Roxane Gay reminds us this week in the New York Times that we are not our jobs. I think we all know this, reading it in print, but I’m not sure we know it.
I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy (you should go!) talking about identity and how much I try to wiggle out of it. It’s hard for me to say that I’m an athlete even though I played competitive sports and run marathons and work out every day. It’s hard for me to say I’m a writer even though I’ve been published and do this shit you’re reading right now.
For fuck’s sake, I have a hard time looking people in the eye and telling them that I’m a gay man, even though I’m madly in love with another dude and getting married this year. (“Well since I, you know, came out.”)
Anyway. More on that for another draft.
The one thing I’m comfortable identifying with is my work. It’s always been that way. Saying exactly what I do, and who for. Work is so much of our identity as Americans it’s the easiest thing to grab onto. It’s the age old party question: What do you do? When someone asks me this, I tell them about my day job. I don’t tell them that I lift weights or write stories or suck dick, all of which are far more interesting.
In fact, I believe it’s even easier to hold onto a job as an identity because it’s so difficult to hold the other identities as truths. All of us are victim of identifying with our jobs too much as that Big American Problem, but perhaps for those of us who spent so much time growing up searching for identity where we couldn’t see it – perhaps because of our sexuality, or because we have an invisible disability, or because we’re multi-race, or because our parents are divorced, or whatever else — it’s the easiest place to find currency.
It’s a dangerous game. Of course, the risk is losing who we really are, ignoring our passions and hiding from others. But it also give our jobs – things that are not real, and could kick us on the street tomorrow if it benefited them – more power.
There’s this concept of quiet quitting which when I first heard it, kind of made me mad. Like, so the people I work with are just not going to show up and work? And then Brad, bless him, explained that it’s basically … doing your job. As in, we spent so much time in our generation and the generations before us grinding, reaching, pressing, all the aggressive verb-ing words to get more more more and squeeze blood out of a stone. The pandemic taught us … it might not be worth it? As Gay puts it, “the expectation that we should go above and beyond for employers who feel no reciprocal responsibility is a grand, incredibly destructive lie.”
So, think about your job as a contract because that’s literally what it is. Is it OK to show up and be ambitious and push and press and strive for more? Yes, of course. Go for it! Is it OK to slack off and not work? Eh, no, not if you want that paycheck. (Or not frustrate me.) But! Is it OK to show up and do the job that you were hired to do, and do it well? Yes.
And then is it OK to go about your day and do something else to build your identity? Yes. And I hope that you do.
TPF, this was a great piece. I will have to bookmark it to read again and again!