talking about work

be chic not cringe

It’s a Thursday night and I’m talking to someone new at a bar trivia. We’re basically screaming at each other over the booming sounds of Talking Heads and 50 other talking heads packed tightly into the apartment-sized wine bar. We’re chatting about this or that, until the question pops out: What do you do for work?

It’s a complex question

The trouble with answering the question is that it can be asked in so many different ways. In-person, some of these ways include:

• Trying to assess if you’re “worth” talking to (the NYC way)

• Searching for things in common (the Midwest way)

• A genuine attempt to grow a network, real-life Linkedin style (the Washington DC way)

• I ran out of things to say to you (the LA way)

Online, the significance of the question varies in accordance with your self-presentation. Do you already have your employer in your bio, where everyone wants to apply for a job? Is a new e-friend just trying to see why you’re so interested in early-twentieth century photos of urban downtowns? Or are you claiming to be a doctor whose patients died from looking at the Covid vaccine? 

There’s plenty of reasons to ask, or not ask, about someone’s work. Understanding which reasons are valuable and which are harmful requires an introspective look at the larger picture of what identifying with a job means and how it informs our perception of others.

It’s an even more complex answer

For a long time, I’ve shied away from talking about my job. I started posting on Twitter when I was a grad student, and had a lot of fun talking about what can loosely be described as “grad student issues.” When I left, I was anxious my new employer would read my tweets - and I stopped talking about my life between the hours of 9am and 5pm. I also didn’t want to limit myself online to my job function. I have a lot of interests, and even when I worked at cool policy think tanks, I never felt that my job was fully indicative of myself. Now, sometimes I’m out at a show or a gallery, and I’m embarrassed to admit around artsy-types that I have a fairly traditional white-collar job. It’s not revolutionary, or particularly well-paid, or the cool arty creative eco design “space”-vibe I get from my more interesting friends, so why bother? Bringing up my job just feels like dull conversation. Then again, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s a good job and I’ve had it for a few years (I’m an Economic Analyst). I think it’s time that I reconsider my anxiety and consider how and when talking about work can be fruitful.

People are more than work

McKinsey people always want to talk about McKinsey, but there’s no way to really respond to their assertion that they are better than you. The implications I’m expected to draw from it – that they’re really smart and interesting – never quite coalesce, and I try not to roll my eyes while I make my way to the bathroom.

But it’s not just limited to the PMC of PMCs. There’s plenty of people across the industry spectrum who see work as a signifier of themselves, and the current cultural tendency to label oneself (and perhaps over-identify) with a particular group becomes an excuse that melts into other aspects of self (e.g., I work for a non-profit! I am a good person who can do no wrong!). It’s like an inversion of (reasonably) disliking someone for working for a weapons manufacturer. You are but your labor. You are a valued social media coordinator, so you have value as a person. This can be such a naive and dehumanizing approach.

It turns out I have non-work motivations and interests that still formulate the “real” me. Some friends and I are planning a trip to Mexico City. My boyfriend is designing and 3D printing a hydroponics tower that may grow an herb garden. My cousin sends me cryptocurrency investment tips.

But a job is still…something

A girl I met on Twitter once told me that she has no idea what any of her closest friends do for a living. At the time, I said something like “yes girl totally” – but that’s kind of weird, right? A job does indicate something – what you spent your young adult years focusing on, what your priorities might be at the moment, what your availability looks like. Maybe the well-intentioned attempts of my more progressive friends have fallen a little off base – in their attempts to remove class position from the conversation, they remove an important layer of human relation after all. It really is striking that so many of my friends manage such rich creative lifestyles while working such draining, difficult jobs – they deserve credit for this, as much as they deserve to complain about the challenges of closing a bar downtown as a woman. Conversely, not talking about work at all advantages the trust fund creatives who spend their lives in expensive coffee shops, convinced of their own misery. Complaining about “the job” places them in a satisfying check. 

By shying away from the industry online and in-person, have I been holding myself back? There is, I guess, a lot you can say about economic modeling and climate and economic development policy. Also, the climate of white collar work itself has shifted dramatically after the pandemic, where it is now highly unusual to go to an office 5 days per week or have met your manager in person. You take meetings from your couch and take your cat to the vet during your lunch break. Old concepts are transformed entirely – what is work/life balance when the barrier between work and life itself dissolves?

Our work lives are new; the decline of office real estate might devastate cities; the “future of work” as a concept is readily discussed as the possibility of fully-automated luxury communism has been raised. Surely there is a lot to talk about? 

Maybe work has no meaning to you or maybe work is everything. In any world, the importance of being a decent person about it matters more than any single anecdote. So as you run into friends-of-friends at house parties and disgraced tech CEOs in hotel cocktail bars, just consider what’s actually insightful about your job. And day to day, your friends should probably know where you work and what you think about it and how you perceive work in general, but I’ll be damned if you want to meet up for ramen on a Friday night for me to listen to you talk about the six different apps you shipped for the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnership Development Integration Initiatives. We can leave that one for the LinkedIn posters.

what kind of wacky anecdote would frasier crane share?