The Vocation of Dasein: A Letter to Young People Amidst the Age of Choosing
I. An Essay from 177 Years Ago
In 1835, a seventeen-year-old Karl Marx wrote an essay at the Trier Gymnasium: Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession.
It was a young person's first serious reckoning with the world. He wrote: "If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all."
One hundred and seventy-seven years later, as I reread these words before my screen, outside the window lies the Hangzhou of 2026. AI agents are replacing human decision-making. The attention economy's bubble is bursting. Countless young people stand at the crossroads of career choice — just as Marx did then, just as the five hundred software school students who listened to my lecture on technical architecture at Zhejiang University did in 2007.
And what I want to say is this: the secret hidden in Marx's high school essay comes closer to the essence of career choice than any formula he later wrote in Das Kapital. It took me twenty years of commercial practice at Alibaba to gradually understand this secret, and Heidegger's phenomenology to finally articulate it.
II. Two Paradigms of Career Choice: Attention Economy vs. Trust Economy
Today's job market is a quintessential attention economy apparatus.
Big tech, AI startups, civil service, freelance work — every career narrative competes for your eyeballs. They fire carefully crafted signals at you: salary, title, stock options, household registration eligibility. Much like the "1,337 seconds" in the controlled nuclear fusion field — some signals are manufactured to capture your attention. Signs are not substance. Attention is not trust.
This is the attention economy model of career choice: you make decisions based on the intensity of external signals. Whoever offers the highest salary, whose brand rings loudest, whose valuation is highest — you choose them. You treat yourself as a rational information processor, computing the optimal solution from a career menu.
But here is the problem: a career is not a menu. A career is a way in which your Dasein dwells in the world.
In November 2004, I joined Alibaba. Alibaba back then was not the trillion-dollar giant it is today. It was merely a mid-sized B2B company, renting a few floors in the Huaxing Technology Building on Wensan Road in Hangzhou. I did not choose it because it offered the highest salary — in fact, there were better offers. I chose it because, within that founding team, I felt a certain thickness of relation.
This is the trust economy model of career choice: not an optimal solution based on external signals, but a co-existential choice grounded in the thickness of relation.
III. "No Best Technology, Only Fitting Technology"
On September 21, 2007, I gave a lecture at Zhejiang University's School of Software. The topic was "Trends in E-commerce and Network Development."
That day on Zhejiang University's Yuquan Campus, the first hints of autumn were in the air. Over five hundred students packed the lecture hall. I spoke to them about Alibaba's technical architecture, massive data processing, user interaction, and search optimization. During the Q&A, a student asked me: "Mr. Li, what do you think is the best technology?"
My answer was: "There is no best technology, only fitting technology."
At the time, this sounded like a piece of pragmatic engineering philosophy. But looking back eighteen years later, it was actually an ontological proposition.
"There is no best technology" — because "best" is an abstract standard detached from any concrete situation, just as "the best career" does not exist. "Only fitting technology" — because fittingness is a quality embedded in specific relations: it fits the current state of the team, the current stage of the business, the current demands of the market.
The same holds for career choice. There is no best career, only a fitting vocation.
"Fitting" is not an informational judgment. You cannot find it by comparing salary charts, ranking lists, or career assessment reports. Fittingness is a relational match — it is whether, between you and this work, the thickness of trust can be integrated over time.
IV. Marx's Insight: Career as the "Vocation of Dasein"
In that high school essay, Marx wrote a line that has been quoted countless times yet rarely truly understood:
"But our mission is by no means to seek the most dazzling career, for it is not one that we can engage in over the long term without ever growing weary, without ever slackening, without ever becoming dejected."
Notice his phrasing: "engage in over the long term without ever growing weary." This is not about interest. This is about time.
Marx discovered a secret: the work truly worthy of your engagement must withstand integration over time. It is not a momentary excitement — those "most dazzling careers" are precisely the products of the attention economy — but a relational field capable of continuously generating meaning across the years.
Let me restate this in Heidegger's language: a career is not something you go out to "become" — it is a way in which you already "exist." Dasein's being-in-the-world does not begin with an isolated self that then goes out to choose a career; rather, in the very act of choosing, you are already co-existing with a certain possibility.
Marx himself lived out this insight. He could have become a respectable lawyer or professor — with his talents, he could have succeeded in any "most dazzling" career. But he chose to write for the proletariat, spending decades of impoverished days in the British Museum's reading room. He did not have a "career" — he had only a vocation (志业). And it is precisely this vocation that has allowed his thought to continue integrating across two centuries of time.
V. A Guide to Career Choice in the Age of the Trust Economy
If you are a young person choosing a career, I want to offer you three sentences. They come not from any career-planning textbook, but from twenty years of personal practice at Alibaba, from the "Relational Dynamics of the Trust Economy" framework, from the ancient insights of Heidegger and Marx.
First: Do not choose the "best" career. Choose the "fitting" vocation.
"Best" is the trap of the attention economy. It captures you with salary, title, and prestige. But the half-life of these things in time is very short — the excitement of that first high salary usually begins to decay by the third month. "Fitting," by contrast, follows the logic of the trust economy. It does not promise instantaneous stimulation. What it promises is this: that you wake up each morning, face the day's work, and feel no resistance in your heart — only quiet acceptance.
Second: Pay attention to the people with whom you will co-exist, not the labels you will acquire.
In twenty years at Alibaba, the most important lesson I learned was not how to optimize an algorithm — it was how to choose a team. What you actually deal with in your career is not the abstract identity of "Alibaba employee," but concrete people — your manager, your colleagues, your collaborators. They constitute the field of "co-existence" (共在, Mitsein) in your working life. A good field of co-existence allows you to exist authentically within it, without pretense, without performance. A bad field of co-existence drains your life energy, no matter how glamorous the job appears on the surface.
Marx put it well: "Those who work for a common goal and thereby become nobler themselves — history recognizes them as great." Note "common goal" — vocation is not a solitary journey, but the co-existence of a group of people.
Third: Let time be the final judge.
No career choice is clear in the present moment. You can only entrust it to time. Time will expose the bubbles of attention — those "good jobs" propped up by narrative and signs will deflate over time. Time will also verify the thickness of trust — the work truly fitting for you will give birth to unexpected meaning across the years.
Just as a Crown-rated Taobao store was not built overnight but accumulated transaction by transaction, your career is not determined by a single offer but integrated day by day, work by work.
VI. Coda: The Vocation of Dasein
In 1835, Marx concluded his essay with these words:
"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions."
One hundred and seventy-seven years later, AI agents are replacing many of the careers that were once "most dazzling." But there is one thing that can never be replaced: the vocation of Dasein co-existing with others in the world. For vocation (志业) is not a skill, not an information-processing capability, not a decision function that can be optimized by an algorithm. Vocation is the way Dasein dwells in the world — it is the thickness of life that integrates over time, sediments in relations, and generates itself through the witness of community.
In 2007, I said to five hundred students at Zhejiang University: "There is no best technology, only fitting technology."
In 2026, I want to say to you, as you choose your career: "There is no best career, only a fitting vocation."
And that "fittingness" does not reside in any salary chart. It dwells in your co-existence, upon the solid ground of Dasein, in the deep places where time integrates.
May you find it.