"My life is my message." vs "Your job is what you do, not who you are"

Great Debates
1

I think these two philosophies might be at the core of my inner strife. The first quote is attributed to Gandhi. I do not know who the second quote is attributed to. I always felt a strong connection with Gandhi’s idea. I really want my job and personal life to be unification. I really want everything to become just “my life” and for it to be positive… But I’m starting to think maybe the second quote is true…or at least makes life easier and happier. People always say that when faced with death, that they wished they spent less time at work…and that no one reads a resume at a funeral. Do you think these statements are in conflict? Any thoughts? Which one do you think is more valid for achieving personal happiness? Which one for greater societal benefit?

I’ve never posted a “great debate” before. Hopefully this is debate worthy…even if it’s not great. :slight_smile: Maybe this is more an IMHO question.

2

Said best by Kuato in Total Recall, “You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.”

3

Sacrifice is necessary if you have a strong desire to achieve a goal, if you just don’t have that desire sacrifice is unnecessary and will make you less happy. Different strokes and all that…

4

Quasimodal, have you read any of Eckhart Tolle’s stuff? He has some interesting
thoughts about identifying with things, and confusing them with “You”. Just like your job analogy. His “A New Earth” is a fav. of mine.
By the way, I don’t think that your original 2 statements conflict in any way.

5

I’ll first point out that Gandhi’s life was not a job; his message was not a job; and that in many ways and instances not related to his message, he was a fucking nutter. From these things and others, I conclude that you needn’t be distressed about not having a career, a calling, or a cause suitable for the sacrifice of your entire being. If you feel that you have a message, then by all means live in a way that proclaims it; there is nothing wrong with also having an ordinary job. You are also living when you are working.

My life’s message is “get out of my way, asshole!” I don’t feel an existential need to proclaim this one, though I certainly have the desire. I settle for screaming in my car. Everywhere else, I try to behave ethically, and in a way that fulfills my purposes. I believe in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; at my level, that means putting in all of the time and effort required to complete my tasks, but it also means exercising my judgement, my creativity, and my will to make the end result of each project not only the best possible articulation of my principles, my employer’s principles, my industry’s principles, and so on, but a part of a harmonious system with no gaps and no redundancy – the perfect intersection of safety and efficiency. And I try to do it with grace, charm, and wit. I write technical documents, and I like it. I believe that building widgets, flagging traffic, planning budgets, and passing legislation can all be done the same way.

And if you find yourself in a job, in a place, where that all seems like blue-sky-and-rainbows bullshit, I recommend Samuel Beckett:

6

I don’t believe in the whole “your job is what you do, not who you are” philosophy. You choose your job (or you allow yourself to be chosen by it). You spend more time at work than anywhere else. And most everything else in your life - where you live, your friends, even your happiness and outlook on life is often derived in a large part from your job.

I think work IS so much of who people are that when people are in jobs that don’t align with their values, aspirations and lifestyle, it creates a cognative dissonance. They become miserable because no matter how much they say they aren’t their job, that’s what they are becomming.

7

The chances are good that if you talked about your job on a first date or family reunion you’d bore the hell out of everyone. If you really think you’re a boring person then I agree, your job is what you are.

8

Sometimes your job IS who you are. Richard Feynman was a physicist. I don’t know, but I’d guarantee his “resume” WAS read at his funeral in the form of a list of his accomplishments.

On the other hand, you’ve got garbage men and shit suckers who clean out port-a-johns who most certainly don’t define themselves by their job. They’ve probably got hobbies and families they consider much more important. It’s just that you’ve got to earn a paycheck to keep those hobbies and families.

And there’s a million gradations in between. Sometimes your job is who you are, sometimes it’s just a means to an end. Sometimes you get some personal satisfaction out of it, but it doesn’t define you.

9

That’s a man, not a human. Two subtly, but radically, different states.

10

Any job can be made to sound exciting or boring.

It’s still part of who they are.

11

Not in conflict. Your message, if you have to have one, is just the way you live your life - an outward expression of your values. For some people their job is their life and that’s O.K. but it wouldn’t be the way I’d want to be defined. I was a cop and most people I met would never have guessed it, based on my off-duty life. Not that I was out breaking the law or anything, I just didn’t fit their idea of what cops are. I didn’t bring it home with me. I’d much rather be remembered for who I was as a person than what I did for a living.

12

I think people are happiest when their lives have integrity in their lives; in other words, when their values and actions are well aligned and reinforce each other, and when there is a cohesiveness and vision to the different aspects of their life.
But there is no one model for creating this harmony. Some people can manage to align all aspects of their life into an overall narrative; others arrange to have some aspects play the role of enabling them to do what they really care about. And sometimes you have to play the long game- you may need to spend some time paying your dues, or learning through failure, or testing your mettle, until you are going to be able to bring together the different aspects of your life.

It’s okay to not be 100% happy all of the time. Sometimes restlessness and dissatisfaction are a necessary part of learning and growing. I’m a big believer in the idea that if you are not in a position that you want to be in (and plausibly could be), it’s likely that there is something you need to learn or understand before you are going to be able to make good use of the opportunities ahead of you.

That said, I think there are some universal values in work/life balance. Everyone wants to be challenged, to build their skills, and to have the opportunity to make the most of their human capacity. Everyone wants a job where they are offered some dignity, respect, the ability to make an impact, and recognition of the value of the work they are doing. Nobody is going to be entirely happy with a life that is all work or all leisure. Every wants some sense of progress or moving forward, and nobody is going to be happy feeling like there are going down a dead end or doing needless work. If your job cannot offer at least these things, it’s probably not going to get better even with a serious shift in attitude.

13

I think that these two ideas are not necessarily at odds with eachother, but I do think that a person will probably be happiest when they are. Here’s sort of how I look at it. Imagine someone you don’t know asks you or someone who knows you really well to tell them about you, what is the first thing that they would say? That will most often align fairly closely with your message, your purpose, your meaning, whatever you want to call it.

For me, I’d be surprised if anyone I know would say anything about my job. But there are plenty of people where who they are and what they do are very closely aligned. I would certainly imagine that for a number of my favorite musicians, their friends and family would probably mention music right out. I could easily see this being more true than not for certain professions, other artist types, doctors, teachers, and a lot less so for a lot of desk workers, administrators, laborers.

I think people will probably be happiest if they’re fortunate enough to be in a position where they can get those two things to align closely, if for no other reason because they get to spend all their time doing what they love rather than needing to take a break to do something they don’t just to make ends meet. So for the rest of us, I can only ask, what can we do to bring that purpose into all aspects of our lives? Of all the values of mine that are more important to me than my job, I try to bring as much of it to work as I can. For instance, I’m a musician and generally artistic and creative person, if I weren’t doing what I am that would be what I’d do with a lot of that time, but to help bring some joy to the daily grind, I jump on projects and opportunities for me to be creative, I’ll find ways to be creative even with thoroughly mundane tasks, and most of my coworkers are quite aware of that aspect of my personality. So, in a way, even when I’m just doing what I do, I’m still living my message.

14

I didn’t get invited to Steve Jobs’ funeral, but I expect they didn’t talk exclusively about his private life.

Yeah, people who hate their jobs (often for good reasons) are not going to talk about them a lot. But that is sad, not admirable. My first boss loved talking about his engineering job, but he also loved talking about his poetry and about his mycology. He is a guy I emulate - and he also was a great boss.

15

If your first date was with someone in your field, I bet you would talk about it.
In The Murdoch Mysteries a romance between a detective and a medical examiner is begun over cut up murder victims. Talking only, to be sure.

16

What I AM is a father and a husband and a son and a brother and a friend and a geek. What I do is systems and software.

The things that matter are the former. How I pay for them is the latter.

The only coincidence between the two (and it’s a happy one) is “geek”. What I am, whether I wash dishes or write software for a living, is a geek. Thankfully, I gravitated to technology as my employment, so by happy coincidence I’m good at what I do for my pay.

It hasn’t always been that way. “What I do” and “Who I am” weren’t always separate.

I was 21 years in the military. An enlisted computer systems programmer, analyst, and manager. This was an area where my country could use my service in an area of expertise I already excelled in: geek. So I served. Took the oath (many times). Accepted the demands. Toed the lines. Surrendered my civil rights as needed. (Case in point: did you realize that anyone in uniform and under command has voluntarily surrendered critical portions of their constitutional rights? Officers who badmouth the Commander-in-Chief get reminded of this the hard way.)

I always regarded, and still regard, that as a part of who I am. I wouldn’t arrogate to call myself a warrior, but I would claim “serviceman” in the roll call of my identity. I accepted that calling, and it demanded the first and best of me for those years, so it’s reasonable to call that “identity” rather than “employment”.

Now? Not so much. I’m a veteran, so that’s an identity title too, but I don’t lean on it much. It doesn’t factor into the parts of my identity that matter now: Father to children I didn’t get to play with enough when they were growing up. Husband to a wife who learned to stop expecting the Air Force’s demands to be reasonable, because an organization which can demand you lay down your life for no reason at all cannot be expected to be reasonable about 7-day work weeks or relieving the shift in a blizzard. I owe my family the “me” they never got much of.

So yeah, now, my life is my message. Play with your kids. Hang out with your beloved. Write letters. Plant a garden.

I just work to pay for that.

17

Depending on what one identifies with, (finds identity or self in), one can easily think
that one’s job is “What I Am.” Then, what, when one loses one’s job?
Now that person is obviously nothing, right?
No, not at all. That person’s job was only ever that. The Job.
Or as my man Eckhart puts it: (paraphrasing)“You can only lose what you have, not what you are.”

18

That’s the difference between having a job and having a career or profession. When I am between jobs I am still an engineer.

19

And between jobs I am still Sitnam, because that is my identity.

20

I have a strong affinity with my own version of the second quote, which is “You work to live, not the other way around”.
In my mind, there is strict compartmentalization between “work”, which is whatever tasks you perform to earn scratch, and “life”, which is what you need that scratch for. Designing software, translating technical literature, building monuments to humankind, killing the enemy of the motherland or teaching children in Africa - that’s work. It’s ultimately meaningless, or rather their only meaning is putting cash in your pocket. What one does with that cash - that’s the message. That’s the “real” me. Having fun, loving friends, eating weird stuff, writing stuff I’ll never publish, playing games, taking that 8th shot on a dare because whatever happens next it’ll be worth not remembering in the morning. That’s what’s really important. Carpe fucking diem. Great causes, messages, social benefits, duty and sacrifice… where will they be in a hundred years ? Ghandi’s dead, mate. He’s not even remembered right.

And if you manage to land a job that furthers your own goals, then bully for you lucky person guy. Or, possibly, you’re one of the cursed ones.

My parents, on the other hand, are full-on former mode. Their marriage, their home, their kids were always subordinate to their respective passions for their work. Oh, sure, they made lots of money, bought lots of stuff, went on lots of travels and ensured my sister and I had good starting blocks (or good faffing arounds figuring what the fuck they wanted to do in my case) - but as long as I remember for example, whenever The Family went to the US, or Italy, or White Castle, there was someone banging away at the computer in the down times. Or answering work emails. Or making calls. So, like the butterfly dream thing, were they working people whisked away on vacation because that’s what people do, or holiday people who happened to do a little work on the side ? You tell me.
They’re now both past retirement age, their little egg nest “for a rainy day” is thoroughly built, and yet both are reliably putting retirement away every year - they’ve got this contract to fulfil, that merger to make sure happens right, this project to finish first, this interesting case to see through, this new hire to set straight before they cock everything up, yadda yadda. Dad is already talking about the job he’s going to pick up* when he’s retired* *and he can do whatever he likes *(emphasis mine, but also his).
To me, that’s strictly perverse. I really don’t get that. Not one bit.
I also strongly suspect that, should some ladder climbing douche force them out of their work (they sure as shit aren’t giving it up on their own, retirement manor in the Loire valley all bought and renovated or not), they’ll end up simply letting themselves die, out of simple lack of purpose and boredom. See ? Perversity.

[QUOTE=DrCube]
Sometimes your job IS who you are. Richard Feynman was a physicist. I don’t know, but I’d guarantee his “resume” WAS read at his funeral in the form of a list of his accomplishments.
[/QUOTE]

Wow, talk about picking wrong examples :).
Judging by his autobiographies, I strongly suspect the opposite. Feynman was the epitome of having your own fun while on the job. He worked on the atomic weapons program fer chrissakes, and what did he do at Los Alamos ? If you listen to him, his contribution consisted in fucking with the heads of mail censors and teaching himself lock picking/safe cracking.
Also probably hash out the details of making the basic components of the universe explode. But that’s not what he wanted to talk to you about. What was really fascinating to him was how hardly anybody bothered to change their factory lock combinations, even after he told them their safes were anything but !