When meeting a new person, it’s common to introduce yourself and ask what the other person does for a living. It’s true that a job doesn’t define all of who you are, but understanding what someone does for work helps you understand their life experience and potentially their interests and areas of expertise too. It’s a question that can lead to a rich and interesting conversation and a deeper knowing of that person.
But once we know the generalities of their occupation, the conversation moves onto other topics. It’s rare that I meet someone with genuine curiosity about what my work life actually looks like. The same goes for friends and family members—we barely talk about the details of our jobs, unless something big happens, like a re-org, promotion, job change, or notable professional accomplishment. (Or that one time there were llamas on the rooftop! That was a fun day.)
Most people spend at least 40 hours every week at a job, doing very specific tasks, making hard decisions, navigating complex relationships, and feeling a host of emotions, including boredom, anxiety, joy, accomplishment, fear, disappointment, frustration, and excitement. We compartmentalize this very significant part of our life from our personal life. Work-life balance is so important and setting boundaries is critical for well-being. At the same time, it’s interesting that we know so little about each other’s work lives. Even our closest friends, partners, and family members have work-lives that are basically a mystery. You may know what industry they work in or what their job title is (even that might be a stretch), but the practicalities of what they do on a daily basis or who they interact with or what’s at stake and what that means for them is mostly out of view. We have such a limited understanding of what goes on in other people’s careers and we also have a hard time communicating about our own jobs to other people.
When someone asks me what’s “new” at work, I hardly know where to start. It’s like asking my first grader what happened at school today and he shrugs, a blank look on his face—nothing of note worth sharing. And besides, school is work and talking about it feels like work too. But that’s not all there is too it, right? Relaying the particularities of my work is a combination of complex and mundane. Sometimes it’s not worth explaining what goes into creating metadata for a forthcoming book or describing why a meeting was awkward or exciting. Often things are confidential or would require too much context in order to convey the significance. Likewise, I’m often unable to ask follow-up questions to someone about their job because I lack the contextual knowledge necessary to know what to ask in the first place!
I’ve worked for my current employer for over a decade. Over the years, I’ve been witness to colleagues going through huge life changes—getting married, having babies, adopting children, going through divorce or break-up, buying a home, coming out, grieving the death of loved ones, and much more. Meanwhile, I went through many big life changes myself. I’ve also navigated interpersonal conflict, grown as a professional and as a person, gained a ton of specialized knowledge, and developed an extensive network of relationships that goes far beyond the employees of my company. These are the people who see the professional version of myself—for better or worse. My close friends and family don’t know me in that way. And they don’t know the people I interact with on a daily basis at work either.
Recently I realized that I have almost no photos of my colleagues. It wouldn’t be appropriate to take photos at work most of the time, but I wonder—when I die and people make photo presentations of my life, will there be any evidence of the people I collaborated with and worked alongside for so long? Or a less morbid scenario—if I ever left this job, would I have any documentation of the people I spent so much time with? Will this part of my life be reduced to a LinkedIn profile or list of professional accomplishments?
Leaving a job and starting a new one can be really disorienting. Suddenly, all those people that had been a part of your daily life are no longer there. And you have to start over somewhere new, building trust and collegiality, learning a new office culture and establishing your personal reputation. Feeling comfortable with, respecting, and even enjoying your coworkers is probably more important to a person’s happiness at work than the actual job responsibilities. I’ve been fortunate to be in the same company for a long time, but I’ve had to say goodbye to many colleagues over the years due to layoffs or personal decisions to pursue other opportunities. Relationships with colleagues are mostly bound by proximity, so once you aren’t working together anymore, relationships end too.
The work we do and the people we interact with at work are a huge part of our ordinary lives. Work isn't all there is to life, but it is a big part, and so are the people we interact with there on a regular basis. We tend to compartmentalize work and personal life, but in the end it's all mixed up together, a mosaic of relationships, memories, and ordinary moments.
It might be worth developing more thoughtful curiosity about our close friends and family members; and figure out how to ask and answer questions about our work in a way that helps us be more fully known. Because that’s what most people want, right? To be deeply known by those who love them?
On the other hand, maybe it’s impossible to fully capture, preserve, and convey our work lives to people in our personal lives. It’s just part of what it means to have multiple identities, communities, and contexts to exist in. There can be a quiet sort of joy in having an elusive side to life that not everyone understands.
Cheers to the weekend,
—NK