# Fundamental Alignment - Response By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-28 The old saying that if you find a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life contains a seed of truth wrapped in dangerous simplicity. It suggests optionality, where our culture provides few alternative narratives for how actually to find such alignment. The dominant profit motive of our time is actually neutral with respect to fulfillment. It doesn't prohibit purpose; it simply doesn't require it. This neutrality creates space, but space without scaffolding is just emptiness. Luck and privilege remain the primary architects of vocational alignment for most. Those who find work that energizes rather than depletes often arrive there through some combination of exposure, margin, and the fortune of encountering a leader who chose to build something different. Leadership, more than market forces, drives these opportunities into existence. There is a fast casual restaurant near me that employs people with intellectual disabilities, workers who might be marginalized elsewhere. This place is, without exaggeration, the best such restaurant I've visited in a decade. The employees care. They hustle. They go out of their way to help. They radiate purpose in an authentic, non-exploitative way. In an industry notorious for turnover and indifference toward both workers and customers, this establishment stands as evidence that alignment is possible when someone chooses to create the conditions for it. The market didn't demand this as I'm sure there are challenges and additional effort required to achieve these results. Alas, a leader decided to do it. And watching it unfold makes me want to go there more often, to support it with my dollars, and to start my own venture someday that extends this possibility further (e.g., fair wages, genuine opportunities, an environment where work matters and where people of all types and abilities can flourish). The both/and of vocational alignment is this: individual responsibility to know oneself and seek purpose is real, and it is insufficient without leaders and institutions willing to build the structures that make such seeking possible for more than the lucky few. The narratives we lack can be constructed. Someone has to choose to create them. #### Related Items [[Work]] [[Purpose]] [[Leadership]] [[Fulfillment]] [[Solidarity]] [[Meaning]] [[Society]]