psyches. But so many of us are worn out from constantly pursuing more and always feeling like we fall short. In a capitalist system, purpose is determined by profitability, manipulating us into believing our entire lives should be driven by growth and production. Society has narrowed our perspective of work, gifts, and success, turning our unique energies into commodities. But we don't have to accept this limiting view. We can reclaim our true purpose by resisting systems of exploitation, slowing our constant forward motion, and tuning in to what's happening in the here and now.
In You Don't Need a Calling, former minister Damon Garcia turns our standard ways of thinking about purpose upside down. Purpose isn't something we find--it's something that finds us when we learn to be present to the world in front of us. Drawing on philosophy, theology, pop culture, and anti-capitalist perspectives, Garcia charts a new course away from, on the one hand, the faith perspective that everything in our lives is part of God's plan and, on the other, the cynical belief that our lives have no purpose at all.
For anyone disillusioned by the idea of "God's plan" for their life or exhausted by the achievement treadmill, this book will dislodge your narrow thinking and reframe the way you view your life, desires, gifts, work, success, and relationship to the world. This book isn't about how to become the person you wish you were. It's about how to free yourself to be present to who you already are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Capitalism falsely frames life in terms of profit that benefit the powerful and damage the human spirit, according to this energetic if imperfect treatise. Pastor Garcia (The God Who Riots) argues that capitalism "manipulates us into thinking that our true selves are found on the other side of success," trapping people in an endless race toward professional achievement. But worth is a result of God's "unearned favor," according to Garcia, and readers would be better served by separating their identity from their work, remaining "genuinely open to what the present moment has in store," and focusing on connecting with their communities. Garcia explains how to achieve this in small ways, like spending quality time with friends and family, while working toward reshaping the capitalist system by strengthening workers' cooperatives and other community organizations, speaking out about unfair labor conditions, and pushing for higher taxes on the rich. While Garcia sometimes resorts to rhetorical gymnastics to make his points ("Positive statements are inherently reductive.... If that person is good, then they're not bad, and if that thing is bad, then it's not good," he writes in a vague entreaty for readers to shed rigid self-perceptions), he effectively makes a case for redefining one's value as innate and rooted in one's relationship to others and to God. This resonates.
