“What do you do?”
It’s usually the first question we ask after we meet someone, yet this was the question I dreaded answering the most. It was 2014 and my partner and I had just moved to the other side of the world. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a job, I wasn’t at university and I had no idea what I wanted to do or even if I would ever be employed again. This faced me with somewhat of an identity crisis and don’t get me wrong, the fact that this was a first world problem was not lost on me. My life had taken an unexpected turn of incredible opportunity and adventure. So when my partner went off to do his job, why did I feel such a sense of inner turmoil? I knew that we are more than just what we do, but never before had I had been confronted with living it.
This blog is an analysis of discourse around how we come to identify ourselves. These are the observations I made in response to my own identity crisis and from the deeper place inside myself that whispers, “why should it have been a crisis?”. Why should removal from my job, my country, academic pursuits, family and social connections have any gage on who I am? The real me had not been taken away, but almost everything my ego could grasp onto was.
As you read this I hope it provokes questions about your why rather than the what. It’s not what we do but rather the stories we construct in response to what we do and how me might feed them to our ego. Why do you do what you do? How do you talk about what you do? And more importantly, who are you regardless of what you do?
“Have you found a job yet?” My well-meaning parents would ask. It was our fourth month living in Spain and after that Skype call, I found myself sobbing as if I was their biggest disappointment. In truth my own unemployment had me telling myself that I was lazy by definition. But in reality, it’s not that I didn’t want to work, it’s just that I had always prided myself on a good work ethic and without any hard work to be done, I was a bit lost.
Generally speaking, the conversation around work hasn’t been “do you like your job?”, but rather, “have you got one?”, as if we couldn’t be validated without one. The underlying message is that if it doesn’t pay, (or if we aren’t studying so that someday it can), we aren’t doing anything productive with our lives. People genuinely used to ask me with pity in their eyes about how I would fill my days, as if I might have suffered from the most dreaded disease – boredom. This was not my experience. And from what I now know about the mind, we are never doing nothing but that we are always creating something. Beneath the embarrassment of not having anything culturally valuable to claim as my own or tell people that I personally did, what really bothered me was the fact that I knew I had more to give. And in the February of 2015, exactly 12 months after we moved to Spain, I got my answer about what that might be.
“Just have kids.”
This was the advice an ex-pat friend of mine was given when she was out of work. It doesn’t take too long to figure out that if you don’t have a certain answer about what you are doing or what you will do, people will be more than happy to answer it for you. You will be re-purposed. You will be made useful. As a society, we find it so uncomfortable to bear witness to someone who isn’t “doing something”. We are ashamed. We are embarrassed. We want to help out and rid them of their “so called” affliction.
“The ego is a derived sense of self. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, abilities, relationships, belief systems, political, racial, religious and other collective identifications. None of these is you.”
– Eckhart Tolle
I’ll be honest, it’s a challenge trying to introduce yourself for the first time without referring to some of what Tolle refers to above. To me, this illuminates how, ego driven we as a society have become. The predominant attitude these days is; if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. Has this resulted in a society where an entire aspect of our being is neglected because it cannot be measured? I am of course referring to unmeasurable aspects of the body, mind and soul trio from which human experience is derived.
My question is, have we lost the ability as a society to construct meaning from anything outside of tasks based on physical outcomes? A lifestyle based on productivity would be a bullet proof strategy if it didn’t lead to the highest rates of depression, addiction and obesity in the world. The statistics would suggest that something is missing. What is interesting is that before learning about the digestive systems, humans have no trouble understanding the need for food. Whether or not one acknowledges the existence of a soul or not, it too has needs, such as the need to connect, create, love, heal emotional wounds and to simply be.
In our division over opinions about the soul and what happens to it after death, focus is taken away from the larger realisation that we are all connected in a collective consciousness that is both experienced and influenced by each of its parts. The power of this according to evolutionists, is that consciousness as a whole is responsible for the next evolutionary step for human kind as a species. (After all, why should we assume that universe stops evolving now?)
“You are one with the totality of consciousness, you cannot separate the two.”
– Eckhart Tolle
When I go back home to visit, the world is much louder to me. As someone who isn’t fluent in Spanish, I tune out to almost all conversation that happens around me in public settings whilst in Spain. Being able to hear and understand everything once I’m home again is something I’m not used to so it can feel like an overwhelming amount of information when I am out and about.
“How are you?”
In Australia we ask this question frequently which would suggest that we placed value on the answer. “G’day, how ya goin’?”
We ask absolutely everyone with almost no intention of getting an answer longer than three words. Are we really too busy for a longer answer? Don’t we all crave more emotional intimacy? Don’t we all want to be seen and truly heard? How many opportunities for emotional intimacy do we miss under the rulership of our tyrannical ego’s? It is the ego after all that says, “Hurry up you don’t have time for this.” Speaking for myself, my ego is boring and kind of an ass. Who wants to hang out in anyone’s head all day telling them that they aren’t good enough and that they need to justify their existence somehow?
“I’ve been flat out lately.”
This is a common response to “how are you?”. People talk about being busy as if that was some indicator of status or greater good at work. Yet, hurriedness and success are not synonymous, just as being busy does not always lead to success. Nor does someone telling you about being busy indicate with accuracy, anything about their internal being or help build a meaningful connection.
In Spain, we quickly noticed that it was inappropriate to ask someone how they were if you didn’t know them. “Hola” will suffice. “Hola, que tal?”, will have a stranger searching your face and trying to see if they recognise you. The underlying cultural message here is that you share how you are with people who you know, and this need not occur in private or outside of work hours. If you happen to be in a check-out que in Europe and the check-out chick has a friend in line ahead of you, settle in because you will be there a while.
As I made friends in my new home, among ex-pat communities, I quickly noticed that the question of occupation was not the first thing people ask about you. Usually it’s not even a question you ask during the first time you meet. It was refreshing. Occupation is discussed as either something people do as a passion project, or a means to a way of life. The focus is on the living and experiencing life itself outside of our obligations.
Perhaps the more surprising thing is that this phenomenon extends farther than privileged ex-pat cohorts. Whilst I am sure there are exceptions to the rule, from my observations, Spanish people work to live. On Sundays the streets, mountains, restaurants and parks are crawling with families. On Sundays the shops in Barcelona are closed and as one of the world’s major cities, it’s not as if they don’t have the revenue to keep them open. Could it be that they value something else more than money?
“Carl Jung tells in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Native American Chief who pointed out to him that in his perception, most white people have tense faces, staring eyes and a cruel demeanour. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don’t know what they want. We think they’re mad.”
– Eckhart Tolle
Moving countries enabled me to see things with fresh eyes. It’s not to say that I am separate from cultural norms but just that I am conscious of it going on around me, much like fish who has been out of water long enough to know that it previously took it’s water-based environment fore granted. I am conscious that the culture I was brought up in, is one way of life, but certainly not the only way of life and certainly not one that serves all those who lived it.
Secondly, it opened up my eyes to how all-encompassing and brainwashing culture can be. When you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up, I bet none of them have ever said that their dream was to work 9-5 in an office for someone else and spend more time with their “work-wife” than their actual wife. As an adult, it can be difficult to think back to what you dreamt of doing as a child because many of us are quickly told that those dreams are unrealistic.
It’s no mistake that as a society we learn to dream smaller; the current system wouldn’t survive without the death of a few million dreams. We go to school in an education system that, for the most part, has not changed in the last century, despite the evolution of our workforce and finds fault or in some cases pathologizes children who cannot fit into the narrow range of disciplines it has to offer. We are encouraged to compete rather than create, and are indoctrinated with ideas about scarcity rather than the abundance of the universe we live in. We are taught that life isn’t fair and that you can’t always get what you want. We are sold the lie that democracy is the fairest option. But actually, the synergistic democracy as tested by Barbara Marx Hubbard offers a model of governance whereby (as ridiculously simple as it sounds) everyone’s needs are taken care of when we work together, rather addressing the needs of the majority only.
When I start to think about all the systems in place that cause us to swallow our voices and our dreams to fit in, I hear Glennon Doyle’s words ringing in my ears.
“Maybe imagination is not the place we go to, to escape reality, imagination is the place we go to, in order to discover our truest reality that we were meant to bring into the world.”
– Glennon Doyle
Yes, if we all followed our dreams the world as we know it would cease to exist, but deep down, don’t we all want that? Don’t we all want to follow our dreams? Don’t we want to beat the issues we face on a societal and international scale that are supported by the current systems?
The American dream used to be to own your own home and for some people maybe it still is, but for many of us, it isn’t. For many of us, we don’t want to just stay comfortable, we want to actively pursue living. In the words of a friend of mine who quit her well-paying job to move country and pursue her passion, “My dream isn’t to work hard so that at the end of the day I can buy a house. And I don’t want to enter into the cycle of fighting for a promotion, just so I can buy a bigger house that I will need to keep working for the rest of my life to pay off.”
On a conscious level, we will only ever be what we are in this moment. And for many people I suspect, success isn’t about anything you could collect, materially, that might help you convince your ego of some sort of status. For many people I think success is about buying back your moments so that you can occupy each of them. For many of us, success is a simple life so that in each of our “nows”, we aren’t chasing, owing, multi-tasking or stressing but rather; creating, loving, experiencing and inhabiting.
“When your deeper sense of self is derived from being, when you are free of becoming as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“What do you do?”
I find myself asking people the same thing when I meet them for the first time. I hear it coming out of my mouth and I die a little bit inside. It’s not that I want to rank people by some sort of status but I couldn’t help but notice during my undergrad that each field of study attracted a certain type of personality. When I ask people what they do, it’s a quick glance into their interests. It gives me a reference about who they might be so I can ask about that next. I suspect that most people are just trying to do the same thing when they ask me that question.
On the odd occasion, when I ask that question and it is met with hesitation, that is usually when I find myself having a truly intimate conversation that connects us both on a deeper level than someone who launches into talk about status and other derivatives of the ego. And there we are, two people connecting as human beings. As equals. It’s a wonderful thing. From now on, I think I’ll try to ask people about their passions instead of what they do. And who knows, maybe after a few years of asking, someone might be able to explain to the native Americans what white people want. I suspect that as a collective, what we want isn’t so different.