I’m not my job title
One of the things I choose to do often is going to a bookstore. Being by myself, surrounded by so many potential resources for discovering truths, feels like a comforting activity.
During the pandemic lockdowns many of us came to realizations about our selves and our lives. For me, one of the most significant truths I faced was how wrongly I have been about identifying myself with my job title. For many years when I was younger I considered it as a kind of an ID. I was proudly saying I was working at a bank. As if it was an important trait of myself. I was, like, “programmed” to consider it as a significant characteristic. A series of events came up, which started with the 2020 lockdowns, and a reassessment process started. It’s been a couple of years now that I totally reevaluated this belief that “I am my job title”.
These thoughts made me notice that usually, when you first meet someone, one of the first -if not the first- questions they ask you is what do you do for a living. “I’m a banker, you say”. And you are defined by that. “John is a lawyer” you are told, and John is “registered” as John the lawyer. And this is ok, and partly true, if you love your job, feel passionate about it and you wake up most mornings feeling good with it. You do it as a way of living too. Your job is a choice maybe more than it is a necessity. Of course you can pay the bills thanks to your work but you also enjoy doing it. It does define you, at least a significant part of you, since you do it for a big portion of your day and you find joy in it.
But I fear that the majority of people aren’t like that. I think most people have to go to this job they have, for a living, to pay the bills and the grocery store. It’s much more a necessity than it is a choice. So being defined by their job title might be unfair and misleading.
Of course it’s a question that serves as a conversation starter. It’s easier. You can’t ask someone you just met “so, what kind of a person are you?” right at their face. They might not want to answer, they might not even know the answer. I find it more informative asking what someone is doing when they’re not working. How do they choose to pass their time. What do they enjoy doing, what lights them up. It’s fairly indicative of the kind of a person they really are, much more than their job title. Either it’s running, fishing, knitting or watching Netflix, what they choose to do says a lot more about them than what they do nine-to-five.
What I often like to ask is a very hypothetical question but always has interesting answers: what would you do if money wasn’t the issue, if every job paid the exact same amount of money and you could do whatever you want. I have received so many different and surprising answers and interesting, deeper conversations usually come up. Everyone seems much more imaginative, creative or closer to their child self. More truthful about their core being.
We always ask kids “What do you want to be when you grow up”, making them feel that the most important thing is to be “a profession”. Most of us have asked this question and we have also received this question when we were children. But maybe we need some rebalancing of investment towards the self. We are not our job title. We are -among many other things- the quality of our character, our values, our way to interact with our environment. These aspects of ourselves are of much greater importance. These define us and, consequently, the impact we have on our society.