Some practical thoughts on diversifying our identity
Part 3: The search for meaning beyond work
This piece is part three of Work & Self-Expression, a series that explores our relationship with work, creativity, and the in between.
Part 2: Who we are without work
Part 3: Some practical thoughts on diversifying our identity
Part 4: The art of self-expression
Part 5: How to sabbatical
the risk of making it your all
In recent years, we’ve seen a decline in reliance on religious institutions as our primary source of meaning. For the first time in Gallup’s eight decade analysis, the majority of Americans reported having no religious affiliation. The absence of organized religion as our anchor has left our generation in search of new faiths to center our lives around.
Enter: workism. In his essay, Workism Is Making Americans Miserable, journalist Derek Thompson writes of the gravitational pull that work has on shaping our identities. As our generation delays marriage and parenthood in favor of chasing after our career dreams and working from anywhere, our lives are more fluid than ever before — the company we work for and what we do remains one of the few steady constants. Work has evolved into far more than a means of economic production, it’s where we find our community and fulfill our life’s purpose. As our expectation of what we seek in work mounts, it’s become our source of income, healthcare, impact, community, fulfillment, and meaning — our human needs and employment status all wrapped into one.
When we allow one aspect of our life to embody our core identity, the danger is our self-worth becomes tethered to outcomes beyond our control and beyond ourselves — this goes for anchoring our sole identity to our work as well as being a partner or a parent. The laser focus on one aspect of our life going according to plan shrinks our worldview and we begin to view the inconsequential as consequential.
By putting undue pressure on our jobs to fulfill our every need, we inadvertently build a highly concentrated identity portfolio and close ourselves off to other sources of meaning. We seek external validation in the form of more responsibility, promotions, and salary raises that bring a limited shelf life of joy at the expense of betting on other parts of ourselves in parallel — our relationships, starting a family, and exploring other interests.
Many of our contributions to companies we work for will fade with time. When we move on, roles are backfilled, work is redistributed, life goes on. While meaningful in the moment, it’s not always our work that lives on, but the relationships we cultivate and lessons we learn while engaged in that work. What else has staying power? The investments we make in ourselves and our communities.
The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments. This is often in their careers, as this domain of their life provides the most concrete evidence that they are moving forward…They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns — such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus — rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children.
…you’ll often see the same sobering pattern when looking at the personal lives of many ambitious people. Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most.
— Clay Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life?
By creating space in our lives to invest in multiple sources of meaning, we can break free from the cycle that demands more of our energy and our time. When we renegotiate our relationship with work, it’s not in sacrifice of our work — in actuality, we’re freeing up space for more of us to become available. It allows us to begin to see the forest for the trees, take a stand, make tradeoffs, and firm up boundaries that enable us to explore paths towards living a fuller, more integrated life. We can’t have our yeses if we don’t own our nos.
tactics to diversifying identity
When we think about opening ourselves up to other sources of meaning, the core work is cultivating a deeper sense of self. It’s about getting to know ourselves and our desires, tuning into our inner voice, and turning towards ourself for validation rather than seeking it in others and institutions.
When you think, “Who am I?,” what comes to mind? What do you identify with? Where do you derive your value? What do you say you value, but don’t act as if you value it? If how you spend your most precious resource, time, is the greatest expression of your values, what would your time allocation tell you about what you valued most?
What roles do you play? Which of your roles is the main character in your life? Who are you without work? What meaning are you in search of that work doesn’t fulfill?
Expand your identity from your job title to what you care about
I recently spoke with a friend who works at a startup reimagining how companies recruit new talent. She was deeply invested in her job and more importantly, the broader mission she serves — so when the pace slowed at work, she started contemplating new ways to further the mission of connecting people with jobs that aligned with their interests. Rather than pigeon holing herself into her day job, she turned towards investing her energy into starting a career coaching business alongside her full-time role.
When we decouple ourselves from our job titles and our organizations, a world of opportunity opens up in ways that are hard to imagine when we’re deeply rooted in chasing after external validation for a job well done, narrowly defined. What does serving the broader mission mean to you? If you untether yourself from your job title, what other avenues might you explore to deepen your skillset and work on what you care about? Your impact has the power to be far more reaching than your job description.
Strengthen your other identities & call in new ones
As you start to examine who you are holistically, determine old beliefs you hold about who you were that no longer serve you: thank them for their service and begin to experiment with shedding them to make room to nurture new identities.
Experimentation can take shape in many forms:
Adopt a more fluid approach to how you introduce yourself to others: shift away from work being central to your introduction and incorporate other elements of your identity that you want to share with the world
Start with subtle changes and observe how it changes the dynamic of your conversations: “I’m exploring psychological wellness and how to construct enduring secular communities. I’m training for a marathon. In my day job, I spend my time…”
Joke about outcomes you want: it’s easy to focus our energy on what’s not possible — why not focus your energy on breathing life into identities you’d like to embody?
Take a page out of Visa Veerasamy’s book and start to joke about the person you’d like to become
Figure out where people who are “xyz” convene and join them: one of the best ways to begin an identity shift is surrounding yourself by other people who already do that thing
Want to be a writer? Register for a writing course
Want to be a marathoner? Sign up for a marathon and join a local running club
Get playful about bringing your new identities to life.
Create space for more novelty in your day to day
When our days seem monotonous, it’s easy to slide into tailoring our life to the thing that has the most visible hold on our lives. It’s up to us to create the boundaries that allow other parts of us to see the light of day.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I was in search of communities of people who shared my interests. In that first year, I went to a lot of events and put myself out there in ways far beyond my comfort zone, but eventually, the search paid off and I found my community.
Through it all, consistently experimenting and showing up allowed me to build a life of novelty. In my most balanced moments, work was simply one part of who I was. On the first of the month, I was the hard things instigator. On Sundays, I was the Writing Club host. Life overflowed in ways I hadn’t previously given myself permission to experience — my days were marked with work, meaningful conversations, interesting community events, and adventures in the Bay. Life moved fast. I was in awe of how much I could get done in a day when I prioritized life alongside work.
Whether it’s hosting a monthly podcast club with friends, leading a weekly morning hike, or starting a pottery class, experiment with designing a life doing things that bring you alive like your life depends on it. Because it does. There’s never a good time. Now is a better time than any.
As the seasons change, our existence portfolios are in a state of ebb and flow, making way for new identities and phasing out the old. It’s in harnessing multiple sources of meanings that we give ourselves the freedom to explore new flavors of our essence in pursuit of aligning who we are and who we aspire to be.
Up next: The art of self-expression
Cissy, thanks for writing this. I am rereading this series as I have started my own sabbatical journey. One question I have, how do you "joke the person you’d like to become"? Do you have an example of that?