What job would you do if the salary stayed the same?

Today’s writing prompt asked a simple question: if the salary were the same, what job would you be doing right now?

I answered it as a vacancy notice — post, scale of pay, essential qualifications, hours of work, leave, probation. Then I withdrew the notice, because the post is not vacant.

The interesting version of this question is not additive but subtractive. Not what you would take up if you were free, but what would still be standing if the money were removed from the description. Some of what we do will not survive that removal, and there is no shame in it. But something usually does. It is generally smaller than we expected and older than we remembered.

Notification of Vacancy

John Britto Kurusumuthu

WordPress Daily Prompt  ·  30 August 2026

Prompt: If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?

GOVERNMENT OF ONE’S OWN LIFE

DEPARTMENT OF UNFINISHED INTENTIONS

No. DUI/Vac/2026/01 Dated, the 30th August, 2026.

NOTIFICATION

Applications are invited from eligible candidates for appointment to the post specified below, on the terms and conditions hereinafter set out.

1. Name of post. — Writer.

2. Number of vacancies. — One. The post is not transferable, cannot be filled by deputation, and no waiting list shall be maintained.

3. Scale of pay. — Identical to that presently drawn by the candidate, whatever it may be. It is clarified that the parity of pay is a condition of this advertisement and not an inducement under it. Candidates who require the salary to be different are advised not to apply, as they have not understood the question.

4. Age. — No upper limit. The lower limit is the age at which a person first suspects that the work he does and the work he is for may be two different things. This age varies. In some it arrives at twenty-three; in others it waits until the farewell function.

5. Essential qualifications. —

(a) Ability to sit alone in a room at an hour when nobody is watching, and to produce something that nobody has commissioned.

(b) Sustained evidence of having done the work already, without appointment, without sanction, and without a file number.

(c) Willingness to be judged by the reader and not by the reporting officer.

6. Desirable qualifications. — Familiarity with any of the following, the traditions being listed in no order of precedence:

(a) The counsel of the Bhagavad Gita (III.35) that one’s own duty, imperfectly discharged, is better than another’s duty performed well — the doctrine of svadharma, which locates excellence not in the grandeur of the task but in its fitness to the person.

(b) Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics (I.7) that the good of any thing lies in its characteristic function, its ergon — the flautist’s good being flute-playing, and the human being’s good being the exercise of what is distinctively his.

(c) The Confucian insistence, in Analects XIII.3, upon the rectification of names — that when names are not correct, speech does not accord with things, and affairs are not carried to completion. A person miscalled is a person misemployed.

(d) The German word Beruf, which carries at once the sense of occupation and of calling, and which the Reformation pressed into service to dignify ordinary labour — the cobbler serving as truly at his last as the cleric at his altar.

(e) The Japanese ikigai, understood in its native and humbler sense as that which makes the morning worth rising into. (Candidates are cautioned that the four-circle diagram now circulated under this name is a later Western construction and forms no part of the original idea.)

7. Nature of duties. —

(i) To notice.

(ii) To find the word that fits, and to reject the three that nearly fit.

(iii) To publish daily, whether or not the day has been kind.

(iv) To be read by strangers in countries the incumbent will never visit.

(v) Such other duties as the sentence may require.

8. Hours of work. — Chiefly before dawn. The post carries no fixed hours, which in practice means all of them; a paragraph left unfinished at nine in the morning will follow the incumbent into the afternoon and sit down with him at dinner.

9. Leave. — Nil. Casual leave is theoretically admissible but has never been availed. Applications for leave will be sanctioned and then quietly ignored by the applicant.

10. Probation. — Lifelong. Confirmation is not contemplated.

11. Method of application. — Candidates need not apply. They need only begin.

12. Note. — Attention is invited to the fact that the salary attached to this post is nil, and that clause 3 above is therefore satisfied automatically, whatever the candidate presently earns. This is not a drafting error.

A Corrigendum, Immediately Issued

The above notification is withdrawn. The post is not vacant.

It was filled some years ago by a man who never saw the advertisement, submitted no application, and received no order of appointment. He simply started, on an ordinary morning, and then did it again the next day, and has not yet found a reason to stop. There are now more than eleven hundred consecutive mornings on the record, and not one of them was paid for.

That is my answer to today’s prompt, and I concede at once that it is a cheat. The question assumes that the salary is what holds us in place, and invites us to imagine the door swinging open. Remove the money, it says, and where would you go? It is a good question and a generous one. But I find, on trying to answer it honestly, that I have already gone. The desk I would walk to is the desk I am sitting at.

I do not offer this as an accomplishment. It is closer to a diagnosis. Forty years of drafting law taught me a habit I could not put down at retirement: the search for the exact word, the suspicion of the approximate one, the conviction that a badly built sentence will eventually injure somebody. That habit was once a duty attached to a designation and a pay scale. It is now simply how I spend my mornings. The designation fell away and the work did not.

Which is, I suspect, the real test the prompt is proposing. Not what job would you do — that is easy to answer expansively, and most of us answer it with something we have never tried and are unlikely to try. The harder test is subtractive. Take the salary out of the question and see what is still standing. Some of what we do will not survive the removal, and there is no shame in that; a great deal of honourable work is done for money and is none the worse for it, and the man who says otherwise usually has money. But something usually does survive. It is generally smaller than we expected and older than we remembered.

The traditions listed at clause 6 disagree about almost everything, and it is worth saying plainly that they cannot all be right. Aristotle is arguing about human nature in general; the Gita is speaking to a particular man in a particular caste on a particular battlefield; Confucius is chiefly concerned with the ordering of a state; the Reformers were making a theological point about the dignity of the laity. They are not four ways of saying the same thing, and I distrust the anthologies that flatten them into one.

But they converge on a single practical suspicion, and it is the one the prompt is circling: that a person can be fully employed and still not be at work. That there is a difference between the post one holds and the function one performs. That the name on the door and the thing being done inside can drift apart for years without anyone raising it in a meeting.

If the salary were the same, I would be doing this. I know that with the particular certainty available to a man who is already doing it for nothing.

The vacancy, in the end, was never the job’s. It was mine — and it took a long time to fill.

What survives the subtraction, in your case? Tell me in the comments.

 Source notes to “Notification of Vacancy”

Purpose. Clause 6 of the notification lists five traditions in a single breath. The compression is a device of the essay and is not a scholarly claim. This companion sets out what each source actually says, in what context it says it, and where the popular modern use of it departs from the original. Points at which the essay simplifies are flagged expressly rather than quietly repaired.

I.  Svadharma — Bhagavad Gita III.35

Text. The verse holds that one’s own dharma, though defectively performed, is better than the dharmaof another performed well; and that it is better to die in one’s own than to take up another’s, which is attended by fear. The opening line recurs almost verbatim at XVIII.47, though the second line of that verse turns instead on action determined by one’s own nature (svabhava), and holds that one who so acts incurs no fault.

Context. The counsel is addressed to Arjuna at the point of refusing battle. It is not general career advice; it is an argument against abandoning a duty that has become distasteful.

Caution. In the received text svadharma is bound to varna — duty as fixed by station of birth. The modern reading that treats it as a summons to discover one’s individual vocation detaches the term from that setting. The detachment is defensible and has a long lineage, but it is an interpretation and should be named as one. Gandhi read the battlefield allegorically; Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, by contrast, read the doctrine as a defence of the varna order and criticised it accordingly. The essay uses the softened modern sense without argument, and the reader should know that.

II.  Ergon — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7

Text. Aristotle reasons that for a flute-player, a sculptor or any craftsman, the good lies in the characteristic work — the ergon — and asks whether a human being as such likewise has one. He concludes that the human ergon is activity of the soul in accordance with reason, and, where there are several excellences, in accordance with the best and most complete of them. (Bekker 1097b22—1098a20.)

Caution. This is the passage most often misapplied. Aristotle’s ergon is a claim about the species, not about the individual: he is identifying what human beings are for, not what any particular person is for. He does not hold that each of us has a private function awaiting discovery. The essay borrows the flautist illustration for a purpose Aristotle does not sanction, and the borrowing is deliberate rather than inadvertent.

III.  Zhengming — Analects XIII.3

Text. Asked by Zilu what he would attend to first if entrusted with the government of a state, Confucius answers: the rectification of names. If names are not correct, speech does not accord with things; affairs are not brought to completion; rites and music do not flourish; punishments are not properly awarded; and the people do not know where to put hand or foot.

Caution (i). The concern is administrative and political — that titles of office and relation should correspond to conduct — not psychological. It is nearer to a doctrine of accurate designation in government than to any notion of personal authenticity.

Caution (ii). The authenticity of this particular passage has been questioned. Arthur Waley, among others, regarded it as a later accretion, partly because the vocabulary of zhengming belongs more comfortably to the philosophical disputes of a subsequent period. The point is contested and not settled; it is recorded here so that the citation is not made to carry more weight than it can bear.

IV.  Beruf — Luther and Weber

Text. The German Beruf holds together the sense of an occupation and the sense of a summons. Max Weber, in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05), argued that the word acquired its distinctively modern colouring largely through Luther’s Bible translation, and that the effect was to invest ordinary worldly labour with a religious dignity previously reserved to the monastic and clerical life.

Caution (i). The figure of the cobbler serving God at his last is a paraphrase of the Lutheran doctrine of vocation as it is commonly summarised, and is not offered as a quotation from Luther. Formulations of this kind circulate widely in a quotational form; the underlying doctrine is genuinely his, the sentence is not.

Caution (ii). Weber’s larger thesis has been contested for a century — by R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and by many since, on both historical and causal grounds. The narrower philological observation about Beruf has worn better than the causal argument built upon it, and it is only the narrower observation that clause 6(d) relies on.

V.  Ikigai

Text. The Japanese ikigai denotes, in ordinary use, that which makes life feel worth living — characteristically something modest and daily rather than grand and singular. Mieko Kamiya’s study Ikigai ni tsuite (1966) is the standard treatment; Ken Mogi’s later popular account likewise emphasises small satisfactions rather than a life’s overarching mission.

Caution. The four-circle diagram — what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for — is not Japanese in origin and is not what ikigai means. It is commonly traced to a diagram of propósito (purpose) published by Andrés Zuzunaga in 2011, subsequently relabelled ikigaiin an English-language blog post around 2014. That chain of attribution is widely repeated and appears sound, but it rests substantially on the later writer’s own account of what he did, and is reported here with that qualification. What is not in doubt is that the diagram post-dates and misdescribes the Japanese term — not least because it makes payment one of the four conditions, which the native sense does not.

Note. This last point is the one that matters for the essay. A prompt that asks what we would do if the salary were held constant is asking a question the Venn diagram cannot frame, because the diagram builds remuneration into the definition of a life worth living. The older sense does not.

VI.  What the Five Do Not Share

It is worth stating plainly that these five cannot be harmonised. Aristotle is making a claim about human nature as such; the Gita is addressing a particular man in a particular station at a particular moment; Confucius is prescribing for the government of a state; the Reformation doctrine is theological, concerned with the standing of lay labour before God; ikigai is descriptive and domestic, and makes no metaphysical claim at all. Anthologies that place them side by side as five expressions of one insight are performing a conjuring trick.

What can honestly be said is narrower. Each tradition, from its own direction, takes seriously the possibility that a person’s designation and a person’s actual function may come apart — and each treats that gap as a matter of consequence rather than a private inconvenience. Confucius thinks it disorders the state. Aristotle thinks it forfeits the good life. The Gita thinks it invites fear. The Reformers thought it misdescribed where holiness was to be found. Kamiya thought it drained the morning of its reason. That is a convergence of concern, not of doctrine, and the essay claims no more.

Select References

— Bhagavad Gita, III.35 and XVIII.47. (Consult a translation that prints the Sanskrit; the two verses should be read together.)

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, ch. 7, Bekker 1097b22—1098a20.

— Confucius, Analects, XIII.3. See also Arthur Waley’s introduction and notes for the doubts as to the passage.

— Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05); English translation by Talcott Parsons (1930), particularly the discussion of Beruf.

— R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926).

— Mieko Kamiya, Ikigai ni tsuite (1966).

— Ken Mogi, The Little Book of Ikigai (2017).

— B. R. Ambedkar, writings on the Bhagavad Gita and varna, for the contrary reading noted at Part I.

Standing note on attribution: where a source is paraphrased rather than quoted, or where an attribution is widely repeated but imperfectly evidenced, the fact is flagged in this companion rather than smoothed over in the essay. Readers who find an error are asked to write; corrections are published, not absorbed.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 30 August 2026.

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