3 ms·

If you only take one thing from this article, let it be this line: My work is only part of my identity. I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer,

If you only take one thing from this article, let it be this line: My work is only part of my identity. I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity. I've never let work be more than the tiniest facet of my existence that provides the resources necessary to well... not die. I understand this isn't the easiest thing for most people - tribalism and pack identity is a powerful thing. It's why we have entires throngs of people who follow celebrities / twitch streamers / influencers / voice actors / etc. It's why things like the "reality distortion field" around Steve Jobs exists. And well, it's why when people suddenly find themselves let go from a job, it apparently affects them in a powerfully and I would argue irrationally emotional way. In a way, these things have sort of acted as a de-facto substitute for more traditional tribalism (patriotism, national pride, etc) for a lot of Gen Z / Millennials. Shrugs. Or maybe this is just a personal observation. Note: Just to be fair, I think her breakdown was FAR FAR more understandable than many people who are let go given that: Her job provided health insurance for her family She has kids who depended on her Needing surgery

SR2Z 3y ago
IMO it's OK for work to be a big part of your identity. People should strive to achieve things professionally; it's a very human thing to master a craft for a living. But, to be fair, work != your specific company. It's stupid to tie your identity to the people hiring you.
- famahar 3y ago
  In University the ultimate goal of almost every Comp Sci student was to work at a FAANG (or whatever it's called). Nothing else mattered. Students walked around with Google and Amazon t-shirts and Stickers. So much of University your identity was tied to working for big tech. Cult like when I look back.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I walked around my university with whatever shirt was given to me for free, so long as it was comfortable enough. Not much has changed in that regard as an adult in tech.
- _kb 3y ago
  I think the important detail is it's OK for it to form part of your identity, but it's also ok for it to not be. If you spend a large part of your waking hours working on something enjoyable, absolutely embrace that. Conversely, if your work is drudgerous but you enjoy the simple things in life - like food and shelter - and it provides that then maybe some separation of identity is a good option too.
- mcbutterbunz 3y ago
  I also might argue that the degree to which it is your identity will change through your life. Certainly in my 20s I had less of an idea of who I was so my value to society was rooted in how much I was paid or my perceived importance. I’ve seen as I age that my work has become less a part of my identity, but definitely greater than zero. I’ll check back in a decade and give an update :)
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  > People should strive to achieve things professionally; it's a very human thing to master a craft for a living. These two concepts may seem related but they often aren't.
timeagain 3y ago
This is a strategy, but your results may vary. After a few years meditating on how much of my psychic energy I could give to my work, I found that programming for work was impossible. Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts of work clouding my brain at all hours of the day. On the other hand, doing my job poorly is an even worse option. I don’t think I could live with myself if I brought apathy to work, since I do it more than anything else. So as a result I don’t program anymore. Knocking your ego down to a reasonable size is nice, but it probably also means not making very much money.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  > Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts or work clouding my brain at all hours of the day. I often think about that Isabel Fall attack helicopter story [1], where pilots of the AH-70 Apache Mystics must have their brains rewired to include the helicopter as part of their gender, so that they'll fly by intuition. Otherwise they wouldn't be good enough to fly. I thought this was an interesting premise already, but now I wonder how much of my programming skill is really ego. How much of my code takes up space in my brain where gender or religion or joi de vivre or something was supposed to be stored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
- titanomachy 3y ago
  Damn. This is an interesting perspective. I certainly agree about the apathy part. I can’t sustain mediocre or poor performance for long without having it spill into other areas of my life. As for the impossibility of compartmentalizing software work… I hope you’re wrong. But my experience doesn’t exactly contradict you. Whenever I’ve felt good at my job it’s also been quite all-consuming.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
> these things have sort of acted as a de-facto substitute for more traditional tribalism (patriotism, national pride, etc) for a lot of Gen Z / Millennials. In 1963, Kurt Vonnegut called it a _granfalloon_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Bokononism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Bokononism - _karass_ – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident. - _granfalloon_ – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers." Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common. They really share little more than a name.
eru 3y ago
> I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity. You are probably going too far. You are spending a reasonable fraction of your waking life at your career. So you can make it a reasonable fraction of your identity.
- phlipski 3y ago
  YOU (in the non-personal sense) may make your job an important part of your identity. But I would ask you to ask yourself the following questions - "What do your close friends do for a living? Does what they do for a living matter to YOU? Does what they do for a living in any way affect your relationship?" I ask this as a thought experiment because I personally believe that we THINK people care about our jobs more than they really do. True friendship should (and does) transcend "jobs". Maybe I'm an outlier - but I believe most folks just want to have a good time with their friends - specific careers be damned!
  - p1esk 3y ago
    I might not care about what my friends do for a living (I do though), but I definitely care a lot about what I do for a living.
    - kodejka 3y ago
      I think that attitude also changes when you lose a job, especially at some FAANG. When you work for FAANG everyone you ever knew, want to be your friends all of a sudden. When you are laid off, then they don't want anymore. :) In a way, works like a filter - true friends stays, but you discover how little of them you have (and that's perfectly normal).
      - eru 3y ago
        I worked for Google for a while (2014-2017), and I did not share the experience you describe. Granted having Google on the CV looks good to recruiters, but my friends didn't care that much.
3abiton 3y ago
To piggyback on your point, some people like to be exploited, and I met so many hard working people who never realized the value of their work and how important they were to their company, maybe just blinded by the culture, but were severely underpaid.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  The desire for meaning through their work is used against a worker. https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-exploitation https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e... > The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description. > The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered. > In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom. Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/
renewiltord 3y ago
Something I've noticed is that some people protest too much. The remote engineer who insists that in-person work is for people who can't find friends. The light worker who insists that people who like working have no better meaning in their life. The blue collar worker who says knowledge workers don't have basic life skills. It's just obvious there's a chip on their shoulder. By default, no one cares about these things. One of my friends cares most about her family, her husband cares about that but work is a much stronger part of his identity. Many of my smartest friends work remotely very successfully. Others like me, just as smart, work in person well. Our friends and family who work in restaurants and factories and driving buses are often happy, though some are not. And more of the knowledge workers are happy because they're wealthier but some are unhappy regardless. But the most striking thing is the difference between the ones who are choosing their path and secure vs. the ones who show other signs of insecurity: it's the statement of their choices as being their own without the obligatory put down of the other. This mechanism of justifying their choices. Insecurity pervades. The person choosing other than them is always flawed in some way they are not. The other's choices alloyed by some sin.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
I hear this argument and I should point out that it can hurt people saying something like that. I understand where you are coming from and I disagree strongly with your statement. Around age 12 I discovered software development and became my greatest passion. It helped me escape MMORPG addiction and being happy (have a family, buy a home, pursue my hobbies). If I lost my job I would be sad, no doubt, but I would still be me, a passionate software developer. If you told me I wouldn't be able to write code anymore because of some illness, I would be in a very bad spot, way worse than if I lost my job. My profession is part of my identity in a strong way, my job is business (although I do love the place I work at).
- manmal 3y ago
  And parent is right that it’s not ideal to have your eggs put in one basket like this.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
    You don't get to choose what you are passionate about, so this comment doesn't really help im any way
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
    I should point out that also my eggs are not in one basket. My passion for board games, videogames, my children and my wife cover everything else, but if my job wasn't software development, I would include it in some way in my life
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I started programming in 6th grade in assembly on Apple //e in 1986. By the time o graduated from college in 1996, I programmed as a hobbyist in assembly on four architectures - 65C02, 68K, PPC and x86. The last time I programmed as a hobbyist was 1996. For the next 15 years my hobby was teaching fitness classes, running and lifting weights. I got married in 2012 and became a father to a 9 and 14 year old. When the youngest graduated in 2020 and a year after Covid lifted, my wife and flew across the US from October 2022 to October 2023 visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely, Software development supports my passions.
begueradj 3y ago
There is what we call: "Occupational identity": https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_29 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_...
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
It's not a tribalism thing. My work is how I directly make the world a much richer place than it would be without me - otherwise I wouldn't be able to skim off some percentage of that value as a salary/income. That's something to be tremendously and persistently proud of, no matter who you are or what you're doing. Besides: If your one and only goal with work really is "do as little as possible to not die", this is easily accomplished in the modern world by working for a year or two in the US and then moving to, e.g. rural Nepal to live off $1-2000 a year for about 3 or 4 decades, zero work required. Indeed the "4% rule" in FIRE circles says this should be permanently sustainable with savings of only about $20-40,000. (Arguments like "but what happens when you get older" willfully ignore the fact thathaving a year of prime healthy adulthood totally free is almost certainly worth quite a bit more than having a year of elderly, ill adulthood "free" in a nursing home.) Yet we almost never see people do that.
- lukan 3y ago
  "Yet we almost never see people do that." There are plenty of people doing that (until their funds run out, which always happens faster than planned). "My work is how I directly make the world a much richer place than it would be without me " And richer in real ressources? Numbers of money are a arbitary thing and do not necessary relate, if they actually make the world a better place.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    If there really were plenty of serious, committed people doing that, but washing out because they just can't stop massively overspending when they get to Namibia etc, why don't they just buy an annuity? (How annuities work, roughly: Say you have $100,000 in that nest egg. I'm sure you could find some financial firm willing to take it off your hands today and give you $4,000 per year for 50 years, and maybe even in perpetuity. That's because $100k sitting around in their index funds will likely have ballooned to $1m+ over that timeframe, whereas the payout to you would be a mere $200k.) The fact such annuities aren't very common suggests your phantom population isn't either.
    - 3y ago
DinaCoder99 3y ago
> I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity. This is not an easy task when many (most?) adults spend the majority of their waking hours either working or going to and from work.

SR2Z 3y ago

IMO it's OK for work to be a big part of your identity. People should strive to achieve things professionally; it's a very human thing to master a craft for a living. But, to be fair, work != your specific company. It's stupid to tie your identity to the people hiring you.

famahar 3y ago
In University the ultimate goal of almost every Comp Sci student was to work at a FAANG (or whatever it's called). Nothing else mattered. Students walked around with Google and Amazon t-shirts and Stickers. So much of University your identity was tied to working for big tech. Cult like when I look back.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I walked around my university with whatever shirt was given to me for free, so long as it was comfortable enough. Not much has changed in that regard as an adult in tech.
_kb 3y ago
I think the important detail is it's OK for it to form part of your identity, but it's also ok for it to not be. If you spend a large part of your waking hours working on something enjoyable, absolutely embrace that. Conversely, if your work is drudgerous but you enjoy the simple things in life - like food and shelter - and it provides that then maybe some separation of identity is a good option too.
mcbutterbunz 3y ago
I also might argue that the degree to which it is your identity will change through your life. Certainly in my 20s I had less of an idea of who I was so my value to society was rooted in how much I was paid or my perceived importance. I’ve seen as I age that my work has become less a part of my identity, but definitely greater than zero. I’ll check back in a decade and give an update :)
DinaCoder99 3y ago
> People should strive to achieve things professionally; it's a very human thing to master a craft for a living. These two concepts may seem related but they often aren't.

timeagain 3y ago

This is a strategy, but your results may vary. After a few years meditating on how much of my psychic energy I could give to my work, I found that programming for work was impossible. Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts of work clouding my brain at all hours of the day. On the other hand, doing my job poorly is an even worse option. I don’t think I could live with myself if I brought apathy to work, since I do it more than anything else. So as a result I don’t program anymore. Knocking your ego down to a reasonable size is nice, but it probably also means not making very much money.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
> Understanding systems enough to update them, debugging, and keeping up with the ecosystem are very hard work. For me there’s no way to do it well without thoughts or work clouding my brain at all hours of the day. I often think about that Isabel Fall attack helicopter story [1], where pilots of the AH-70 Apache Mystics must have their brains rewired to include the helicopter as part of their gender, so that they'll fly by intuition. Otherwise they wouldn't be good enough to fly. I thought this was an interesting premise already, but now I wonder how much of my programming skill is really ego. How much of my code takes up space in my brain where gender or religion or joi de vivre or something was supposed to be stored. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Atta...
titanomachy 3y ago
Damn. This is an interesting perspective. I certainly agree about the apathy part. I can’t sustain mediocre or poor performance for long without having it spill into other areas of my life. As for the impossibility of compartmentalizing software work… I hope you’re wrong. But my experience doesn’t exactly contradict you. Whenever I’ve felt good at my job it’s also been quite all-consuming.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago

> these things have sort of acted as a de-facto substitute for more traditional tribalism (patriotism, national pride, etc) for a lot of Gen Z / Millennials. In 1963, Kurt Vonnegut called it a _granfalloon_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Bokononism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Bokononism - _karass_ – A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident. - _granfalloon_ – a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers." Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common. They really share little more than a name.

eru 3y ago

> I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity. You are probably going too far. You are spending a reasonable fraction of your waking life at your career. So you can make it a reasonable fraction of your identity.

phlipski 3y ago
YOU (in the non-personal sense) may make your job an important part of your identity. But I would ask you to ask yourself the following questions - "What do your close friends do for a living? Does what they do for a living matter to YOU? Does what they do for a living in any way affect your relationship?" I ask this as a thought experiment because I personally believe that we THINK people care about our jobs more than they really do. True friendship should (and does) transcend "jobs". Maybe I'm an outlier - but I believe most folks just want to have a good time with their friends - specific careers be damned!
- p1esk 3y ago
  I might not care about what my friends do for a living (I do though), but I definitely care a lot about what I do for a living.
  - kodejka 3y ago
    I think that attitude also changes when you lose a job, especially at some FAANG. When you work for FAANG everyone you ever knew, want to be your friends all of a sudden. When you are laid off, then they don't want anymore. :) In a way, works like a filter - true friends stays, but you discover how little of them you have (and that's perfectly normal).
    - eru 3y ago
      I worked for Google for a while (2014-2017), and I did not share the experience you describe. Granted having Google on the CV looks good to recruiters, but my friends didn't care that much.

3abiton 3y ago

To piggyback on your point, some people like to be exploited, and I met so many hard working people who never realized the value of their work and how important they were to their company, maybe just blinded by the culture, but were severely underpaid.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
The desire for meaning through their work is used against a worker. https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-exploitation https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e... > The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description. > The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered. > In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom. Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/

renewiltord 3y ago

Something I've noticed is that some people protest too much. The remote engineer who insists that in-person work is for people who can't find friends. The light worker who insists that people who like working have no better meaning in their life. The blue collar worker who says knowledge workers don't have basic life skills. It's just obvious there's a chip on their shoulder. By default, no one cares about these things. One of my friends cares most about her family, her husband cares about that but work is a much stronger part of his identity. Many of my smartest friends work remotely very successfully. Others like me, just as smart, work in person well. Our friends and family who work in restaurants and factories and driving buses are often happy, though some are not. And more of the knowledge workers are happy because they're wealthier but some are unhappy regardless. But the most striking thing is the difference between the ones who are choosing their path and secure vs. the ones who show other signs of insecurity: it's the statement of their choices as being their own without the obligatory put down of the other. This mechanism of justifying their choices. Insecurity pervades. The person choosing other than them is always flawed in some way they are not. The other's choices alloyed by some sin.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

I hear this argument and I should point out that it can hurt people saying something like that. I understand where you are coming from and I disagree strongly with your statement. Around age 12 I discovered software development and became my greatest passion. It helped me escape MMORPG addiction and being happy (have a family, buy a home, pursue my hobbies). If I lost my job I would be sad, no doubt, but I would still be me, a passionate software developer. If you told me I wouldn't be able to write code anymore because of some illness, I would be in a very bad spot, way worse than if I lost my job. My profession is part of my identity in a strong way, my job is business (although I do love the place I work at).

manmal 3y ago
And parent is right that it’s not ideal to have your eggs put in one basket like this.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  You don't get to choose what you are passionate about, so this comment doesn't really help im any way
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  I should point out that also my eggs are not in one basket. My passion for board games, videogames, my children and my wife cover everything else, but if my job wasn't software development, I would include it in some way in my life
scarface_74 3y ago
I started programming in 6th grade in assembly on Apple //e in 1986. By the time o graduated from college in 1996, I programmed as a hobbyist in assembly on four architectures - 65C02, 68K, PPC and x86. The last time I programmed as a hobbyist was 1996. For the next 15 years my hobby was teaching fitness classes, running and lifting weights. I got married in 2012 and became a father to a 9 and 14 year old. When the youngest graduated in 2020 and a year after Covid lifted, my wife and flew across the US from October 2022 to October 2023 visiting over a dozen cities while I worked remotely, Software development supports my passions.

begueradj 3y ago

There is what we call: "Occupational identity": https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_29 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7988-9_...

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

It's not a tribalism thing. My work is how I directly make the world a much richer place than it would be without me - otherwise I wouldn't be able to skim off some percentage of that value as a salary/income. That's something to be tremendously and persistently proud of, no matter who you are or what you're doing. Besides: If your one and only goal with work really is "do as little as possible to not die", this is easily accomplished in the modern world by working for a year or two in the US and then moving to, e.g. rural Nepal to live off $1-2000 a year for about 3 or 4 decades, zero work required. Indeed the "4% rule" in FIRE circles says this should be permanently sustainable with savings of only about $20-40,000. (Arguments like "but what happens when you get older" willfully ignore the fact thathaving a year of prime healthy adulthood totally free is almost certainly worth quite a bit more than having a year of elderly, ill adulthood "free" in a nursing home.) Yet we almost never see people do that.

lukan 3y ago
"Yet we almost never see people do that." There are plenty of people doing that (until their funds run out, which always happens faster than planned). "My work is how I directly make the world a much richer place than it would be without me " And richer in real ressources? Numbers of money are a arbitary thing and do not necessary relate, if they actually make the world a better place.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  If there really were plenty of serious, committed people doing that, but washing out because they just can't stop massively overspending when they get to Namibia etc, why don't they just buy an annuity? (How annuities work, roughly: Say you have $100,000 in that nest egg. I'm sure you could find some financial firm willing to take it off your hands today and give you $4,000 per year for 50 years, and maybe even in perpetuity. That's because $100k sitting around in their index funds will likely have ballooned to $1m+ over that timeframe, whereas the payout to you would be a mere $200k.) The fact such annuities aren't very common suggests your phantom population isn't either.
  - 3y ago

DinaCoder99 3y ago

> I'd argue that unless you're literally curing cancer, it should be the least important part of your identity. This is not an easy task when many (most?) adults spend the majority of their waking hours either working or going to and from work.