A Profession Is Not the Whole Biography

Society meets a person with the question “what do you do” and quickly takes the answer for a description of the personality. A profession really does change how you see things and what you do, but it is not obliged to become the whole biography.

A professional setting creates a language, habits and a way of seeing the world. A lawyer notices wording, an engineer causal chains, a doctor symptoms, a salesman a possible deal.

This is useful at work and at times exhausting at home.

It gets dangerous when a person can only answer the question “who am I?” with a job title. Losing the job then becomes not only a financial problem but the disappearance of a personality.

It helps to keep areas where professional standing is not the main thing:

• relationships;
• interests;
• the body;
• civic life;
• making things;
• ordinary domestic skills.

This does not reduce dedication to the work. On the contrary, it gives you a point from which its limits are visible.

A profession also changes. A person can leave an industry, learn a new role, work temporarily below his qualifications or use an old skill in an unexpected way.

A career trajectory rarely looks like a ladder. More often it is a building with corridors, extensions and one door the architect for some reason placed behind a cupboard.

What matters is not keeping an immaculate line on a CV but accumulating the ability to solve an ever wider or deeper class of problems.

The bond is conveniently tested on holiday. Someone whose profession occupies part of his life starts doing something else by the third day. Someone whose profession occupies all of it checks his email by the third day, because without incoming tasks it is unclear what to do with the time. Redundancy and retirement run the same test, only with no return ticket: that is why the first year after leaving is harder than the financial arithmetic suggests.

Spare areas are cheaper to acquire while they are not needed and look like an optional waste of evenings. Once the job title has gone, interests and relationships have to be invented from scratch, and in the worst possible condition.