Let’s look at some advice you often hear about career choice. One is “Follow your passion.” The benefits of doing work in a field you’re passionate about is that you have a higher chance of loving what you do. You would also be less likely to burn out, and probably more effective at the work you do. But there are problems with this advice.
One is that lots of people are passionate about the same things early on in life, and other fields get neglected. Lots of people just leaving college are passionate about playing video games, comedy improv, and watching sports. Among students, 84 percent had passions, but they tended to involve sports, music, and other arts.1 But there are far more people who want to do these things than there are jobs. Only 3 percent of jobs are in sports or the arts. This means that most of the people who follow their passion will not be successful in working in that area. It also means that the jobs will be highly competitive, and thus lower paying.
A good modification of the “follow your passion” rule doesn’t sound as good, but has much more wisdom. Follow one of your passions that balances how passionate you are about it with how many other people are passionate about it, and how much people are willing to pay for that skill. If, for example, you are kind of passionate about working with numbers, risk, and probability, but what you really love is composing country music songs, you just might have a better life becoming an actuary and doing country music in your spare time than the other way around.
A further modification has to do with the idea of passion at all. In the Western world we tend to think of passion as something you’re born with, or have to discover. Some people seem to be like this. Famed athlete Wayne Gretzky seemed like he was destined to be a hockey player since he was three years old.
But this isn’t always true, and other cultures recognize that. Sometimes you become passionate about something that you get good at. Your parents might force you to practice piano when you’re young, and when you’re young you might hate it. But when you get really good at it, you just might love it in adolescence. Even Gretzky had a father who encouraged him and pushed him to succeed.2
What you’re passionate about and what you’re good at are usually, but not always, the same thing. You can be passionate about singing, but not have a particularly good voice, or a voice that tires easily.
The lesson is that the ideas of what you’re passionate about when someone is young and not good at anything yet should not be treated as some indication of a person’s authentic self. The self is something that grows over time. You might think of your passions as something that are core to your being, perhaps even genetic. But much of it is probably a result of your culture—as historian Yuval Harari puts it, “a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths.”3 Your passion for travel is a modern value that you got from your culture. This is not to say that culture isn’t a legitimate part of you, it’s just to emphasize that culture is learned, and you should remember that what you’ll learn as you age will change who you are—what your authentic self really is.
Keep in mind what you want to do, what you’re good at, and how hard that job is to get.
Studies also show that job satisfaction has less to do with matching your passion to a job and more with how good the job is in a more or less objective way. The best jobs allow you some independence, have variety, give a sense of completion and positive contribution, and make it easy to know if you’re doing well or not.4
Most of us have to work to earn money to live, and most of us spend around forty hours a week doing it. But just because you need to earn money to live doesn’t mean that work can’t pay off in other ways.
No matter what kind of employment people have, studies have found that workers have one of three basic mindsets about them: it’s a job, it’s a career, or it’s a calling.5
If you look at your work as just a job, then you see it only as a means to money. You might look forward to the weekends, and have other ambitions in your life, like mastering calligraphy, volunteering, or completing your Beastie Boys record collection. If you see your work as a career, you’re more ambitious about it. You see your job as a part of a larger plan in your life in which you advance. You seek prestige and promotions. Those who see their jobs as callings find it intrinsically fulfilling, because they are doing something they genuinely want to do, or feel is important.
I’m lucky in that my job is my calling. I think I’d do cognitive science even if I wasn’t getting paid to do it. But you don’t need to be a university professor to have a calling. Amy Wrzesniewski found that there are people with these attitudes toward their work in almost every profession. Even among custodial staff, there were people who were just punching the clock, and those who saw their work as an important part of a larger organization. A hospital worker, while cleaning up vomit, might see her work as a part of healing people, and find it very fulfilling.6
To the extent that you are able, you might be able to change your mindset so that the work you do is more of a calling. Assuming that your job involves doing something good for the world, and you’re not working as an advertiser for a cigarette company or something, you might be able to nurture the idea of your work as a calling in your mind. Think about what your field is doing for the world, and how you are a part of a larger force for good.
Admittedly, this is harder for some professions. Journalists, for example, often feel that in the workplace they are unable to live by the ideals that brought them into the field in the first place. It’s the sad truth that many people go into environmental law to help the environment, and refugee law to help refugees, but most of the jobs in these areas are defending companies who are trashing the environment, or working to keep refugees out of the country. In those professions, the jobs that work toward the values of the employees are rare, coveted, and as a result pay much less.
It’s an unfortunate fact of our modern world that there is a correlation between doing good for the world and getting paid less. Jobs where you get a visceral feeling of helping people or the environment, like teaching, social work, and so on, tend to be low-paying jobs. This is one of the reasons women, on average, are paid less than men: women tend to choose meaningful jobs where they are helping people, and men are more likely to do unmeaningful work that they might hate so they can get a bigger paycheck. We end up with the situation where women get paid less, but are happier with their jobs.
If you can’t make your work a calling, it might be that another job would be better for you. It’s possible that some people would not find their work to be a calling no matter what they did. But if you have a calling, you’d have a better life if you had work that channeled it.
There are some jobs that seem great because of the effect they have on the world, or because they are associated with some ideal, but the day-to-day activities of the job aren’t very pleasant. This mismatch between what people think a job involves and what a job actually involves cause a lot of people to get into areas of work that they shouldn’t. They think that wedding photographers spend most of their time snapping pictures of happy couples, and don’t realize that the vast majority of their time is spent alone, editing photos on a computer. Luckily, the cure for this is simple: chat with a few people in the profession you’re targeting and ask them what their day-to-day work-life actually is. This will wake you out of your television-induced delusions of what certain careers are like.
Truly fulfilling work involves flow states for the things you do day-to-day, as well as a feeling of meaningfulness about what the work is doing to the world. These two things correspond to the two main aspects of happiness: pleasure and life satisfaction.7
Having your work be a calling is a win-win-win: you make money, you are happy, and you’re doing good for the world.
Choosing a Career on Moral Grounds
A good starting point for choosing a career on moral grounds is to decide how you want to make the world a better place. There are two basic ways to think about this. The first is that you want to create something that is good. Maybe you will try to cure malaria, or work to encourage good governance.
The other is that you choose a problem and try to reduce its magnitude. There is no shortage of problems in this world. But we can break the most important problems up into a few classes: one is human suffering, another is animal suffering, another is prevention of future catastrophes, and the last one is environmental protection.8
Of course, these problems have fuzzy boundaries and overlap with each other. Preventing global climate change, for example, has ramifications for human and animal suffering. But one of the reasons to break it up this way is that it’s difficult to compare a charity that helps one to a charity that helps another. For example, is it better to save rainforests, which helps prevent climate change and increases species diversity, or is it better to save people’s lives with malaria nets, or is it better to prevent factory farming so that animals don’t suffer? These apples and oranges problems have yet to be solved when it comes to occupation choice.
The bright side of this is that you can choose whichever one you like the best! Let’s say, for example, you’re particularly interested in preventing global pandemics.
At some point, a pandemic might wipe out large amounts of people. No good. What kind of things can you do to try to prevent global pandemics? Well, one consideration is your skill set. You can do research to try to find cures for infectious diseases. This might be a career path you can choose if your skills are in science and biology. You can also work for a nonprofit that creates programs that prepare communities for these events, or distribute vaccines. This is the kind of thing that someone with social and organizational skills can do. If you’re good at writing, then perhaps you can be a journalist, or be in some kind of a communications job where you can raise awareness for the problem so that other people can help. If you’re into politics, say, a lobbyist, you can try to influence government policy so as to reduce the probability of devastating pandemics. If you’re not good at any of these kinds of things, then you can try to get a job where you earn a lot of money, and then just donate money to the charities that are trying to prevent pandemics in all the ways described above.9
The lesson here is that even though the problem of global pandemics is in some sense a biological and sociological one, it doesn’t mean you need to be an expert in biology or sociology to be able to help with the problem. Lots of problems are multifaceted, and involve research, government, communication, and so on. You can be creative, and try to figure out how you can best use your skills and interests to work toward solving the problem of your choice.
Furthermore, it’s really important that you enjoy your work. When you’re twenty-two years old, you might be full of vigor and want to force yourself to do something for the good of the world that, fifteen years later, you might not like anymore. Recall that burnout is a real problem. If you’re unable to do your job because you’re so miserable, then you’re no good to anybody. So if you choose a job that does good for the world, make sure that you’re reasonably happy doing it, or else it will be unsustainable.10
Let’s look at a job everybody thinks is good for the world: being a doctor (not the kind of doctor I am, I mean the kind that actually helps people). If you add one doctor to America, for example, there will be an estimated four lives saved over the course of the doctor’s career. Is that a lot? Well, to me it sounds low, but part of the reason it’s not higher is because there are already a lot of doctors. Does this mean that if you work as a doctor, you’ll save an estimated four more lives? Actually, no, because your becoming a doctor does not mean that there will be one more doctor, because if you had not become a doctor, someone else would have. Medical schools are competitive places with only a few spots. If you hadn’t taken one of those spots, someone else would have. Let’s assume that the selection criteria these schools use is pretty good. This means that if you got the spot, you’re going to be a better doctor than the person who would have taken your place. Fair enough. But when you’re looking at the lives saved by becoming a doctor, you need to look at the difference between the number of lives you would save versus the number of lives the person behind you line would have saved. When you do this calculation, we find that becoming a doctor only saves one or two additional lives than would have been saved by someone else if they had become the doctor instead.11
Being a doctor has benefits for you, such as prestige and (often) a high salary. But if we’re thinking only about the good contribution to the world, is all the stress, sleep deprivation, and up-front financial cost worth one or two additional lives saved? As we will see, the best way for even doctors to maximize the number of lives they save is by donating good chunks of their salary to effective charities.
Earning to Give
When people want to do good for the world, they often think of careers that help people directly: teachers, doctors, social workers, and working for nonprofits. There is also an idea among do-gooders that earning a lot of money is distasteful.
But another way to look at it is that you might be doing more good by earning obscene amounts of money and giving it to effective charities. Is it better to work for very little as a social worker, probably helping people in rich countries one at a time, or working in the financial sector, and donating tens of thousands of dollars to charities, and saving several lives a year? The concept of “earning to give” turns many ideas of doing good for the world on its head.12
Philosopher William MacAskill introduces a hypothetical newly educated doctor, Sophie, interested in helping the world, which I have adapted for this book. She has two tempting job offers. One is to work as a doctor in the developing world for a charity Doctors Against Sickness Greatly Undermining Death, or DASGUD. This job would pay her $50k annually, and let’s estimate that if she took this job she’d treat lots of people and save the equivalent of ten lives per year, because more lives are at risk in the developing world, and doctors there can do more good than doctors in rich countries. Her other offer is working at a hospital in Atlanta, giving some of the richest people in the world nose jobs, for $150k per year. Let’s assume that the medical work she would do in Atlanta saves no lives. Because she wants to maximize her goodness, if she were to take the high-paying job, she’d live on $50k and donate the other $100k to charity every year, which would save twenty lives yearly. Let’s assume that she’d be equally happy in either job, and we’re only comparing these jobs in terms of the magnitude of her positive effect on the world.13
In both cases she’d be living on $50k per year. Which job should she take?
There are some good reasons for her to take the high-paying job. One is that the $100k she’d be able to donate would pay for two other doctors if she donated that $100k to DASGUD, which, you will recall, pays their doctors a $50k salary. So right here we see that she’d have twice the positive effect with the Atlanta job, even if she spent her days doing nose jobs for rich people.
Another reason is that the donated money can go wherever she thinks it would be most valuable, and changing her mind about where to put her money is very inexpensive. Let’s suppose that when she enters the workforce Sophie thinks that being a doctor is a great way to help the world. If, five years later, she decides that she now thinks investing in education is more effective, or helping the environment, or helping animals, or doing medical research, she can easily start pouring her $100k somewhere else. If she took the charity job, she’d have to switch jobs, which is quite expensive in terms of time. She’s also a doctor, and because of her skill set might not be able to contribute very much to, say, an environmental cause.
A third reason is the “replaceability” argument. Charity jobs are highly competitive. This means that if she doesn’t work at DASGUD, someone almost as qualified as her will. Let’s say Sophie working at the charity job would save ten lives per year. How many lives would be saved if the next best candidate, Candace, had the job instead? We can assume that, on average, the best person was hired for the job, so the next best person for the job would be slightly less effective. So let’s say that Candace would save nine lives per year instead of Sophie’s ten. Still pretty good! If Sophie doesn’t take the Atlanta job, someone else will, too, but this person will probably not donate $100k of their salary to charity (most people donate little, and what they do donate usually goes to relatively ineffective charities).
This isn’t something that people think about a lot, but it’s important: not only should you think about the effect of your actions, but you need to think about what will happen as a result of your not choosing the other options (opportunity cost). The added good to the world Sophie would do in the charity job is not ten saved lives, but one: the difference between her taking the job and Candace taking the job. In this case, not choosing the charity job results in a minor difference in lives saved (Candace would cure one less person than Sophie would), but not choosing the Atlanta job results in a big difference.
What you might think at first is that the charity job saves ten lives and the Atlanta job saves twenty, but when you consider replaceability, you look at the difference between what Sophie would do in one job versus what her replacement would probably do. When you do this, her taking the charity job only would save one more life per year, and taking the Atlanta job would save twenty more. On this reasoning, she’d be doing twenty times as much good in the Atlanta job.14
The same goes for my own job. I’m a university professor—a highly competitive job. I could pat myself on the back for doing science and educating people, but if I didn’t have this job, somebody almost as good as me would. Or someone better than me, as I sometimes think when I’m suffering from imposter syndrome.
At the beginning of your career, it’s more important to get job skills and credentials than to try to make an impact right away. This is because you will still be learning about what you want to do, and working will help with that. People change jobs every few years, so don’t think of the first job you take as set in stone. Also keep in mind that it’s easier to move from for-profit to nonprofit than the other way around.15
Being a doctor is something people generally think of as a do-gooder job. How does this reasoning apply to morally problematic jobs? Let’s suppose Kurt has a job offer at a factory that raises pigs for consumption, and the pigs there are treated terribly. Kurt’s job there would be to make the company more money, which would, in many cases, be bad for the pigs. Kurt cares about animal welfare, and could also work at a nonprofit that tries to encourage companies to have more ethical practices.
The meat company pays much more. If he donated a substantial portion of his earnings to the animal welfare nonprofit, he could potentially do much more good for animals by working at a factory farm, as weird as that sounds. I’m not saying he necessarily would, just that it’s possible.
I’m sure some of you are getting your backs up over this. Recall from the section on moral psychology how we’re very harm-focused, and we are prone to be morally harsh on people who cause harm, and it takes a lot to make up for causing harm. That is, saving a life doesn’t make up for murder, in most people’s minds. Although we can try to resist this bias, it’s tough. And the person actually doing the working has to live with herself.
MacAskill suggests a real-world example to help us feel these situations to be more acceptable: Oskar Schindler. Here’s somebody who’s not working for a factory farm, but manufacturing bullets for the Nazis so they can kill innocent people and try to take over the world. But he used the money he made from it to save the lives of an estimated 1,200 Jews. He’s on everybody’s list of heroes.16
Still, it can be hard to work for a terrible organization, even if you can rationalize that you’re doing more good than harm by doing so, due to your donations. One way to feel better about it is to bring back the principle of double-effect. I brought this up earlier in the context of moral psychology. I don’t know whether it’s something we should hold as a moral principle, but you and I both probably do. It’s the belief that doing harm isn’t so morally bad if it’s a side effect of what you’re trying to do, rather than the intention of what you’re trying to do.
An example from philosophy is the “tactical bombing” case. Murdering 200 innocent people is pretty bad. Luis Garavito, the worst serial killer in history, was responsible for 138 proven victims, and probably killed more.17 So any action that results in the death of 200 innocent people is comparable to the effects of most of the world’s worst serial killer. Suppose a nation could end a bloody war by bombing a weapons facility, but we can pretty confidently foresee that 200 innocent people would die. But ending the war would save thousands. In the tactical bombing case, the nation is not killing the innocent people to end the war. The intention is only to destroy the weapons, and the innocents who die are a side effect of an otherwise moral action. Many people would say that the tactical bombing case is morally justified for this reason. But if a doctor killed one innocent to harvest organs to save five others, we feel differently about it, because the innocent is being killed to save others.
If this difference is meaningful to you, then it can help you feel better about harming the world in your job so you can earn to give. The point of taking the job with the mining company isn’t to destroy the environment, and the point of taking the factory farm job isn’t to hurt animals—that’s a side effect. The reason you’re doing it is to earn money so you can do philanthropy.
Some large companies donate money to charities, and some of those offer matching donation programs, such that you can donate a part of your salary and the company will match it.18 This is an effective way to amplify the impact of your own donations, but it must be tempered with consideration of the effectiveness of the charity the company chooses. If it’s a really ineffective charity, even given the amplification it might not be as good for the world as just donating your money to an effective charity without any matching program. If you work at a company, you might try to start a matching program if there isn’t one, or try to steer the company toward more effective causes.
The judgment of what job you should take depends on, as always, the numbers. If Kurt is good at his factory job, let’s assume that it means some number more pigs a year have terrible lives. By working at the nonprofit, he would contribute to saving some number of pigs. By donating, he’s saving some different number.
Coming up with these numbers in an individual’s life is often not easy. Years ago, it was impossible.
Luckily, there’s a website dedicated to helping you choose a career based on ethics: https://80000hours.org, based on the estimate that you will work about 80 thousand hours over the course of your life.
What about research? Many of the advances that makes us capable of doing good today are the result of people who did not spend all of their time trying to feed the world’s hungry or keep them from getting malaria. If nobody did anything but try to help the world’s poor directly, we’d have to postpone every other endeavor of value. If we had done this from the beginning, we’d have never invented writing, or high-productivity crops, or smallpox vaccines.19
This suggests that if you have the capacity to be a researcher, then you might well consider becoming one. What should you research? Although it’s tempting to focus on practical problems, most of the great advances in science were the result of what we call “basic” research, which is research that is not aimed at solving any particular practical problem. For example, in the 1800s Boolean algebra was invented because George Boole thought it was kind of interesting. A hundred years later it became the basis of all computing technology. It turned out that a key to understanding the Southwestern fever depended on a deer-mouse population study that was conducted because the scientists were interested. They had no idea of the practical applications later down the road. If you wanted to find a cure for disease, would you fund a researcher looking at mouse populations in Arizona?20
Working to find solutions to long-term world problems is something that very few people are capable of doing. If this an option for you, it’s probably the best choice of career you can make. For everyone else, thinking about the good done in the work you’re doing, tempered with the amount of good you can do through donation is the best way to choose what field to go into.