Calling

Although “New Work” is an alternative work system with different new forms of work, none has attracted as much attention, demand, and interest as the “work we really, really want”. It has virtually become its trademark. “The expression most associated with New Work is the repeated, recurring question about the work someone really, really wants to do.” (Frithjof Bergmann, New Work, New Culture, Arbor Verlag, Freiamt, 2004). It is therefore all the more important to show what Frithjof Bergmann understands by this specific work; otherwise it can and will easily be misunderstood. For as Hegel, on whose work Bergmann wrote his dissertation, already remarked in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”: “What is familiar is not understood merely because it is familiar.” This article therefore sets itself the task of presenting the “work we really, really want”. It is structured as follows: Part I presents premises and basic reflections by Bergmann that are constitutive for “New Work” and without which the “work we really, really want” cannot be understood comprehensively.

I Premises and Basic Reflections

1. The job system is characterized by a multitude of deficiencies:
• Automation, digitalization, and the rationalization of work mean that more and more jobs disappear. Technology increasingly replaces human labor. At the same time, population growth and rural exodus around the world produce countless workers every day, so the need for jobs grows. The shortage of jobs therefore becomes ever greater. Consequently, an alternative to the job is needed in order to make work possible for all people.
• The increase in global joblessness (as the reverse side of automation, digitalization, population growth, and rural exodus) is only one among many abuses in the job system. Others include performance pressure, pressure to succeed, overwork, monotony, stress, overload, precarious employment, and so on. These deficiencies are not disappearing; they are increasing, and new ones will be added. They make life difficult for human beings in every respect.
• The financial crisis ten years ago, and even more clearly the current Corona crisis, show how vulnerable the job system and economic system are. Within a very short time, millions of jobs can be destroyed, millions of people can fall into poverty, and the state must step in to rescue the system. This makes clear how urgently we need a more resilient, more humane, and more self-determined work system.
• The job system produces dependencies: on employers, on the labor market, on economic cycles, on location, on wages, on social insurance, on approval, on being useful in someone else’s plan. This dependency is often hidden behind the promise of security.
• The job system does not ask what people really want, what they are able to become, or what would make them more alive. It asks whether they fit into a job. This is the decisive difference.

2. Bergmann speaks of the so-called “polarity of work” (Frithjof Bergmann: “New Work, New Culture”, Arbor Verlag, Freiamt, 2004, pp. 13-21). This refers to a fundamental spectrum of work, with “bad” work at one end and “good” work at the other. The job belongs to “bad” work for the reasons already mentioned. The job does not keep what it promises. It promises, for example, economic independence; in reality, however, it makes us deeply dependent on the labor market. Jobs are the fleshpots of our time. They usually offer money and security, but at the same time they enslave us and bind us to necessity. New Work wants to liberate us from this – it is the call to the “exodus from Egypt”.

“Good” work, by contrast, is work with which we identify, work that is meaningful to us, makes us proud, represents a real task, gives us strength and energy, lets us grow beyond ourselves, and to which we feel called. Whereas in the job we are a means and make ourselves into a means, here we are the purpose of the work.

3. Frithjof Bergmann belongs to that philosophical current which assumes that the human being is by nature a deficient being. According to this view, people are rather weak, inadequate, easily discouraged, quickly intimidated, and even ready to give themselves up.

The human being is the (only) being that can lose itself. For this reason, the wish to want something specific is often not developed, if it exists at all. Bergmann, following Hegel, calls this state “poverty of desire” (ibid., pp. 134-141 as well as pp. 328 and 348). In his texts he gives example after example to demonstrate this basic human condition – whether workers in automobile production in Flint, Michigan, street children in Vancouver, Native Americans on reservations, managers in companies, retirees, or university students.

At this point, another note may underline this image of the human being: if people were strong from childhood, bursting with purposefulness, determination, and self-confidence, so that nothing could throw them off course, if disorientation were a foreign word to them, why are psychotherapists’ waiting rooms full, and why are coaching and counseling offers multiplying for every situation in life?

To avoid misunderstanding: “poverty of desire” means a specific lack of wishes or “wanting”, namely the striving toward oneself. Many people have lost this “wanting oneself”, or never developed it in the first place. Instead, apathy, boredom, indifference, despair, or cynicism spread among some. Among others, the will is directed outward: toward money, career, vacation, power, security, and so on. Concern for this and that, but no concern for oneself. Many forces are designed to pull people away from themselves, distract them, and scatter them: advertising, consumption, vacation, entertainment, media. The job must not be missing from this list. Job work is work for others: for money, for the employer, for the labor market, for the career, for material prosperity. Job work is work for everything possible, only not for oneself.

II What Does It Mean: “Do What You Really, Really Want”?

In relation to what has been said so far, this new form of work means:
• it is an alternative to the job
• it wants to overcome the “poverty of desire”
• it is “free work” as opposed to “necessary work”
• it therefore means an increase in “freedom”
• it leads us to recognize ourselves more – it brings light into self-ignorance
• it causes the human being to become “more alive”, “stronger”, to “come to itself” and to do more justice to its possibilities.

Beyond that, explained through the individual words of the sentence, it means:

WHAT

What is the idea, the destiny, the possibility that is laid within us? Not just anything, nothing superficial, nothing fashionable, nothing corruptible, nothing foreign to me. Rather, what lies deep within us, what makes us ourselves, what we want entirely out of ourselves, something we absolutely, unconditionally, seriously, and passionately want to be.

DO

It is not enough to know what we want to do – we must also do the work that we really, really want. Doing mediates between idea and reality. Only when we do the work do we know whether it is the right one; and only when it is the right one does it have the corresponding positive effect on us, meaning that it “strengthens” and “empowers” us, makes us “more alive” and gives us “energy”, and so on.

REALLY, REALLY WANT

In accordance with the earlier statement that it is difficult for us to recognize ourselves, that we often misrecognize ourselves, it is obvious that it is not easy to find out what we “really, really want”. Our will can be mistaken, it can deceive us, it can want something that does not fit us and is foreign to us. At the beginning, our will is usually not oriented toward ourselves or toward our needs. Especially in our time, many social forces fight to influence our will in their own sense: advertising and business, entertainment and media, and so on constantly tell us that we should want this or that. No wonder we must be careful that our will does not become the plaything of external factors. This is also one reason for the formulation “really-really-wanting”. We must ask several times whether this or that is now what we “really, really want”. And if not, we must begin the search again. This procedure can be compared with the efforts of a writer who rewrites a text again and again until it expresses what they really want to say. In the same way, we must keep searching until we have identified what we “really, really want”.

III How Do We Help People Do “What They Really, Really Want”?

Against the background of the assumptions and premises described in Parts I and II, as well as the image of the human being in “New Work”, we derive an approach consisting of the following elements or steps:
• counseling
• presenting possibilities
• experimenting

It should be pointed out here that “New Work” does not rely only on counseling, but gives practice just as much space and time, if not more. This is already a first significant difference from many other forms of coaching and therapy that rely exclusively on conversation.
For this reason there should be “Centers for New Work” in which this approach can be practiced and institutionalized.
What follows are some explanations of the three elements mentioned, without claiming to be complete.

Counseling

“New Work” places special demands on counseling (and therefore on the counselor). Its high goal is to help people toward more aliveness and toward calling, which amounts to a “reversal” of their previous life.
The understanding of counseling, and the seriousness and necessity of counseling, arise from the image of the human being that we have presented on the preceding pages. Especially in the chapter on “self-ignorance” in his book, Bergmann explains that human beings need other human beings in order to recognize themselves, to come to themselves, and to get beyond their isolation, limitation, and previous condition. Counseling here is not a matter of service provision or an expert-client relationship, but of an interpersonal relationship in which the counselor must possess a high degree of knowledge of human beings in order to do justice to the person opposite them. Considering that people who come to us are dissatisfied with their previous work, want to work differently, at best know what they no longer want but do not know what they really want, know themselves too little, often feel alone with their problem, and that their wishes as well as their ability to wish are fragile and not strongly developed, counseling first of all needs time. Its duration is not determined in advance, for example by a health insurance fund limiting the number of hours; rather, the duration is determined by the time needed for counseling.

Then we as counselors must enter into relationship with the guest, because our concern is precisely to overcome their “poverty of desire”, their “self-ignorance”, and, where applicable, their lack of aliveness. This means that the relationship between counselor and guest is shaped by goodwill and sympathy, warmth and attention, attentiveness and care, respect and recognition. These form the interpersonal foundation without which counseling in our sense would be doomed to fail from the outset.
Furthermore, what is needed is the benevolent eye for possibility, that is, for the guest’s calling; the rare art of listening, which is known to be the “soul of conversation”; and the ability to strike the other person’s tone or to connect with the language to which they are receptive. Conventional coaching and therapy often act, out of a misunderstood professionalism, with distance, coolness, detachment, inaccessibility, and “objectivity”. In this way they never reach the person themselves. But that is not their concern either. Their concern is to bring people back to “normality”; to bring them to the point where they “function” again. And for that it is not necessary to concern oneself with the person themselves.
The counselor must be familiar with “New Work” as a whole and be able to present it vividly to the guest when needed. The “calling” is embedded in, or is part of, an overall concept and can only be understood and followed in that context. By this I mean, on the one hand, the image of the human being in “New Work” and, on the other, its different forms of work: high-tech self-providing, community production, and part-time job.
Calling plays a special role for Bergmann – see here, among other places, the bottom of page 372 and the bottom of page 381 in his book – citation. But he also leaves no doubt about how difficult it can often be to help people toward it. It is therefore indispensable for the counselor to explain what calling is in many different ways, including by repeatedly presenting it in contrast to the job or to wage labor. Beyond that, the counselor should be able to ask the question of calling in many different ways, again and again, until the guest has “bitten”.

Presenting Possibilities in the “Space of Possibilities”

In our experience, the poverty of desire and self-ignorance are not overcome through introspection but through encounter with the world. Just as the person seeking counsel needs the other person, the counselor, in order to become clearer about themselves in conversation, they need “the world” just as much in order to find orientation, themselves, and finally their calling. This explains the importance of what we call “presenting possibilities”. Just as adolescents need a stimulating environment in order to develop themselves and their capacities and explore their interests, many adults need the same later on, especially when they lack professional orientation, when they have become resigned and indifferent, when they have lost sight of themselves through years of monotonous job work. Put differently: because many people see no perspective, that is, no possibilities, out of hopelessness, lack of interest, discouragement, boredom, and routine (“everything already exists”, “there is nothing left to do”, or “there is no place for me”), concrete counterpositions are needed. “New Work” offers a completely different view of the world and of life: namely, that they are full of possibilities, full of opportunities for development, full of ideas not yet realized, full of possible beginnings. In reality there is no shortage of possibilities, but an abundance, so that there is something for everyone.

The process is in principle the same from guest to guest; of course, however, it differs in the possibilities that are presented, since each guest is unique. In a first step, possibilities are presented in a still general and unspecific way, but in the course of orientation they become more and more specific. What matters is that “presenting possibilities” does not take place only “theoretically” in conversation or through information, but very concretely and practically. Whatever possibility comes into question must be “visible”, must be “real”, and must be “tangible”. The possibility must be prepared in such a way that the guest can imagine taking it up. Bergmann therefore imagines an infrastructure in which this can be implemented – the “space of possibilities”. Frithjof Bergmann gives examples of this in his book.
• Mass production and mass consumption place a considerable burden on the environment; every ecological improvement of a product is neutralized by the increase in production demanded by economic growth; the globalization of the economy wants to spread the Western material lifestyle across the earth, which far exceeds its carrying capacity. Community Production, by contrast, is characterized by limitations of many different kinds that benefit the environment: it replaces industrial mass production with individual production; mass consumption gives way to individual need fulfillment; economic growth is a foreign word for Community Production. It is not the absurdly artificially inflated material lifestyle of the West, not its consumer frenzy, that is carried into the world, but a basic provision that can be individually shaped. Since Community Production is local economy, it decisively reduces the immense global transport of goods, which contributes substantially to environmental pollution. At the same time, it abolishes the now prevailing separation of life and work that spread with the economic and job system. This reduces the disastrous mass commuting to and from work worldwide, which also means less environmental pollution. Apart from that, thousands upon thousands of traffic jams are avoided in which we senselessly waste our time and nerves.

Experimenting

Experimenting complements “counseling” and the “space of possibilities”. All three elements stand in reciprocal relationship. What emerges in “counseling” and in the “space of possibilities” as a possible activity for the guest is tried out and tested in “experimenting”, so that the guest can experience whether they are on the right path. These experiences flow back into counseling.
People generally do not discover suddenly and all at once what they really, really want. Rather, it is often a long process with setbacks, trial and error, and reorientation. Only gradually does a calling emerge. Hence the necessity of “experimenting”. And each guest does this in their own way – whether in the form of internships, projects, excursions, participation in an existing program that interests them, and so on.
Like “presenting possibilities”, “experimenting” is an encounter with the world, a finding of oneself in the world. With regard to work: one experiences in a practical and concrete way which activity fits oneself.
Our prevailing work system (the job system) assumes that one remains in the profession one has learned; the highly developed division of labor makes a fundamental professional change difficult. Of course many people change positions over time, but only few change their profession. From many seminars with people who are dissatisfied with their job, we know how difficult it is, and how difficult it is made for them, to actually reorient themselves, especially if one wants more than a job.

Suppose Community Production were to prevail and the world’s population could be materially provided for by it sufficiently; suppose individually definable self-provisioning could be achieved with limited effort: the economy would no longer be an end in itself, but a means to an end. Concretely: its function would be to create the necessary condition for “free work”.