Hyper-identifying With Our Jobs
Work, though essential to life, is not life. As important as work is to finding our individual meaning, it twists us out of shape if we let it.
– Geoffrey M. Bellman, author of The Consultant’s Calling
When our society was largely agrarian, doing a job used to be a whole process. If you were a furniture maker, you would seek out and harvest a tree; cut, shave and cure the wood; then design, build and paint the product… say, a dinner table. It was common to simply adopt the trade of your parents and apprentice for years in such a job.
With the advent of the industrial age, your job might have been merely one part of the whole process to produce something – perhaps, your job would be to turn screws into the legs of the table and move it along to someone else to paint it. You didn’t have to possess expert-level skill. You could get a job without needing years of apprenticeship under a master furniture maker.
Career options were limited when you lived in the agrarian age, so some would say that life was hard back then. Others might yearn for the loss of creative ownership during the industrial age. But what about the age of technology we’ve been enjoying for the past several decades? We have fast food, fast computers, fast travel, and every bit of information and disinformation we could dream of at our fingertips. Everything’s been so sped up though, that some would say that life is hard now.
However, you have an abundance of options for jobs. Today you can work in a factory supervising a computerized robot as it puts screws into table legs or you can make the whole table yourself with plans you download from the internet along with power and hand tools you purchase down the street at the home improvement superstore, and you can call yourself an artisan. You can earn a living either way.
It’s all relative, isn’t it? There will always be some who say life is hard no matter what. It’s a matter of perspective. Whether you are a table-making artisan or a table-making robot supervisor, it’s a job. However, in our culture, it is the way we tend to identify ourselves and so it becomes our identity. You don’t think so? Then imagine this common scene:
First meeting moment, pressing flesh at a party.
Then comes, “So, what do you do?” (Translation: “Who are you?”)
You pause. Maybe you simply work to pay the bills or maybe you have a job you think is worth doing. What do you say?
A) “I’m a supervisor at XYZ Manufacturing.”
B) “I’m a furniture maker.”
C) “I ponder the existential relationship between man and machine in the pursuit of conscious capitalism.”
“C’mon,” you might say, “that’s foolish. We exchange such information as a social courtesy – as a way for us to find commonality. Since most of us have jobs or professions, it’s an obvious mutually-shared experience.”
Well, it’s a good assumption that most of listen to some sort of music – even back in the cave, we were probably tapping out rhythms with sticks on rocks, but we don’t identify ourselves by the music we love. Honestly though, it would be more fun to say, “Nice to meet you. My name is Angela. I love the blues – just picked up Jimmie Vaughan’s latest compilation.” rather than, “Nice to meet you. My name is Angela. I’m a supervisor at XYZ Manufacturing.”
I believe that if we didn’t hyper-identify with our jobs, we wouldn’t be so unhappy. One careerbuilder.com survey I read stated that 4 out of 5 U.S. workers do not have their dream jobs and less than ½ say they’re satisfied. So, the majority of us don’t have dream jobs. What is a dream job anyway? Does it mean that I should love my job? Well, I love my job, but I don’t love my job all the time. It’s never fun to let someone know they’ve been rejected during the interview process, yet this is part of my job. Once again, it’s all about perspective, and that perspective is relative, isn’t it? I mean, what a problem to have! We enjoy great living standards from the money we earn at these non-dream jobs. Compared to our pioneering ancestors, we live like royalty, with conveniences and luxuries that would have seemed like a dream to them.
Unless we’re being abused in the workplace, in which case I advocate tossing the job you have in favor of a new one, why can’t we look at what we’re doing as a way to earn a living and not necessarily as who we really are? I believe that the vast majority of us are confusing our identifying role when we do this. If there is one thing we have control over in this world, it is our perspective… our attitude about things.
So understand this… your job does not define you unless you allow it to. What your job does is act as a vehicle to bring your divine gifts forth so that you may use them for that which is intended. No matter where you are and what you are doing, you carry your gifts with you… Your gifts serve as part of and in reflection of your identity – but your identity is NOT the method of their delivery.
My advice for immediate happiness and fulfillment? It’s simple. Stop identifying so much with the job and turn your focus on figuring out what your gifts are and how to use them in your work.
