Shiraz Janjua

More from The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (expect more in due time; I wrote down tons of gems from his gorgeous book on architecture, The Architecture of Happiness, as I read it earlier this year, far too many to excerpt here). In this scene, the author watches via closed-circuit television as a private career counselor listens to a client describe “her personal history and professional dissatisfactions.”

Three times the client interrupted her own anecdotes, suddenly pushing back her hair and saying, ‘I’m so sorry, this must be unbearably boring’, to which Symons shot back calmly, as if he had been expecting her to say this all along, ‘I am here only for you’. Twenty minutes into the session, the therapist dropped his voice almost to a whisper and asked, with an avuncular warmth, what had become of the spontaneous and excited child the client must have once been. At which, quite without warning, Carol, thirty-seven years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of forty-five in an office near the Bank of England, began to sob, as Symons watched her with his kindly eyes and, outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll around the carp pond.

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited — long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms — what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true ‘calling’.

This curious and unfortunate term had first come into circulation in a Christian context during the medieval period, in reference to people’s abrupt encounter with an imperative to devote themselves to Jesus’ teachings. But Symons maintained that a secularised version of this notion had survived even into the modern age, where it was prone to torture us with an expectation that the meaning of our lives might at some point be revealed to us in a ready-made and decisive form, which would in turn render us permanently immune to feelings of confusion, envy and regret.

Symons preferred a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, which he had pinned up above the toilet: ‘It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement’.