You Don't Need a Calling: An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto for a Life of Purpose

Stop searching for purpose and start being present.

"Pursue your calling." "Become the best version of yourself." "Make your life count." These messages inundate us at work, in our churches, in self-help books, and in our own psyches. But so many of us are worn out from constantly pursuing more and always feeling like we fall short. In a capitalist system, purpose is determined by profitability, manipulating us into believing our entire lives should be driven by growth and production. Society has narrowed our perspective of work, gifts, and success, turning our unique energies into commodities. But we don't have to accept this limiting view. We can reclaim our true purpose by resisting systems of exploitation, slowing our constant forward motion, and tuning in to what's happening in the here and now.

In You Don't Need a Calling, former minister Damon Garcia turns our standard ways of thinking about purpose upside down. Purpose isn't something we find--it's something that finds us when we learn to be present to the world in front of us. Drawing on philosophy, theology, pop culture, and anti-capitalist perspectives, Garcia charts a new course away from, on the one hand, the faith perspective that everything in our lives is part of God's plan and, on the other, the cynical belief that our lives have no purpose at all.

For anyone disillusioned by the idea of "God's plan" for their life or exhausted by the achievement treadmill, this book will dislodge your narrow thinking and reframe the way you view your life, desires, gifts, work, success, and relationship to the world. This book isn't about how to become the person you wish you were. It's about how to free yourself to be present to who you already are.

Damon Garcia is a public theologian, writer, video essayist, and author of The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus. He discovered his passion for ministering to spiritual misfits and radicals through evangelical youth and young adult ministry in evangelical spaces. This passion led him out of Evangelicalism and into post-Christian spaces, where he continues to develop a liberative Christianity for a disillusioned generation through video essays and dialogue. Garcia's work is inspired by liberation theology and anti-capitalist politics as he helps people unsettle and untangle oppressive ideologies. He lives in Santa Maria, California.