Are we more than just a job title?
What do you do for a living?
It’s often the first question we’re asked when we meet someone new. What do you do? It’s the question that runs through our minds when we’re introduced to a new tool too, more or less.
The obvious answer to the question in the title is, yes, of course we are more than just our job titles. Our identities are complex and multifaceted and couldn’t possibly be distilled down to that one aspect of our lives. Our jobs. And yet, in Western society at least, we very much are distilled, whether we like it or not.
The question of what we do is packed with meaning and inferences. It provides a one sentence synopsis of our academic achievements, our ambitions, our circumstances in life, the opportunities that lay ahead of us, our income, our potential. It paints a vivid picture of what our life might be like, the kind of house we’d probably be able to afford, or even the car we might drive. It’s a yardstick for everything our society holds dear — commercial success, wealth, and achievement.
What do you do? Is a gentle and seemingly non-intrusive probe into the value of your existence, your contribution to society, and of you as a person.
The location in which the question is asked reveals even more. It is loaded with data. If you meet someone at an industry conference, you could reasonably assume that they are devoted to their career, maybe even their company, and that hold a position of some importance within said company. You might also infer ambition, the drive to take control over career direction, to captain one’s own fate. Or a desire for more. You meet someone at a conference and without even talking to them, you can assume certain things about their personality and life. If you met someone at your child’s swim meet, you could safely assume they have a kid in the competition. Depending on the location and event, you might be able to pinpoint the age or gender of their child based just off of your being in the same spot at the same time. Add the question, what do you do? to the mix, and you have a wealth of inferred data on complete strangers.
Now, of course, you might be wrong about some of your assumptions. That’s the thing about assumptions. But on average, you’ll probably be mostly right about the kinds of things you can assume about a person based on the answer to that question and the cues you can pick up on from the place of your meeting.
But you can’t really know a person entirely based on this information — and that’s the point. There is so much packed into occupation — so many assumptions being made — without even scratching the surface of who people really are. We know that we, as humans, each have many selves. Multiple faces that we wear and show to the world. Research has shown this. And most people can probably see this within themselves and accept these findings as truth. We are not the same person with our boss that we are with our spouse. And nor should we be.
So despite our multifaceted selves, despite our general acknowledgment that people are complex — why do we persist in integrating so much of how we personally identify, categorize, and understand other people with occupation?
Simply because it’s effective?
Maybe.
But why is it effective? That’s what troubles me. Why is the largest piece of a person’s identity in the modern era tied to the job that they have?
I think this might have made sense a few hundreds of years ago. Before the industrialized world create the corporate environment of meaningless jobs that workers themselves don’t understand.
I’d love to track the origins of this conundrum.
When trades and guilds ruled the world of commerce, these types of classifications would have made sense. People were what they did in a more real sense. The shoemaker, the baker, the butcher, the blacksmith — these types of careers weren’t just jobs, they were life-long careers. Or callings. Or heritable businesses with specialized, often secret, knowledge that was passed from one generation to the next. Apprenticeship was involved. There was no alienation of labour. The labour, the business, the craft of it — required immersive practice. So the old adage “you are what you repeatedly do” applied and offered an honest glimpse into what someone’s life was really like.
But in the modern age, are you still what you repeatedly do? Or even more precisely, what you get paid to repeatedly do?
What if your job is to move boxes of files to one end of a building to the other? Or to analyze marketing campaigns to try to make a determination of their efficacy, and guess at what you could do better next time? Or to listen to hours of voice recordings to sort what you hear into buckets of relevancy in order to help a computer-generated voice assistant provide more accurate service? Or to ring in items at the cash at the local grocery store.
What are you then?
The modern world of work actively encourages alienation of labour to the extent that many office workers are barely able to describe what it is that they “do” in a sentence anymore.
When working as a Communications Specialist, I spent large portions of the day writing emails. So then, am I an emailer and nothing more? My job was to write, but I couldn’t say that I was a writer because then people would assume that I meant a writer of books. Whenever I told someone I was a corporate copywriter, they weren’t quite sure what that meant. What do you write? Mostly emails and blog posts. Oh, okay. It’s a peg (or more!) down from the expectation of the work a “real writer” was supposed to do. As a writer, I must produce books. Without books, I can’t really be a writer. So the question doesn’t provide the same satisfying categorization and data map that it was intended to.
Maybe it’s time for a new question. A new way of understanding people, and the contribution they are trying to make. A new way of imagining our place in the world. Something more open-ended that allows for passion, and hobbies, and personality to come into the mix. Something broader and more inviting than what is essentialy just a more polite version of, how do you get the money to pay all your bills?
Maybe, what are you all about? Or, what have you found your life’s purpose to be? Or, where do you like to invest your time and energy?
Something along those lines. And maybe none of those are right, but I think they open the doors to a deeper interaction and a more meaningful yardstick of a life-well-lived than an overly simplified inquiry into economic activity. What do you think?
