You Are Not Your Job
On being judged too much based on how we support ourselves - positively or negatively
During the time before I began my teaching career, but after I had tried a couple of things after law school and started rethinking working as a lawyer, I worked as a bike messenger for a number of months. I also worked as a waiter for a while, but preferred being out on my bike (especially when the weather was good…). I learned during that time something that I already knew somewhat abstractly, but it became very concrete and personal: how much people are judged according to their job.
This is probably true to varying degrees depending on the local culture. My last piece on meritocracy is relevant here, as the more the particular place buys into the ideology of meritocracy, the greater will be the strength of judgment, positive and negative, based on where one’s job slots into the meritocratic hierarchy. The Washington, DC area where I was living and working is likely to be among the most thoroughly pervaded by this ideology (as are similar areas with disproportionately large numbers of highly educated, upper-middle class members of the professional-managerial class). The further one gets from this type of demographic, the less prominent this kind of judgment and identifying of people with their job/career seems to be. In fact, at the farthest away from the upper-class DC culture, job matters much less than family/community/church, etc. as far as one’s identity and value as a person are concerned (this distance is cultural not physical, as there are communities in the DC area extremely far from the PMC milieu).
The people who worked as bike couriers that I met in the course of my time doing it were an extremely diverse group. I remember one guy who had a masters degree in biology, and he and his wife had just moved to DC from having worked as hiking tour guides at the Grand Canyon. They were interesting people, wanting to see and live in different places while supporting themselves in some outdoor, active way in each. Others were students in between learning stints, trying to save up money for the next semester. Some had been (and even were still) involved in criminal ways of earning money, but were doing this while looking for the next move. The age range was from late teens to forties (although I saw some couriers in the streets who looked even older), but it was mostly young, and mostly male, even as the female numbers were growing. Just as with my law school colleagues, there were some fellow workers I found interesting and enjoyable to be around and talk to, and others not so much.
It was striking to me at first how rudely I was often treated while doing the job, so that the exceptions became pleasingly notable. But it wasn’t just people being curt for no reason, as it also was being talked to as if I were stupid, as if the assumption was that anyone doing such a job couldn’t be much of a thinker. Some of the regular clients of the company I worked for came to know I had a law degree (because the owner liked to tell law firms he was courting as clients that they could have a courier with a law degree handle the filing of their official legal documents with the proper government offices, etc.), and I actually noticed better treatment at those firms from the folks in their offices.
Once though, I had a lawyer personally hand me a package to deliver because the secretary in the office was already gone for the day. It had the address on it, which I had already gotten from my dispatcher - 2100 M St NW (or something similar). The lawyer proceeded to instruct me that I could find this building at the corner of 21st and M streets! By this time, I could immediately picture not only the exact place on the street and which side it was on of most of the addresses in the downtown area, but also many of the buildings and their lobbies, what shortcut alleys or one-way streets I could use to get there, what procedures were required to get in, where I could most easily lock up my bike quickly, etc., but this guy is trying to explain to me where 2100 M St is. He’s wearing a suit and working as a lawyer, while I’m an ignorant bike courier, so he must be much more knowledgeable about everything than I can possibly be - this is how it felt.
I also remember going to social events and meeting people, where of course the first question is always “so what do you do?” After getting a very quick cold shoulder a number of times when saying I was a bike messenger, I sometimes experimented with saying I had recently graduated from law school and was exploring different possibilities, which played much better. Other times, however, I preferred starting with the bike courier answer, as a kind of test, given that a few times I got more neutral or even positive (“oh, that’s interesting - what is that like?”) kinds of responses which told me something important about the person, and led to some good conversations. On the occasional after work happy hour meetup with some fellow couriers, we often experienced looks of disapproval and avoidance by all the professional-looking types in their nice office clothes, while we were in the eclectic mix of outfits and looks of bike couriers, from clean-cut athletic cycling lycra, to denim cut-offs, dreadlocks, the whole range of possible ways to be comfortable on the bike and in one’s own skin. It was palpable what pariahs we were in the place by how rare it was that any of the office-job looking people would even speak with any of us.
All of the above, and more I probably can’t remember, brought home to me just how wrong it was to treat people as if their job is what makes them who they are. It’s telling that we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, not what kind of job they want to do. If we really meant this, I would hope the answer we would be looking for would be “a kind and generous person” or “a good citizen and community member” and not “a doctor” or “a corporate executive”. It’s okay for people to want a career that gives them a sense of meaning. But must everyone look to their jobs for this? It is also perfectly fine to work in order to just make a living, and find greater sources of meaning in one's hobbies, community and family life, etc. outside of work, or some combination of the two approaches.
I remember visiting my sister when she was living and working in Italy, and eating at her favorite local restaurant multiple times. I was struck by the professionalism and pride in his work of the waiter who served us almost every time we were there. It made me think of all the people in the U.S. who are actors, students, or some other thing aspirationally while working as waiters to support themselves temporarily, as if they are refusing to identify as a waiter, much less take any pride in how well they do it. It would imply they’re losers, or they’d be doing something “better” (even if it’s something much worse for humanity, like a defense contractor or marketer to children) as in higher up the competitive hierarchy of meritocracy.1 Even as a high school teacher, I can recall the disappointment of a couple of relatives who couldn’t believe I would get away from the professional lawyer track to voluntarily join the lower public school teacher track. Then, when I was a teacher, these same relatives couldn’t believe I had no interest in “moving up” the public school track to become an administrator, even though that would have also meant giving up almost all the things I enjoyed doing as a teacher.
All these things demonstrate to me that we have a very weird, dysfunctional system that devalues the dignity of huge numbers, the vast majority, of people who do the necessary work of our society (the “essential workers” we were briefly cheering), in order to justify the elevation to positions of respect, authority, and high income of a few select professions, with no regard to whether those so elevated help or harm the society’s well-being. There is little wonder so many are dissatisfied with such a system.
The one exception I can think of to the basic idea of not judging someone based on their work is the Buddhist idea of Right Livelihood: it does seem better to do work that at least does no harm to people. In this sense being a waiter is far better than being a military contractor company CEO or someone who markets sugary cereals to children.
Thank you for sharing, Mr. Scharff! I could not agree more.