How we live our lives with meaning and purpose and how we pay our bills do not have to be the same thing.

My entire career, which I’ve always enjoyed, has been in marketing. Like your dad, I refuse to be put on the defensive about that. I’ve also voluntarily run a grief-support group and website in my free time over the last two decades. Looking at my life’s overall meaning and purpose, the latter has been far more important. Yet without my marketing career, I wouldn’t have had adequate resources to support the bereaved.

A career is just one aspect of a well-rounded existence. Freighting it with 100% of life’s meaning, then feeling guilty when it doesn’t meet some amorphous ideal of “serving the greater good” is where we go wrong.

Great article!