Americans love to ask people 'what do you do'? It's a habit we should break
|
Version 0 of 1. If you've ever spoken with an American, likely one of the first questions they asked you was "what do you do?" In the US, we're obsessed with people's jobs. We want to know all about it. We insist that you tell us what "career tribe" you're in – white collar, blue collar or new high-techy collar. What's your exact title? How do you spend your day? Are you someone speaks the language of law, tech, finance, media, marketing, education, military, government, the arts, etc? Basically, we would like everyone to walk around with their business card attached to their forehead, but since that's a bit over-the-top, we try to glean the same information by asking questions – often lots of them – about your work. Most of us mean well when we ask these questions. We're trying to get to know you, and in our country, your career is a major part of who you are. Until it isn't. How do you define yourself when you don't have a job – or, at least, you don't have the one you want? The US, like many countries, is still in an economic funk. Friday's unemployment figures reiterated just how gloomy it is for many people. The economic situation is also posing a cultural problem for Americans: how do we adopt to a world where people aren't living for their jobs? "People in their 20s and 30s are starting to give up on work as a primary way to center or ground their identity. You can't define yourself by work when you don't know if you're going to be employed," says Dr Jennifer Silva, a sociologist and author of Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. She did in depth interviews with a hundred Millennials to try to understand how they are shaping their lives in this environment. One question she asked as part of her research was the simple: "who are you?" Three-quarters of the young adults she spoke with didn't mention work at all in their response. Instead, they would emphasize what Dr Silva calls "narratives of personal growth" such as feeling they had matured in a relationship with a relative or lover or had some sort of self-discovery. It's a remarkable shift in America's mentality. The younger generation isn't nearly as fixated on jobs for the obvious reason that they have a much harder time finding stable employment. Instead, they are trying to find a different kind of meaning in their lives. This phenomenon isn't exclusive to young people. At the same time that they struggle to find jobs, the Baby Boomer generation is starting to retire. This, too, is dramatically re-shaping America's attitudes about work as people who had long careers are deciding enough is enough or being forced out. They also have to come up with a new identity that isn't all about a job. "A lot of people are asking this question: what is my purpose in life post-retirement? It's no longer about careers, but opportunities," says Rabbi Levi Brackman. He's conducting a study of people who are 55+ to help them figure out their "next stage purpose" (you can still participate in the study here). However, one of the most surprising things he's found so far is just how many people still want some kind of career, even in "retirement". It's ingrained in the Baby Boomer generation to want to work and to think of work as a huge part of defining who you are. The problem is there aren't nearly enough jobs for people – young or more mature – who want to work. I've been keeping an eye on what's known as the labor force participation rate. It's a measure of how many adult Americans are working. For much of the halcyon days of the 1980s and 1990s, 65 to 67% of us had jobs. Now we can't seem to get that figure higher than 63%. That might not seem like a large drop, but let me put it another way: if the US had a 67% labor force participation rate today, about 10 million more people would be working. The even scarier part of this is that forecasters don't think things are going to improve much for those who have dropped out of the labor force. The jobs aren't coming back fast enough, and the ones that are back aren't exactly ones that make people excited to talk about what they do. Hedrick Smith, author of Who Stole the American Dream?, put it this way: One of the reasons labor force participation was so high in the 1990s was people saw jobs were available and the pay was going up. Now you see exactly the opposite. The median family income is down, and the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their income go down since 2002. People are beginning to ask: what's the point of work? What's the point of trying to get ahead when even those who are working hard are falling behind? These are questions Americans aren't used to asking. Few understand these shifts in the American economy and work mentality better than Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union. She is an expert in the "gig economy", the notion that people have to piece together a lot of different jobs to get by. She points out that 42 million Americans – about 30% of the workforce – can be classified as "independent", meaning they're freelancers or self-employed. "It's becoming a part of almost everyone's life and career now, whether it's in between jobs or supplementing or freelancing is your career," she says. Uncertainty abounds about the next pay check, and on a cultural level, fewer people are that "company man" or "union woman" like before. Now you have multiple identities because you're often working on several different gigs each year and trying to pitch for more projects on top of that. As Horowitz explains: Post World War Two, it was worth sticking in a job that had benefits and paid the mortgage and gave retirement benefits, but those jobs are few and far between. So people are saying, what is the new reality? The Freelancers Union just launched what they're calling the Quiet Revolution for people who want an entirely different economic model where you are encouraged to use credit unions and food co-ops as a better way to make your money go further, help employ more people and get a new sense of identity. Americans simply aren't working at the levels they used to, and it's creating economic issues and cultural ones. Instead of asking what do you do, perhaps the question to pose is what keeps you busy? I've found it often makes people think beyond just their job – or lack thereof. |