A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From

Why was Socrates sentenced to death? Ask any reasonably educated person why Socrates drank the hemlock, and they might respond: “corrupting the youth.” In reality, corrupting the youth was one of a pair of charges and stemmed from the more seditious charge of impiety. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defended himself against the allegation of godlessness by calling his work an “obligation” or a “duty” that had been “enjoined” or “imposed” on him by “god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything.”¹ It was this very admission of divine guidance that upset the Athenian authorities in the first place, a notion that “caused him to be accused of introducing ‘new spiritual beings’ or divinities and of disbelieving in the gods of the state.”² Socrates said he was commanded by god to pursue philosophy, which suggests he felt a divine, mystical, or supernatural inspiration to pursue his life’s work. “God gave me a station,” Socrates said, “with orders to spend my life in philosophy.”³

Why do some people feel compelled to devote their lives to study or to art? When we say we feel a “higher calling,” what do we mean? As it turns out, humans have been trying to answer these questions for over two thousand years.

To be “inspired” originally meant to be “breathed into” by some divine influence, much like the word “enthusiasm” meant to be “possessed by a god.” For the Greeks, the supernatural-like force that inspired men was sometimes called daimon (δαίμων), the root of the modern word for another force that possesses us: demon. For the Romans, the guiding, protective force was called a genius. There is a longstanding mystical or spiritual element to this feeling, which helps us understand why the Greek daimon and the Latin genius are often translated into English as “spirit.”

This also helps us understand why, now, in the 21st century, those in intellectual and creative fields continue to describe the urge to do their work in similar, otherworldly terms. In his 2023 book The Creative Act, the legendary music producer Rick Rubin suggests the creative impulse comes from an external source emanating from the “universe.” He called the source of the impulse “the Source.” The Source is something we need to tune into using our “antennae,” a metaphor Rubin uses to refer to our receptive sensibilities and creative intuitions. “We are all translators,” Rubin writes, “for messages the universe is broadcasting.”⁴

But Rubin’s idea is a modern rendition of an old standard, whose echoes emanate from the songs of the Homeric age. His cosmic Source is the modern equivalent of the Muse who sings into his book’s target audience, the creative ancestor of the Greek bard.⁵

It is as if an artist is a kind of medium, prophet, or seer, less a maker than a receiver. Less a genius than possessed by one. Less a storm than a lightning rod. This is the take of Elizabeth Gilbert who, in her 2016 bestseller Big Magic, writes that ideas exist out there in the ether and it is our jobs as artists to acknowledge the idea’s call to express itself through us. “The universe,” Gilbert writes, “buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”⁶ If we can’t find the jewel, the universe will find someone else who can.

Socrates was critical of this idea two thousand years ago, and especially of poets for their “inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”⁷ Socrates seems to be signalling a difference between those who feel commanded by a god to pursue a path and those who are are simply puppeteered by one. We need to be active agents in our calling.

In the first of several letters sent to a young, aspiring writer, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised him to stop searching for external validation and, instead, to consider if his urge to write came from a deeper, internal impulse.⁸ Rilke said:

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

As Socrates alluded to in his own life, Rilke recommends that the young poet surrender to the call, organizing his life around this pursuit. Unlike Socrates, Rilke’s impulse is an internal, human drive; it doesn’t come from god. Two theories, then, about the same feeling that come to the same conclusions. Yet where they locate the sources of their drives couldn’t be any more different.

Does the source of our creative impulse even matter? I’m not sure it does, for they all take us to the same place. We pursue our work at great personal sacrifice. We dedicate ourselves to our work with zeal. We recklessly pursue something that promises little, if anything at all, except for the nebulous suggestion that it makes life worth living.

As it turns out, modern psychology gives us insight into the power of our motivations and drives.

In 1971, the psychologist Edward Deci performed a series of experiments hoping to gain insight into the power of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.⁹ The experiment involved college students and Soma cubes, a puzzle where one assembles Tetris-like shapes into various three-dimensional forms. The students all noted that they liked solving puzzles and were split into two groups. Students in one group were paid if they successfully made forms from the Soma cubes. Students in the other group were not paid. When researchers left the room with a pre-established excuse, they watched on and found that students who were not paid to solve the puzzles continued playing with Soma cubes at a significantly higher rate than students who were paid. Deci concluded that external motivations can compromise, corrupt, or undermine the power of intrinsic motivations. Interestingly, he also found that the students who were not paid actually performed better at assembling forms with the Soma cubes. As Deci wrote in a paper co-authored with psychologist Richard Ryan, “intrinsic motivation [is] the prototypic manifestation of the human tendency towards learning and creativity.”¹⁰

But Deci and his colleagues also learned that intrinsic motivation is not just helpful in work. It is important in cultivating autonomy and a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They found that people whose motivation is authentic and self-authored exhibit stronger performance and creativity, as well as “heightened vitality, self-esteem, and general well-being.”¹¹ In short, those who feel driven to pursue their work do measurably better work and feel better for it. They are not, Deci and his colleagues write, “among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs.”¹²

This is what Socrates was circling around two thousand years before psychology caught up. Far from a sacrifice, surrendering to the work we feel driven to is one of the more reliable paths to a life that feels worth living.

The superiority of internal motivation makes sense. Work that we like to do without external pressure is often done with more enthusiasm and joy. Indeed, it is often work that we excel at.

At least this is what has been suggested in the recent discourse surrounding Alysa Liu, the American athlete who, after retiring from figure skating as a teenager, returned to win two gold medals at the 2026 Olympics barely into her twenties.¹³ Liu retried from the sport because of the external demands it placed on her. But, after freeing herself from these external pressures, rekindled her love with the sport. “Winning and losing don’t affect me anymore,” Liu said, adding, “I feel pretty indifferent about placements. Medaling doesn’t fulfill me. I skate because I like to skate.”¹⁴

As Liu might attest, work that we feel obligated or forced to do is often done begrudgingly. It is work that doesn’t “fulfill” us. It might put food on our tables, but that doesn’t nourish our souls. It is work that acts as a means to an end, work done to provide material comfort often at the expense of work that offers inner well-being or a sense of purpose.

To those who work begrudgingly, we hurl that old chestnut: “their heart is not in it.” If the spirit is a good metaphor for an external drive to create, the heart might be a good one for our inner drive because it locates the impulse in the organ that literally pulses. The heart is what keeps us alive, the metaphor suggests. Perhaps this is why Rilke asked the young poet if he felt his internal drive in his heart. The heart gives us courage and pushes us, “in the most silent hours of the night,” to endure. Meaningful work demands that we pour our hearts into it.

The heart is related to another term that describes this internal feeling: “passion.” To be passionate literally means “to suffer,” and to have compassion for someone suggests that you’re suffering alongside them. Suffering for one’s work is a good metaphor, for many who dedicate their lives to their passions, Socrates among them, a kind of suffering follows. Socrates claimed that he was in “vast poverty on account of my service to the god.”¹⁵

In his 1921 book The Intellectual Life, the French philosopher Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges called intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He believed that being called by god to pursue the life of the mind is to be drafted into a spiritual selective service. “You are,” Sertillanges addressed the would-be intellectual, “consecrated by your vocation.”¹⁶ The thinking man is thus akin to an apostle chosen by god. Not unlike Matthew, whom Jesus lured away from the lucrative, if stigmatized life of a tax collector and into an uncertain, itinerant life, the intellectual is called on by god to surrender himself to a new lifestyle in His image and in pursuit of truth.

Yet Sertillanges seems to suggest the calling can come from within or from without. On the one hand, “it is written in our instincts, in our powers, in a sort of inner impulse of which reason must judge.” On the other hand, “a vocation is something that cannot be had for the asking. It comes from heaven and from our first nature. The whole point is to be docile to God and to oneself as soon as they have spoken."¹⁷ If the creative impulse comes from an internal or external source, Sertillanges asks us to surrender our lives to it.

The supernatural source of our creative impulse is an enchanting metaphor: a higher power calls upon an unsuspecting mortal to surrender their life in pursuit of the divine act of creation. While some of us might resist the supernatural framing of the creative impulse, I wonder if it is powerful because it offers a two-for-one deal, giving us both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. An external power orders us to work, but surrendering to this “higher calling” and believing it to be our “life’s mission” is intrinsically motivating.

Feeling driven or “called” gives our work energy and resonance, casting it into a higher orbit where it buzzes like a charged particle. This is why we can feel duty-bound to our work so strongly that it becomes our life’s mission. The call separates the good work from lower forms of work, propelling it into a loftier realm where it feels, if not sacred, then at least serious.

Whether it is of god, the universe, or human nature, the fact remains that some of us feel driven to pursue our work. Perhaps this feeling is not a supernatural feeling at all, but rather a deeply human one. Whatever the source of our impulse, we should feel a deep sense of kinship with those who feel one. There is something inspiring about those who dedicate their lives to pursue some vocation, to surrender themselves to some creative work and, if need be, to drink the hemlock for it.