Who are you? Who am I? | Week 37

September | Family and Career | Week 37 | 9/17/2023
Where does your career fit into your life?

Work to live or live to work? The poetic juxtaposition, pontificated and professed towards the attitude of one's career. Steel-manning both sides, on one hand there are those with identarian careers like lawyers, doctors, professors, who work because their livelihood is their identity and their identity is their work. This runs contrary to those with white collar or blue collar jobs whom work to live, seeing that their job is part of an assembly line of manual or intellectual output. It makes sense, spend an exorbitant amount of time apprenticing, either academically (PhD) or physically (blacksmith), and one's identity will codevelop in conjunction with the duration allocated to said craft. Also, because of the specific and somewhat self-evident nature of the work, it is far easier to attach an identity to those careers. Doctors know medicine. Lawyers know the law. Professors know their research. What do program managers know? Marketing analysts? Finance managers? You might say, program management, marketing, finance, but anyone who's worked in those fields knows two things: [1] it is not as clear as that, and [2] it's not sexy, illustrious, or pellucid. 

So we're left with live to work or work to live, a binary with a clear distinction for signalers of virtue on either end. Maybe there's a third option, work and live. Cliché I know, but profound if given second consideration. I picture a venn diagram, with Work on the left and Live on the right, and crossover in the middle. One must work in order to support life, but life involves more than what can be monetarily supported. There's room to attach part of your identity to your skillsets, however unspecific and difficult to explain they might be, and room to attach part of your identity to your life outside work, all while recognizing the fact that in order to support yourself you need the output of your work and in order for the organization to support itself it requires the input of your work. 

One can take many attitudes to his work - necessary evil, serendipitous enjoyment, a sense of purpose - but I see my career as duty. Like Sisyphus in Camus's flagship novel, bound to roll the same stone up the same hill in perpetuity. Mine is not the story of Jesus Christ, sentenced to carry his own cross to his final destination, not the story of Socrates, killed by the society whom he brought philosophical prudence, not the story of Odysseus, the hero of his people. Mine is a story of responsibility and of duty, which can be reduced by the nihilists as purposeless - 9-5, business finance for a fortune 500, climbing the latter, fighting for promotions, for money, for influence, with little praise, little recognition, and financial success at the behest of the C Suite. But for me, as long as the answer to the following four questions is Yes, I view myself on a dutiful and purposeful track: [1] Am I good at this (better than 50%)? [2] Do I not dread the work (maybe even enjoy it from time to time)? [3] Does it support my lifestyle (personal time, financial means, etc...)? [4] Am I progressing as a person (intellectually, hard and soft skills)?