Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues

SOURCE:  The Moral Bucket List by David Brooks, NY Times. April 11, 2015.  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html

KEYWORDS:  Fulfilled, Fulfilling, Life, Vocation, Meaning, Regret, Love,

The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

Study Suggests Fulfilling Life = Career or Job

SOURCE:  Views on Marriage and Cohabitation in the US.  Pew Research Center. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/11/06/marriage-and-cohabitation-in-the-u-s/

KEYWORDS:  vocation, marriage, children, meaning, fulfilled, 

COMMENT:
Although this study has much to say about changes in societal attitudes about marriage and cohabitation, this graph also suggests a change in how we view meaning. Work is at the top of the list.  Our faith brings some resources to bear on this.