You are not your job, or are you?

A frequent conversation topic between me and my friends is how we separate our home-selves from our work-selves. How we untangle our work identity and our non-work identity.

This got me thinking about what jobs really are.

For me, I’m an experienced senior software developer specialising in Ruby on Rails. Peeling back that first opening layer, what else is there? Problem solving, a care for the quality of the work that I do, dependability, reliability, occasionally questioning why things are done how they are, trying to improve things for those who come next and acting as an example for the rest of my team.

Now, how many of those attributes can map onto my home life? I’ve got a house, a wife, two kids and a dog. There are always problems to fix. I need to be dependable and reliable; if I say I’m doing the school pick-up or drop-off, I need to do it or things go sideways fast. I try to improve things for the girls by acting in a way I’d like them to act, and looking after their environment.

Do we conflate our work and non-work lives because we are lacking something outside work? Are we searching for meaning, purpose or value within work because we don’t know where or how to find it elsewhere?

I would wager that someone who was training hard for a marathon wouldn’t have the energy or brain space to be thinking about work outside work hours because back-to-back three-hour runs are exhausting!

Find something you enjoy doing outside work, do it well and with intention, and make peace with the overlap in the varied facets of your home and professional lives.