Maybe Our Jobs Should Connect With Our Souls?

The inner life matters more than money.

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

Frank Bidart is an 82-year-old poet who’s won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He’s also won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In fact, he’s won pretty much everything you can win in the world of poetry, but poetry isn’t a field that makes a person famous or wealthy.

If I said, “Frank Bidart might be the preeminent living poet in the United States,” most people would reply, “Who’s Frank Bidart?”

While Bidart was intelligent enough to become a private litigator or a marketing director for an insurance company, I’m thankful that he pursued poetry as a career. I’m grateful that he didn’t buy into the American Dream-Trap of making more money than a person needs and accumulating high-status items until the end of life when everything’s sold in an estate auction.

Bidart once said in an interview:

“We live in this awkward culture that tells people that they have to have a job, have money to buy things, but that the job does not have to be connected to one’s soul, one’s inner life or spirit or sense of…