Work and Identity
Plus our upcoming café on dignity, a contribution from co-moderator Minami Alguire, Poor Artist’s Cupboard by Charles Bird King, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Marybel Menzies
If you have seen the movie Fight Club, then you are likely familiar with the following quote by Chuck Palahniuk, spoken by the character Tyler Durden: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet.” How many of us can say that we truly feel that way, though? As we discovered at our latest Curiosity Café, many of us closely associate our identity with our line of work and how much freedom it affords us. Furthermore, as our co-moderators highlighted, not only do we identify ourselves with our work, but we also ask children “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and other adults “What do you do?” at dinner parties. Both questions are typically asked in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the other person. The moderators noted that the unspoken expectation is for that answer to be about our work rather than other aspects of our lives. We regularly make assumptions about who a person is based on their answers to those questions: the argumentative lawyer, the boring accountant, the patient preschool teacher. Work and identity conflate in our day-to-day lives. But should they? Take a look at our recap to see what participants had to say. But first:
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: Work and Identity
Upcoming Events
Community Survey
“When I Grow Up” by Minami Alguire
Arts & Culture: Poor Artist’s Cupboard by Charles Bird King (c. 1815)
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: Work and Identity
By Marybel Menzies
Our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Minami Alguire and Zach Grey, began with an exploration of the question: What is work? From here, the conversation took off:
What does it even mean to work?
Even during work hours, one is often asked to do things that do not feel like work, suggesting that “work” can refer to more than the tasks associated with one’s occupation. On the other hand, when we are at home and off the clock, the things we do often do feel like work: just think about the last time you took the Dyson out for a walk.
Maybe “work” is not confined to what we do on the job but refers to any task that is not immediately gratifying.
We often equate our worth with our productivity. However, it is important, at times, to find ways to fight against that inclination, so that we do not see ourselves as any less valuable just because we suffer a lapse in productivity—especially because such lapses can occur for reasons we can’t foresee or control, like a physical injury.
While one might not identify with the particular role one is working in, one’s identity can still go hand-in-hand with one’s job, such that the job becomes an expression of one’s interests, values, and other aspects of one’s identity. I may not identify specifically as a hydrogeologist, for example, but the position still allows me to express my love for science and my lifelong admiration for great scientists.
Work can actually feel like play. Work allows us to escape from private life, which is filled with doctor’s appointments, household chores, and other mundane responsibilities. Work feels like being on vacation.
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt provides a helpful distinction between work and labour. Labour, in Arendt’s account, has more to do with actions that involve subsistence, such as collecting food or building shelter, whereas work refers to the creation of lasting objects. A great deal of work today shares little in common with this definition of labour. Instead, much of the work we do nowadays is far removed from our daily subsistence.
However, in a capitalist society, in which one’s livelihood—one’s means of subsistence—is tied to one’s work, the line between work and labour, in Arendt’s sense, is often blurred.
In the second half of the Curiosity Café, our moderators led two parallel conversations on the relationship between one’s work identity, self-worth, and loving what one does:
Our tendency to associate our self-worth with our work identity raises questions about how work influences our sense of self.
If my identity is closely tied to my work, then could being in a line of work that is perceived as socially undesirable negatively impact my self-esteem and sense of self?
How much of ourselves should we dedicate to our work? Should we throw our entire selves into work or should we keep it at arm’s length?
Associating myself too strongly with my work could lead to the distortion of my motivational structure, such that I am responsive only to job-related considerations and neglect other important areas of my life, like my personal relationships and passion projects. It is important, then, to work to unlearn associations (e.g., I am my work identity, and I am no one outside of my job) that may be causing faulty motivational structures.
If you didn’t have to go to work, would you still do it?
Perhaps surprisingly, most indicated that they would.
Without work, I wouldn’t know what else to do; it would be difficult to determine how to arrange my time and give it structure.
Passion alone is not enough to secure my attachment to my job. Although I love my work, society is structured such that my passion is outweighed by the need for higher wages.
Others disagreed, stating, for example, that they would take the option not to work so they could devote more time to their many hobbies. Some participants also complicated the question:
How we answer this question now does not necessarily reflect who we are in any deep, fundamental way, or reveal some permanent attitude toward work as such. Instead, it may simply reflect where we are, or what we need in our current circumstances. In certain periods—such as periods of burnout or soul-searching idleness—work may be the last thing we want or need; at other times, work may be a far more appealing or constructive option.
Answers to this question need not be binary. Instead of choosing between working and not working, I may choose to continue working under a different set of conditions. For example, I may opt to remain in my current job but reduce my weekly hours from 40 to 20. What this suggests is that one’s alienation from one’s work may stem less from the nature of the work itself and more from the extent to which it consumes one’s life.
In what kind of world are we asking ourselves this question? In a very imperfect world (like the one we live in), I would continue to work even if I had the option not to, because my work provides an essential service to other people. However, in an ideal world, where everyone’s needs are met (where poverty has been eliminated, where everyone has equal access to quality health care, and so on), my personal interests would play a bigger role in my reasons for working.
Even if we didn’t need to work, we would continue to engage in projects and creative expression. With or without employment, human beings need something to do, something to aim at, a way to organize their days and structure their time.
As humans, we want to find meaning in our work. However, society hasn’t always been this way. Only recently has society been such that we can aim to find meaning in our work. Previously, societies had very different conceptions of what work is and means. For example, it is plausible that hunter-gatherer societies found more meaning in their communities than the work they performed to contribute to that community.
In having these conversations, we should be mindful of who is and is not included, and the extent to which the conclusions we draw are representative of all working people. How we relate to our work can vary widely depending on what we do, how others perceive what we do, our social status, and so on.
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will host our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, August 20th from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at info@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we can accommodate you.
The topic of our next café is: Dignity
Dignity is commonly understood as a kind of moral worth or status shared by all human beings, and the basis for a variety of legal and ethical duties and rights. From prohibitions against torture to the provision of medical assistance in dying, the notion of dignity is frequently cited in discussions of how people should or should not be treated. At the same time, there remains widespread disagreement as to what, exactly, dignity means or entails. In an essay entitled “The Stupidity of Dignity,” Steven Pinker called it “a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it”; and even those who believe dignity is neither squishy, subjective, nor stupid have advanced very different accounts of what it is.
So what, exactly, is dignity? At our next Curiosity Café, moderated by Reshma Aser and Adrian Ma, we will engage in a collaborative exploration of dignity and its relevance to ongoing debates in ethics and human rights. Along the way, we will ask ourselves:
Where does dignity come from? From our rationality? From God? From our social status? From the mere fact of being human? From something else?
Is dignity unique to human beings, or can it be extended to non-human animals?
Is the vagueness of dignity a strength, rather than a weakness?
How does the concept of dignity apply in major areas of legal and ethical concern, such as end-of-life care and meat consumption?
And many other questions.
We do not know if dignity will turn out to be stupid, but we promise the discussion will make us all a little smarter.
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and "free" tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
When I Grow Up
By Minami Alguire
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist (can a millennial please explain to me why so many of us wanted to be marine biologists?). This was my resounding answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Until about the fourth grade, when I realized that becoming a marine biologist meant being good at science—and math—and that it involved very little time pretending to be a mermaid.
I have, apparently, reached the stage where children look at me and see an adult. So, now it is my turn to ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We expect the answer to be some kind of occupation, as if children yearn for labour. But I think the real question is: Why do we ask this? And: Why do we keep asking it throughout life?
The question evolves too. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” turns into “What do you want to do after you graduate?" for those who continue their education, and then later “What do you do?” at dinner parties and backyard potlucks, and, eventually, “What did you used to do?” in our retirement. These shifts echo not only the way that our relationship to work changes throughout life, but also the way that the milestones of our lives are often defined by our relationship to work. So, why do we ask these questions? For one, we make assumptions about others based on their answers. We gauge how driven they are, how smart they are, how kind they are—all based on their work. Similarly, we form narratives about ourselves based on our work, seeking validation for the type of person we are based on the work that we do. What’s noteworthy to me about the question “What do you do?” is that it implies that our time to choose our path has passed. That the growing up has finished.
Lately, I find myself wanting to identify first by what matters to me and then by how I pursue that. I find myself wanting to give myself grace. I tell myself that what I’m doing right now doesn’t have to be what I’ll be doing tomorrow. That as long as I start by grounding myself in my values and who I want to be then there’s space to explore how that shows up in my work.
When I grow up, I want to be someone who helps others. I want to be someone who acts with intention. I want to be someone who learns, someone who chases knowledge and values connection with others. When I grow up, I want to spend my time with the very cool sorts of folk who share their Tuesday nights philosophizing at a bar in a big city! And to the extent that all this aligns with my work, I’ll count myself as a lucky goose.
Arts & Culture: Poor Artist’s Cupboard by Charles Bird King (c. 1815)
By Marybel Menzies and Adrian Ma
Charles Bird King’s painting Poor Artist's Cupboard cleverly uses trompe-l’oeil to depict the scattered belongings of a fictional artist named C. Palette. The scene includes simple items like a crust of bread, a glass of water, and a journal of unpaid bills, all hinting at Palette’s financial struggles. Two calling cards add to the story: one from a stingy patron, Mrs. Skinflint, and another noting a five-dollar debt. The painting contrasts Palette’s poverty with his ambitions, symbolized by a fashionable beaver pelt hat across from a sheriff’s sale notice listing basic items like clothing and potatoes. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the books entitled Advantages of Poverty and Pleasures of Hope suggests that the artist is vacillating between acceptance of his poverty and his hope to overcome or transcend it.
Although the artwork criticizes the scarcity of art patronage and the undervaluing of artists in early 19th-century America, it also, more broadly, highlights a salient aspect of the relationship between work and identity—namely, the tension between our desire to express ourselves through our work and the practical realities that stand in the way. King’s painting suggests that, even in creative fields like art, our ambitions to make our work an extension of our identity must compete with and even be tempered by mundane considerations of money.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Marybel’s Recommendation:
“What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity” by Janna Koretz
In this piece, Koretz explores the idea of “enmeshment,” where people tie their self-worth and identity too closely to their jobs. This article resonates with me because I, personally, have experienced a loss of identity when I became overly enmeshed in my past employment. Koretz argues that when work becomes everything, it can lead to serious emotional challenges, like anxiety and depression, especially if someone faces burnout, job loss, or retirement. From this point of view, it is important for one to have a well-rounded identity. By engaging in activities and nurturing relationships outside of work, individuals can build a more stable sense of self that isn’t solely reliant on their careers. This balance helps protect against the emotional turmoil that can come with career changes or setbacks, allowing people to stay grounded in their personal values and interests.
Sofia’s Recommendation:
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
If you’ve ever, like me, felt guilty about not being productive enough, this book is a sure-fire remedy. At the heart of this philosophical commentary on modern workaholism and productivity culture is a simple message: true leisure (a spiritual state of tranquility, awe, and celebration) is both valuable for its own sake and for the sake of a healthy and sustainable culture. In it Pieper critiques modern culture for its treatment of leisure as the opposite of work—as something that we earn in exchange for our labour. He defends the state-like definition of leisure above and encourages the reader to reevaluate their relationship with work and leisure.
Featured Quote
“The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state ... Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.”
- James Allen
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