Vocation and Sacrifice Theme Analysis

Many of the historical figures in David Brooks’s The Road to Character didn’t choose the course of their own lives. When Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, she was horrified by the working conditions that caused the atrocity. From that point on, her life ceased to be just about her. The fight for workers’ rights became her vocation, which Brooks defines as the job a person is called to do, not the job they choose to do; the person with a calling “[doesn’t] create [their] life; [they] are summoned by life.” Similarly, religion called so strongly to Dorothy Day that “she preferred the church to her own will,” suggesting that one sacrifices even their own desires in order to pursue their calling. The idea of vocation can also sustain a person’s will to live. Frankl, a writer interned in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, kept other inmates from committing suicide by telling them that life still expected things of them—that is, that life “summoned” them. Through such examples, Brooks argues that answering a calling doesn’t annihilate the self, but is the surest way to find oneself and live a meaningful life.

Brooks shows that Frances Perkins’s vocation replaced her own ego as the core of her life. She was appalled by the horrible working conditions that caused the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, taking the lives of so many workers. This “moral indignation” was so strong that she forgot her own wants and devoted herself to fighting for workers’ rights, proving that a cause greater than herself was calling to her in this moment. To serve this calling, Perkins compromised her happiness. She went wherever she could affect the most change, even consenting to work with corrupt politicians who only listened to her when she behaved like a mother figure. She dressed in matronly clothing and allowed her colleagues to call her “Mother Perkins,” showing that she was willing to stifle her youth and femininity for the sake of making change. Also, she compromised intimacy and warmth in her relationships with her husband and daughter in her fight for workers’ rights. She hewed to a strict philosophy of privacy, keeping her personal emotions out of her work so as to be as productive as possible. As a result, her husband’s mental health unraveled, and her daughter’s messy life never took shape. Perkins herself confessed in her diary: “I am the cause of others’ nervous collapse, my husband, my daughter.” Despite the sacrifices it entailed, this calling transformed the way Perkins approached life. Instead of asking herself what she wanted, she started responding to what the world needed of her. Perkins’s experience thus demonstrates how one’s vocation can become the central structure of their life, replacing their wants and even their happiness.

Similarly, Dorothy Day’s calling demanded that she give up what she’d previously found meaningful. She made several attempts to fill the emptiness in her life. For instance, she hoped that secluding herself with a lover would fulfill her lack of purpose. However, devoting herself to her romantic partner Forster Batterham did not satisfy her. Next, she thought that motherhood might answer her needs. But despite her immense feeling of gratitude at her first daughter’s birth, this was only the beginning of her calling. Indeed, her daughter’s birth showed her that she still had “no outlet for her faith.” Finally, she poured her faith into the outlet of the Catholic Church, and in so doing, she fatefully distanced herself from her husband and daughter. In other words, she gave up the things she’d previously chosen in hopes of fulfilling her purpose. This suggests that sometimes, one’s calling requires them to give up even good and meaningful parts of life in pursuit of a larger purpose.

In another light, the idea of a vocation sustains a person’s will to live in the most degrading circumstances. Viktor Frankl’s life in a concentration camp was completely contrary to what he’d planned for himself. Subjected to torture and made to work grueling and demeaning jobs, nothing in his life was what he’d wanted. In order to survive this, Frankl took up the idea of a vocation: his life was expecting things from him, not the other way around. Frankl took this philosophy and used it to control his inner response to the suffering he could not control. Despite the degrading treatment he received, he fortified his own integrity against it instead of succumbing to it. Furthermore, Frankl saved the lives of countless fellow prisoners, preventing them from potentially committing suicide by sharing the idea of a vocation with them. He told them that although they couldn’t expect anything out of life, life nonetheless expected something out of them; it expected them to endure their hardships and keep their minds on goodness and love in the midst of forces that tried to destroy these things. In this way, when a person has nothing else, the concept of a vocation can sustain them.

Although a vocation seems to require the sacrifice of one’s happiness and their individual will, it actually constitutes the core of a person’s purpose in life. This is because the concept of a vocation transforms the meaning of life from the pursuit of one’s desires to the sacrifice of oneself in the service of a higher cause. From this perspective, none of Brooks’s exemplars would have attained a meaningful life if they weren’t called by vocations. When Perkins and Day lost everything, and when Frankl had nothing, their vocations afforded them strength of character and meaningful lives, nonetheless.