You know what the greatest thing about having a job that doesn’t fit into any of the normal categories is? It makes it a lot easier to not define yourself by your job.
I started working at Millikin a little over a year ago. What I do is hard to define: it’s not IT, but it’s geeky. I work for the Alumni Office, as part of the Communications and Services team. I oversee our section of the database, although, not directly–I’m responsible for business practices and the staff that does day-to-day entry. Plus web communication, social media, reporting and being the department’s liason to IT.
Overall, it’s a great job, but it’s not the kind of thing you can put in a standard form: it’s not IT; it’s not communications; it’s not fund-raising. It’s somewhere in between all of those.
And as it turns out, this is a huge relief.
A few years ago, I was a campus minister. That was the primary definition of who I was: my job. After that, I worked in marketing. And I never really felt at home there, because I never really considered myself a “marketer” (or marketing guru or marketing exec or any other ridiculous title). Even thought that was my job, I never felt comfortable with it defining my identity, even though, most of the time, I felt like it did.
Now, my job doesn’t fit into any neat boxes. I’m not a “campus minister” nor do I “work in marketing.”
I’m not even “in IT.”
And it’s really freeing–now, I can consider myself a father and a Christian and a musician and a poet. I might not be particularly good at any of those things, but they’re labels I relate to, regardless of whether or not I’m making a living at them.
Which brings me to the most interesting question of this all: why DO we tend to define ourselves by our jobs? and define others the same way? Is this an American thing (I’ve picked up vague rumblings online that it is; but I don’t have any way of quantifying or showing that empirically). And more importantly, how does this sort of mindset, where we define ourselves primarily by our jobs, inform our lives a Christians and how (un?)healthy is it?
One Comment
I don’t think this is an American thing, but rather a human thing. We spend most of our waking time at work, which means it is natural that we identify with that. And I think this could be a good thing
A lot of people that really don’t identify with their jobs are people that hate their jobs, and so spend most of their life engaged in something they do not like. They see their work as somehow seperate from who they are–something that just pays the bills, for example–and therefore will never invest all they could into their work. This could be because their job does not suit their personality, but it could also be due to laziness, or because they desire to enjoy the fruits of their labour, but do not care about the labour itself.
One of the central teachings of the Bhagavad-gita, a classical Hindu text, is that our actions should flow naturally from our being: we should do what comes natural to us, even if it is unpleasant, but do this with detachment, not craving to enjoy the fruits of one’s work. Such an ethic makes you identify to a certain extent with your work, sees your work as part of your personality, but does not make you a workaholic or someone obsessed with personal gain.