What are the right criteria to choose a job? What should you do when you’re not satisfied with your current position? Should you accept a job that you don’t like? For how long? And how much weight do you give to your desires, aspirations, and ambitions? How can you reconcile family life and career? “These are all questions young people often ask me, but they apply to all of us, even those who have been working for years: they’re the warning sign of a situation that keeps getting worse,” says Giorgio Vittadini, president of the Foundation for Subsidiarity and a statistics professor at the Bicocca University in Milan with years of research on the topic behind him. The reality is a world of widespread instability, lower wages, increased competition, and worrisome levels of underemployment and unemployment. As well as an increasing amount of time spent at work, and an unclear future ahead. “With such a landscape, in constant flux and full of uncertainty, the biggest risk is feeling defeated.”

Let’s start out within this context, then. You did research about human capital and on the changes that have broken down the relationship between work and the person. What’s at stake?
Above all, a conception of work. Or better, the beginning of a battle between two conceptions. The first conceives of work as something all-encompassing, that carries within it its meaning, so you are your job, your career, without an identity of your own, you exist as a function of the company. And you lose your ideals, determined solely to achieve an individual gain. Before the crisis, it seemed like we could only reach a collective level of well-being through this absence of values, through in dividual self-interest, like the bees in Bernard de Mandeville’s seventeenth-century fable. During the crisis, we saw that this often bears unpleasant effects, including for the average person who was successful. Maybe a person sacrifices everything for his or her career, but when it turns out to be fickle and they give up, a 40- or 50-year-old feels defeated and depressed because they went on believing that only those who succeed have value.

It seems like many people try to avoid work; they do a poor job...
It’s the same conception, turned around. Thinking that life is really somewhere else, outside of work. Giving in to this logic means closing yourself up within a parish, a union, your family, your hobbies, or something else. Thinking that the company is like a kind of cow to milk: I get my pay, I do as little as I can; “my dear company, your destiny is no concern of mine.” In this case, too, it’s inhuman, you are as divided and alienated as those who conceive of their career as the only ideal.

What, then, is the alternative conception?
There’s an increasing amount of empirical evidence demonstrating the need to recover certain qualities of the original nature of the person within the workplace: emotional stability, a propensity for friendship, and openness to experience, to name a few. Many experts in human resources, most notably James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, have recognized that productivity levels at work are often linked to these aspects of our nature. A few days ago, a Finance professor in Denver wrote to me about this, telling me that, informally, theories have been circulating lately that demonstrate how one’s educational and cultural background, and one’s age and personality traits play a role in explaining some of the variables in his field. The question, then, is if the “person” has something to do with economic results, if the person makes a difference.

And how would you respond?
That it makes a difference, a big one. And it’s becoming clearer to us all the time. People have started to rediscover that even the great entrepreneurs of our day aren’t sharks obsessed with success, but rather people who set out for “something beyond.”

For example?
Take the man of secular myth, Steve Jobs, who went to Stanford sporadically, didn’t graduate, and only studied for calligraphy class. His greatest contribution was more about communication than about technology: he understood that behind each screen there’s a person, in most cases one without much technical knowledge. He put himself in the shoes of that person and invented devices that are easy to use, like the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad. All of the great geniuses in business are like this. A manager doesn’t have to do more than keep things running; an entrepreneur who invents or develops a new product has to have a human ingenuity, an intuitive capacity to foresee what people need, where reality reveals a gap. This “human ingenuity” is also at the heart of economic development. Saint-Exupéry used to say that to build a boat, it’s not enough to combine a group of workers, materials, and a sketch; you have to have a sense for the infinite sea. The research on character skills that we mentioned before gives us something to think about. Unfortunately, even those who are starting to recognize the positive impact of these non-cognitive skills on a person’s work think of them as just another mechanism.

What do you mean by that?
Take, for example, the idea of team building, the new training technique for managers. It assumes that to develop a person’s creativity and make them more responsive to change, you have to put them in some extreme circumstance where they can develop equally extreme responses: setting up camp in the middle of the forest at night, going rafting… Instead what they need is to rediscover their hearts, their reason, their capacity to read the signs of reality, to discover a passion for their freedom and a desire for a happiness that’s full and all-encompassing. It’s that “something beyond” that can’t be generated by using new procedures. “Something that comes before” one’s job, that “is born” outside the company, that doesn’t belong to the company. And this is often a scandal.

Why?
As we said before, usually what prevails is the belief that a person can only be useful to you if you “own” them. The opposite is true. The fact that a person is free makes them more helpful to you. Under the Roman Empire, the first Christians never questioned the power of the state. They simply said, “I don’t belong to you.” They could serve as soldiers, but wouldn’t venerate the Emperor– saints like Nabor, Felix, Gervasius, and Protasius, who were killed because of this. Now it’s the same thing. The challenge is that I serve the company, I help you and work for you, only if you first allow me to be free. But instead you’re told, “No, I want all of you.”

So what is this “something that comes before?”
It’s the person’s heart; the thing that makes you desire someone or something that responds to your need for happiness, for justice, for beauty. It’s what makes you desire a meaning in what you do, your “character,” the deepest source of your person.

And what is this source?
At the heart of work is a love for what’s in front of you, for the circumstances of your work, even difficult ones. Like Vincenzina in the Enzo Jannacci song. Why is it that there are people who have humble jobs but who are always happy? Above all, because they know that, with their job, with the paycheck they earn, they’re earning a living for someone they love. I think of those who emigrated to go work in the mines, people who loved their families but may have left them to go abroad. Every day traveling kilometers underground, a dangerous life, to be able to send money home. Their affection justifies all this. Then, there’s the satisfaction of contributing to the good of your people with your own sweat and blood. And also the perception that, even through humble work, you’re transforming reality to make it better.

Is the problem, then, that we no longer have this awareness?
To say that is a defensive attitude; we’re quick to say we no longer have anything. You need to go out and look for examples of it, to see people of goodwill who, without dwelling on the “before” or “after,” perhaps without knowing why, take that piece of reality that’s in front of them seriously. Think about how many in-home caregivers work hours and hours to send money to their families. They love someone and this justifies what they do. The same is true for many immigrants. On Christmas Eve, I met a boy who was selling flowers on the street. He struggles to do that job, it’s hard to make a living; he cuts back on food because he supports his parents in Bangladesh. He had a stable job that he lost, but watching him sell flowers gives you an idea of the love for work, because it’s tied to affection. It’s a different priority, but it transforms the circumstances.

But these cases are rare…
No, many people love their work. There are young people who want to make a difference in the world and build a future for themselves, for their countries, perhaps as immigrants. Mothers who want to take care of their family and to work. Teachers who continue to teach in struggling schools. People who relish learning a trade or discovering the opportunities brought by new technologies–not against, but for humanity–for example, the socalled “industry 4.0.” Employees and entrepreneurs who do all they can to save a factory or create new jobs. People who work with a passion even when their contracts are uncertain.

What does it take to work in a way that’s human?
I think that you have to remember the three criteria that Fr. Giussani set forth when speaking about vocation. First of all, a person can’t help but start from the heart, the desires, the aspirations and passions and talents he or she has. Today we often don’t look at this because we don’t trust ourselves, we don’t recognize that we have a heart full of something beautiful. But our personal inclinations are a gift. There’s one way to understand if it’s possible to realize these inclinations, and it’s the second criterion: to use the signs reality gives to verify if they can be realized as they are or if they have to be modified to fit what reality suggests. And, further, discovering that these changes of course do not take away from your personal fulfillment, but rather help clarify the road to take. Years ago there were young women who, for example, because their parents died, didn’t get married, quit their schooling, and went to work to take care of their siblings. This can happen many times in life, including through extremely complicated circumstances. And, the third criterion: we should encourage, not demonize, those who, looking at what’s happening around them, want to offer their energies to serve the most obvious needs reality reveals. They might, for example, become a doctor or nurse to answer the needs of the sick, or teach, or dedicate themselves to the poor... And do this as a career if they can.

So it’s far from being a question of calculations and balance sheets.
Yes. We need to educate people to recognize their own inclinations, to obey reality, and act with gratuitousness. This can only happen through mature examples who accompany others and show them the way. I’m thinking of examples of vocational schools and other places that have reintroduced the opportunity to learn a trade: as a pastry chef, electrician, or carpenter. Not as a fallback for kids who are so often at risk of dropping out of school. What do young people do in these places? With direction, they get their hands dirty; they try something. And they begin to discover that they can love what they do. Not just teaching them technical skills, but helping them to fall in love. They need someone who says, “Try, look, do this, undo that.” A person who helps you to discover your heart. A job is “lost” because you’ve lost your heart, and therefore that capacity to build that you have inside. If you recover your heart, you recover the path to work.

In a word, you need witnesses. But who?
There’s a need for people who give their lives so others can live. “There’s no greater sacrifice than to give one’s life for the work of an other.” These are people who find satisfaction in their daily work and help others to do the same, teaching technical skills and a desire to work, no matter the conditions you find yourself in.

And what does faith add?
When I started working, they showed me a painting and, hidden behind it, a cross. As if to say, “See? No one is taking it away, but, here, it shouldn’t be seen.” Facing this objection, that to be there I had to be “100% university,” I perceived that faith for me wasn’t an ideological belonging to hide or to show off. It was a Person who accompanied me, the same who worked as a carpenter two thousand years ago. He was in dialogue with my heart, as an invisible presence that was always near, whose contours were in the faces of the Christian community in which He has incarnated Himself, a community that has corrected, inspired, comforted, advised, and most importantly, taught me to recognize that He is with me. What a help to work in a way that’s more human!