Why do we conflate our work with our identity?

Work's an important part of life, but work is just one element within our greater life

Excerpt: " If you took away your Slack status, your email signature, or your LinkedIn profile, how would you define yourself? In other words, do you know who you are without your career?

Whenever I meet someone new, the details of my job tend to crop up in the first few minutes. And likewise, if I’m stumped for things to ask a new acquaintance, ‘what do you do for work?’ is always a firm first contender.

It’s always bothered me that we find it so difficult to separate ourselves from our work. Why do we conflate careers (ones that so many of us spend hours moaning about) with our sense of who we are as human beings?

I understand that work is a place we’ll end up spending most of our lives in – a depressing but unavoidably true fact of life. But don’t we feed the capitalist machine enough that we can’t find anything more interesting to say about ourselves?

Work-as-identity isn’t a new phenomenon, but it upholds the perception that our worth is defined by our labour. And that’s a dangerous thing, especially when so many of us feel unfulfilled at work, or are struggling to find any at all.

The other issue is that work is ultimately a means of earning money (sorry, but we’re not turning up to an office five days a week to sing Kumbaya and braid each other’s hair). In that vein, when we conflate our jobs with our identities, we’re also placing a monetary value on who we are.