To be (your job) or not to be (your job)
Over tea with a friend the other day, I happily counted down the few teaching days remaining in my academic career. She asked, “Having an identity crisis yet?” I was easily able to answer: “Not one bit.”
The dangers of identifying with our jobs have never been more obvious. From layoffs to the shocking decline of entire industries, from zero-hour contracts to the gig economy, it’s clear to many people that investing too much of your self-worth and sense of who you are in your job is a recipe for disaster. This is true whether you work in the service industry or the knowledge economy. Work is far too precarious a thing to over-invest in.
Phrases like “work/the institution won’t love you back” and “you are not your job” circulate to remind us a) that any loyalty we have to our jobs is probably not reciprocated by our employer or the profession as a whole, and b) that we’re all more than our work; we don’t have to be defined by what we do to survive under capitalism.
It’s hard not to be over-identified with our jobs, though. “What do you do?” is one of the first questions we ask new acquaintances. We include our professions in our social media bios and brand ourselves accordingly. Many of us spend up to a decade studying and training to “be” a doctor, professor, vet, engineer, etc. If we’re not our jobs at that point, what are we?
The reality is that even the seemingly most secure of those jobs, like tenured professor or medical doctor, are increasingly tenuous for a variety of reasons. The number of secure, full-time positions in many industries is falling. In others, demand is high but so is burnout, making it difficult to sustain a life-long career in your chosen field. Even if you’re self-employed, your business can fail (or succeed and get sold!) and you’ll need to pivot. Whatever the cause, the rug can be swept out from under your career in a moment.
And yet, the call to treat your chosen career as “just a job” doesn’t land well for lots of us. Applying a “clock in, clock out” mentality can keep some of the dangers of overwork at bay, but it also limits the satisfaction that we might derive from work when it’s viewed as little more than a necessary evil, like flossing your teeth or cleaning the cat litter. Those tasks are worth it in order to have clean teeth and delightful kitties, but not pleasurable in and of themselves.
You don’t train for or strive to get good at your job over many years just so you can treat it like a mundane chore. Being completely emotionally detached from what you do and never investing any of who you are in it also just doesn’t make much sense for a lot of careers. Who I am as a person is part of who I am as a teacher, for example. I wouldn’t be a good teacher at all if I brought nothing of myself to the endeavour.
Many people (myself included sometimes) point out that the idea of your job as a vocation or a calling can be a trap: it can easily lead to overwork, burnout, exploitation, being underpaid, stress, etc., all in the name of doing something we’re passionate about, or helping others, or doing what we’re “meant to do.” Over-identifying with your work is almost inevitable if you see it as a calling or passion project.
But swinging the pendulum all the way in the other direction—treating work as nothing to care deeply about, as detached from our values and personalities, as purely transactional—doesn’t exactly seem like a recipe for happiness, either. And if happiness is connected to meaningfulness, do we really want to evacuate all meaning from the things we spend the majority of our waking hours doing?
As someone who is transitioning out of the formal career that I spent 14 years of post-secondary education preparing for and over 20 years working in, I could easily be having the “identity crisis” my friend asked about. I have found meaning in my work and invested a lot of care and personal effort into it. Reflecting on why I’m not feeling like I’m losing a part of myself, a couple of things come to mind.
One is external: the pandemic created a certain distance between me and my job as I spent little time on campus and had fewer close connections with students and colleagues. The other is a distinction I think I’ve made in my own mindset about my work: I don’t hold to any loyalty or emotional attachment to my specific workplace/employer, which allows for some separation between my job as the thing I get paid for and my work as the meaningful activities I engage in and even identify with.
What I’ve learned in recent years is that those meaningful activities aren’t tied tightly to a particular kind of working environment. Teaching is meaningful to me, for example, but it’s a myth that teaching only happens in a classroom within an educational institution. I teach through my writing, through talks and seminars, in my coaching work, as a mentor, as a consultant, as a volunteer. I’ll still “be” a teacher and “do” teaching outside of the university, maybe even more so.
As I’ve pondered the question of whether it’s always bad to identify with your job, I think the simple answer is no, it’s not always a bad thing. The trick, I suppose, is to a) not identity with your employer, because they really aren’t looking out for you; and b) recognize that the parts of your work you most identify with probably transcend work itself and certainly transcend any specific employment situation.
What does this look like, practically speaking? I can tell you how it’s played out for me, keeping in mind this isn’t meant to be prescriptive, and that it’s taken me a while to get to this point:
I “clock in and out” of the parts of my job that are like, well, flossing and litter scooping. I don’t do email, admin-type work, course prep, grading or such outside of business hours.
I keep some emotional and personal detachment from the aspects of the job that aren’t especially meaningful to me.
I do not much more than the minimum on the “cat litter” (metaphorically and literally, haha, sorry cats).
I reserve my emotional and creative energies for the stuff I most identify with: being in the classroom, engaging with students, writing, working to improve various conditions in the university, etc. I don’t have a “punch the clock” mentality about this work, although I also try to keep it within business hours if it’s for my main employer.
While I put a lot of energy into the more meaningful parts of my work, I also remind myself that this meaning isn’t attached to or derived from doing this within one professional or institutional context.
Although I certainly didn’t plan for this to be the case, I think these elements have set me up well for transitioning out of official professor-hood and into a more, shall we say, eclectic phase of my career. I know I’ll still be doing the things I care about (and I know the flossing and cat litter bits don’t disappear entirely!). The parts of my work that are me will be with me long after my last day.
Ultimately, you don’t have to stop identifying with your job entirely in order to put a little breathing space between you and work. I think we’re allowed to hold on tightly to the parts of work that give our lives joy, satisfaction, and meaning, while acknowledging that we’re not wholly defined by our jobs and certainly not by the conditions of our employment.
What I’m reading: An installment in Scottish queen of crime Val McDermid’s Detective Karen Pirie series: Past Lying. It’s set in the early days of lockdown and also has a cool crime-novel-within-a-crime-novel thing going on.
What I’m watching: I got a free one-week trial to Starz so I’m going to blast through 2 seasons of Vigil (my love for Suranne Jones is unstoppable). Also, Lauren Lyle, who plays Karen Pirie in the tv version of McDermid’s books, is in this too.