Sanskrit had a word for duty that changed based on your stage of life.
The Sanskrit word dharma derives from the root dhṛ, meaning to hold, support, or sustain.1 In Vedic texts dating to roughly 1500 BCE, dharma referred to cosmic law, the order that prevented chaos. Over the following centuries, the word expanded to encompass duty, conduct, custom, and the moral responsibilities attached to a person's position in the world.2
No single English word captures dharma. Karl Friedrich Geldner, in his translation of the Rig Veda, used twenty different English words for it, including law, justice, custom, quality, and model.3
What makes dharma distinctive in the history of work is that it was never one-size-fits-all. Hindu tradition divided dharma into categories: sva-dharma, one's personal duty based on individual nature; varna dharma, duties tied to social role; and ashrama dharma, duties that shifted across four stages of life, from student to householder to retiree to renunciant.4 A farmer's dharma differed from a soldier's. A young person's dharma differed from an elder's.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Better one's own dharma, though imperfect, than another's dharma well-performed."5
The Western concept of career assumes a single trajectory, a path that accumulates status over time. Dharma assumed the opposite: that what you owe the world changes as you change. The student's obligation was to learn. The householder's was to earn and raise children. The retiree's was to withdraw from accumulation. The final stage required letting go of all roles entirely.6
When the British colonial administration encountered Indian society, they codified the flexible concept of varna into the rigid caste system, freezing what had been a framework of evolving obligations into inherited categories that determined a person's occupation at birth.7