You aren't what you do

Early in my career, I worked in recruitment and candidate screening for an American non-profit that worked in overseas development. I spoke to all kinds of people, from university students and graduates looking to do a summer-long internship to people who had worked successful careers and wanted to do something they felt was meaningful when they retired. I was their first contact with the organisation and vice versa, and part of my role was to get to know them to see if we were a good fit for each other.

During these calls, rather than asking people the predictable and problematic “What do you do?”, I started asking them, “Who is Jane Smith? What’s your story?” I felt that was a more empowering question to get to know someone. It felt like giving someone a paintbrush and asking them to paint a self-portrait.?

After a few weeks, I noticed a fascinating pattern in the first brushstrokes people made with their initial responses:

If Jane Smith was older and in the twilight of her career, she was more likely to respond along the lines of “Well, I’m a professional accountant [or insert other job role or title] and I’ve been working for X years and I’m starting to think about what I want to do after I retire soon.”

If Jane Smith, however, was a recent graduate and wanted to do some volunteer work overseas, the conversation often started with her passions and interests, not her career: “I’m really passionate about kids and creativity, and I’m looking for ways to do something with that.” These younger candidates almost never answered my question with, 'I’m a teacher,' or 'I’m a graphic designer,' 'I’m a consultant, etc.’

It was also 2010, so recent graduates went on to tell me that they were working at Starbucks to pay rent and appreciated that I didn’t ask them ‘what they did’ because they felt that making coffee wasn’t really who they were. By telling me with their first brushstroke that they were creative, that they loved kids, that they loved fixing things or they were passionate about music, they were sending a message that their sense of self wasn’t tied into what work they did to pay the bills.

As an organisational anthropologist, I still reflect on those conversations because they point to a bigger connection between work, our identities, and what it means to be a person in our societies.

Work = identity is deeply rooted in our childhoods

This idea that work = identity is so deep, powerful and pervasive because we’re introduced to it as children the first time we’re asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Of course, the question there isn’t about what kind of person someone actually is (eg kind, generous, brave, curious, thoughtful, etc); the question we’re really asking is ‘What do you want to do for a living when you grow up?’

There’s a subtle sleight of hand that takes place where we conflate what we are with what we do, and you’ll forgive me if I think it’s more than mere semantics. Rather, that sleight of hand demonstrates both how pervasive the work = identity construct is in our own mindsets and it’s also how we actively pass down the idea and entangle our youth into this idea that our work = our identity. When you look at how toys are increasingly focused on learning and become a proxy for this further indoctrination, it gets worrying for our kids.

Work = identity isn’t just how we present ourselves to the world when we meet a stranger and ask them what they do within 30 seconds of introducing ourselves. It can also be the measure by which we define ourselves and ascribe our sense of value and self-worth, especially in relation to others.

One of the challenges is that this idea is so deeply embedded in us – and in relation to a piece I previously wrote, I think it’s an internalised pressure that contributes to our need to be constantly productive. Work = identity is part of why we struggle to switch off, it’s part of why we feel guilty about resting (even when we’re ill or on the verge of burnout) and it’s why we struggle with the idea of work-life balance and having a life beyond work, pushing us closer and closer to burnout.

Of course, it’s not just switching off on evenings, holidays or weekends where we see this construct at play. The effects can be seen when people retire, lose a job, change careers or go on parental leave. For some, it’s not just a loss of structure and routine that can be disorientating or disheartening; some also lose a sense of themselves and who they are if they’re no longer working as a productive member of society and they’re no longer a [fill in their job title].

Decoupling work from identity

There’s no doubt that work is a vital aspect of our lives and our experience as human beings. Across our lifetimes, we spend more of our waking time working than doing any other task. Of course, it’s important.

But the danger is when we define ourselves by our work and it becomes the sole or even primary aspect of our identity. Among other issues, it’s unfair to you to define yourself or your self-worth based on what you do (or even worse, how much you're paid or not paid for it).

It's one of the reasons that organisations are making a more concerted effort to make work more meaningful and doubling down on purpose and values. If work is our identity, we want that identity to be meaningful in the grand scheme of things – not just in terms of our pay packets or relative status.

The wider point is that what you do for a living isn’t who you are; you aren’t a human doing, but rather, you're a human being.

One of the dangers of defining yourself through work is a loss of balance and perspective. When your work is the core part of who you are, other aspects of your life (such as your health or your relationships) can take a backseat to your work, leading to mental, emotional and physical and reduced wellbeing – which, ironically, will likely have a negative effect on your work and your productivity.

Decoupling work from our identity can be a long, difficult process for us – individually and as a society. But if we’re going to make work more sustainable from a wellbeing perspective and stem an oncoming tide of burnout, we’re going to have to think differently about our relationship with work.

The road ahead: from human doings to human beings

Part of what we need to do is shift our mindsets to think about our lives holistically. We need to understand where work fits in the bigger picture, and how both work and our lives outside of work affect each other. Here are a few reflections:

• Individually, take time to reflect and remind yourself: your work (and what you do) isn’t the whole of who you are. It might be important, but it doesn’t define you; there’s a reason that one of the most common regrets people have at the end of their lives is that they worked too hard at the expense of their relationships. Similarly, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, who oversees the longest-running study on happiness, suggests that relationships are a prime factor in driving happiness. In other words, remember that we’re not just machines designed to work; we’re social beings made for connection and relationship.
• I’m hopeful that the time we’ve had to reflect during the pandemic and phenomena like The Great Resignation, quiet quitting and companies’ increased emphasis on employee experience, wellbeing, purpose, meaning and values are part of that wider re-evaluation and decoupling. For many of us, the work = identity complex is still deeply rooted in us individually and socially pervasive, so it’ll take time for us to retrain our mindsets and disentangle ourselves, but these trends suggest that more of us are taking a step back and starting to think about work holistically.
• My initial observation more than 10 years ago about my fellow millennials and data on Gen Z’s expectations of work are encouraging signs that maybe younger people are decoupling work from their identity – I’d certainly hope that’s the case. But part of me remains sceptical whether that’s down to different generational values and senses of self, or having different values and a different sense of self at different points in their lives and careers. There’s a chance that my older respondents answered the way they did because they were more entrenched in their careers rather than because they were Boomers or Gen Xers.
• At the same time, it’s possible that Millennials and Gen Zs may see things differently after being raised by parents who lived and breathed the work = identity complex, pushing us in the opposite direction, to think more holistically about our lives. While I hope that’s the case and we may have a generational advantage towards a healthier mindset, it’s not guaranteed.

The wider point is that regardless of generational differences, we need to explore and experiment with ways to re-evaluate and reimagine our relationship with work with a more holistic lens.