Have you become your Job?

Have you ever wondered how you ended up here?

It is rather like being a toddler at a fair, confidently marching towards the next exciting stall. There is complete faith that one’s parents are somewhere behind, keeping watch. Then, quite suddenly, one turns around and discovers they have vanished. There you stand, surrounded by a milling crowd, scanning the horizon for a familiar face, with no earthly idea how you arrived at this particular spot.

Feeling lost is a terrible business.

More so when you are in your mid-thirties and are generally expected to know things. For most of your life, there has been the quiet comfort of knowing what comes next. One scarcely had to think about it. The current of circumstance carried you along quite efficiently. School led to college. College led to an internship. The internship led to a job. Perhaps you chose your field with great deliberation; perhaps it was simply the first reasonably respectable option available. Either way, you stayed the course.

And then, quite unexpectedly, somewhere in the middle of it all—just when you were supposed to be enjoying the fruits of a steadily compounding career—you find yourself unsure.

What brought about this sudden bout of questioning?

It may be that the middle rungs of the corporate ladder proved rather different from the brochure. The view is less magnificent than expected, and the climb considerably more exhausting. The next promotion no longer inspires the enthusiasm it once did. Life, meanwhile, has quietly rearranged a few priorities. Then comes the unsettling discovery that at fifty, you may not even be playing the same game. There are only so many seats at the top, after all, and only so many daily crises a person can treat as urgent before the whole arrangement begins to feel faintly ridiculous.

Perhaps, most unsettling of all, you realised that you do not want your boss’s job.

And then one day, you find yourself exactly one crisis, one escalation, one firefight away from burnout. One step away from the uncomfortable realisation that perhaps none of it was quite as important as it seemed. The years spent caring deeply, striving relentlessly, and treating every deadline as a matter of national importance come rushing back for inspection. You begin to take stock—not only of what you have achieved, but of what you have become.

It is then that a curious thought occurs to you.

You have become your job.

So completely, in fact, that separating yourself from it feels oddly difficult.

Who are you when you are not working?

Who are you when the job title disappears?

What do you actually enjoy?

What gets you out of bed in the morning, apart from Outlook notifications and quarterly targets?

And perhaps the most alarming question of all:

How would you introduce yourself in a room full of strangers if you were forbidden from mentioning your profession?