The story on work and identity is from the ABC.
“Who are you outside of your work? Does the answer come quickly — amateur pickleball player, community choir leader, model train enthusiast?
Or are you struggling to come up with something that feels as substantial as what you do for a living?
If it’s the latter, how about another question? How do you nurture your non-work self?
When I asked Life Matters listeners that question, their responses were varied.
One caller reflected on the different reactions he gets depending on whether he introduces himself as a gardener (his day job) or as a musician (his passion).
Another said her professional identities as a high school teacher and touring musician felt at odds with each other.
And one caller told me he hadn’t realised how central work was to his identity until the pandemic hit and things fell apart.
The centrality of work in our lives can’t be denied, especially when Australians are working longer hours than ever before. But short of quitting our jobs, how do we shift the balance?
Simone Stolzoff is a labour reporter whose years of covering the world of work, led him to investigate how we got to this point — and also to some personal realisations.
“Like many people in my generation, I am a millennial, and I was raised with this idea that I could do whatever I wanted when I grew up. And that if I hadn’t found my dream job, I should just keep searching, keep looking,” he told me on Life Matters.
Mr Stolzoff’s book, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work, examines how identity and self-worth became entangled with what we do for a living, and how we can change that.
He uses the term ‘workism’ — coined by journalist Derek Thompson — to describe a phenomenon of “looking to work not just for a pay cheque, but also a means of transcendence, self-actualisation, community belonging, identity”.
With burnout at unprecedented levels who doesn’t dream of stepping away from it all and embracing a career break. But can it solve the problem?
And while this rings true at a gut level, there are many downsides to being a workist, he says.
First, “Your job might not always be there, so if you are attaching your identity solely to your job title, it might be a risky proposition.”
Second, “When we’re always expecting our job to be perfect or our job to be a dream, it creates a lot of room for potential disappointment underneath it.”
“And third, which is the … angle that I’m most passionate about, is that we’re all more than just workers. We are neighbours and friends and citizens.”
“Say you want to invest in your relationships. Can you carve out time to go on a weekly walk with your best friend?” he asks. “Say that you want to learn a new instrument. Maybe it’s just 10 minutes practising the piano after dinner.
“They don’t have to be these grand gestures. I think they’re just these little ways in which we can … treat these identities sort of like plants, give them all a little water, give them all a little sunlight, a little energy to grow.”
In my personal quest to develop my non-work self, I’ve picked up — and dropped — a few hobby attempts.
Emma Dickeson says her “school night” adventures are about devoting time and attention to the things that energise you.
“There are a couple of questions that I’d ask. One would be, why did you choose to do the role, the job, that you do? Because the things that drew you to that work exist outside of the work,” she says.
“And then the second is, what do you enjoy? When you’re outside of the workplace, what do you do?”
Whether it’s watching your favourite TV show or playing sports, Ms Namwinga says thinking about the recurring themes and appeal of existing interests can help light the way to filling out your non-work identity.
“The process of finding yourself is that there’s a journey — we’re constantly curating who we are, and it’s not really that there’s an end product that we’re trying to get to. It’s figuring out who we become along the way,” she says.
Another piece of the puzzle is reframing the place of work in our lives.
“It might sound a bit crass because we’re so often told that work should be a calling or a vocation, but I actually think that framing it as an economic contract can be incredibly empowering both for employers and employees,” Mr Stolzoff says.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with identifying with what you do for work, so long as it’s not the sole identity in your life,” he says.