What do you do?
A JOB TITLE that is easy to explain, like the owner and CEO even of an obscure company dealing with fire extinguishers, satisfies the curiosity of a querying acquaintance. But titles today are getting more complicated and harder to describe. That’s why status symbols are sought, requiring no further elaboration.
When asked what we do, we usually provide a job description, not necessarily the position printed on our calling card. Seldom do we answer that question with activities we do on weekends or at our leisure. (I attend to my bonsai garden at home.)
What we enjoy doing is not always related to our job, or what we do to meet our daily expenses, although the latter helps to support the former. A job with its deliverables, quotas, difficult clients, and bossy superiors, can even be a source of anxiety and pain. And yet it’s something we do again and again.
Of course, if one doesn’t currently have a job, the question of what one is doing becomes problematic. It can result in a short response — I retired last year. Worse, if a person is not yet of retireable age and is simply “between jobs,” how does he answer the question? (Right now, I’m working from home.)
Occupations (as opposed to preoccupations) are limited to activities that are compensated, never mind if adequately. Activities that may absorb us like conversations with friends, meditations on stoic philosophy, or attention to hobbies, are seldom used to describe what we do.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince, published in 1943, has become a small cult work for looking at life differently: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” The Little Prince from Asteroid B-612 may well wonder how a person can possibly be defined only by his job and how much money he makes, rather than whether he wears a hat or collects butterflies. The portrayal of a businessman as somebody who counts stars and claims them as his own gives a context of what the Little Prince thinks of the activity of making money.
Leisure, as a worthwhile activity that we do, may be a clearer way to define us and what we consider important. Anyone not hurrying off to a business meeting but to an art gallery or museum must have another kind of priority that absorbs him.
Ideally what we do for a living is enjoyable enough to spend time and effort on. The workplace can offer recognition and promoting the values one espouses. Work and play can be combined to promote a healthy life balance.
Industrialization and the dominance of economic activity (measured in the nation’s GDP) has sanctified work as a means for self-actualization, power, status, and measuring one’s contribution to the common good.
In contemporary thinking, the pursuit of leisure as a goal in itself seems too self-indulgent, permissible only upon retirement. But here again, it is one’s declining contribution and productivity that leads to the end of work, rather than the beginning of leisure. Retirement pay is intended to finance the non-productive and uncompensated joblessness, not to promote the enjoyment of leisure.
Why is ancient Greece remembered not for its workers who may have toiled to build the Parthenon but only for the product of their efforts? If any personalities survive history and are remembered for what we would now consider a leisure activity, it is the Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who are remembered for ideas that shaped our humanitarian view of life. Was it their leisure activity which dealt with the meaning of life that defined what they did? Was that work as we know it? Did they get compensated for their aphorisms? And did they have a day job that enabled them to philosophize?
Work and its demands should not define what we are, or even what we do. It is our legacy and maybe the eulogies that follow us that in the end define who we are… and what we used to do for others.
Tony Samson is chairman and CEO of TOUCH xda
