Americans are famously criticized for equating who we are with what we do for money. At parties, we feel completely comfortable asking strangers: “Where do you work? What do you do?” as if this is a useful way of finding out who someone IS. In many cultures, this is the height of crass-itude … but of course in some of those countries, “who one is” depends entirely upon who one’s ancestors were, and that’s really just yuckiness of another kind.
I’ve been turning over in my brain the strange intimacy we feel between what we do and who we are, perhaps because we have a new 16-year-old in the house and a summer job has become a priority. But also because some of my middle-aged peers have found themselves jobless in this terrible, unforgiving economy. Books on this topic are blooming faster than daylilies, often with the Pollyanna perspective that job loss, while, sure, a blow to the ego, is often a chance to rediscover oneself. Chief among these shiny, happy job-loss stories is Dominique Browning’s new book Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness. Browning tumbled to unemployment from a lofty perch as editor in chief of Conde Nast’s House and Garden magazine, and she describes poignantly the way work creates “scaffolding” in our lives, without which many people crumble to emotional bits. Browning’s meditation on unemployment is full of observational jewels about the funky eating habits of those who are suddenly home alone, and an argument for wearing pajamas 24-7. But her book is about a different reality than most of ours. Her biggest dilemma is not finding another job; it’s whether or not to sell her second home. My unemployed friends are not so much delighting in their work-free freedom as lying awake all night, mentally sorting bank account numbers in a Sudoku that can only be solved by finding another job. Really soon.
Against this identity-laden angst of trying to find work in mid-life, it’s kind of refreshing to watch teenagers feel exactly the opposite as they try to find summer jobs. The whole point of first paychecks, after all, is NOT to connect the work with who you are. Teenagers don’t imagine that knowing how to buzz up an Oreo Blizzard at Dairy Queen means that they are, at their core, a Blizzard-maker. Those Blizzards are just a way to get gas money in order to drive up Lake Michigan for an afternoon of awesomeness that really DOES capture what they are … which is AWESOME!
Think of your first job, likely filled with fumbles and humiliations. My first time babysitting, at age 10, I industriously diapered a toddler in a snowy cloth and secured it with an outsized pin topped with a faded yellow plastic duck head. When the kid began plucking worriedly at her hip, I re-checked my handiwork discovered to my horror that I’d run the thick pin through a fold of her moist skin. I hollered louder than she did, as with trembling fingers I undid her accidental piercing.
Since then, to earn money, I have taught piano to grade-schoolers, one of whom nervously left a pee stain on my piano bench that is still visible 30 some years later. I’ve slammed pots over leaping flames in restaurant kitchens, sliced my finger wide open in a sandwich shop, spent a summer crawling on all fours in the boiling New Jersey sun, injecting mold samples into patches of Kentucky bluegrass and fescues on an experimental turf farm … before finally finding a job in a classroom that finally felt like work I wanted to be identified with, instead of against.
So, when does this change? Probably it’s when we cross that mystifying threshold of adulthood that jobs are somehow supposed to become careers. Once others begin to depend on us, once we’re no longer identified with a high school or college … that’s when jobs take on the heft of who we are. But: must they? This is no longer a Mad Men economy where most folks work the same job until they retire. Increasingly, the shifting tides and new currents in the job market mean that most of us will be called to work more than one job, in waves, just as when we were teenagers, and this could be a useful reminder that we are more than our paychecks.
This terrible economy is a heart-breaker, it’s true. But our work, I hope, is not who we are, whether or not we’re collecting a paycheck right now. On this cusp of summer, fat with promise, consider all you do that truly makes you who you are, from sharing garden plants with neighbors, to creating beautiful meals for friends and family, to fixing broken machinery or broken hearts, to soaking in the honeyed loveliness of the setting Midwestern sun … Who are you? What, really, do you do? What any of us do for money will never, I hope, be the right answer.