But now we come to the most important thing. Those diverse projects or programs of life which our fancy elaborates, and among which our will, another psychic mechanism can freely choose, are not presented to us as looking all alike; a strange voice emerging from some intimate and secret depth of our own calls on us to choose one of these and to bar the others. All these programs, please note, are presented to us as possible — we may have the ability to be one kind of person or another, but one and only one appears to us as the one which we have to be. This is the strangest and most mysterious ingredient in man. On the one hand, he is free, he is not forced to be any single thing as is the star; and yet in the face of this freedom something always rises with a certain character of necessity about it, as thought saying to us, “You are able to be whatever you want; but only if you choose this or that specific pattern will you be what you have to be.’ That is to say, among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call ‘vocation.’ But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it.
Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (Mildred Adams, trans., 1958), p. 179.