"What's your name, and what do you do for work?"
When meeting new people, these are usually the first questions that we need to address. And for years, I've replied with, "I'm Eileen, and I'm a project manager." That's what I was to the rest of the world: a name and a job. When working within the confines of a Capitalist society, we are judged by our output and, as a result, our job is treated as an intrinsic part of our identity. And yet, I don't want to be defined by my mode of employment.
This dilemma calls to mind Jean-Paul Sartre's groundbreaking Existentialist essay Being and Nothingness and Sartre's concept of living in "bad faith," which can be simply defined as living inauthentically. In this work, Sartre provides his famous example of a waiter:
Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. [...] We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.
Sartre highlights how unnatural the behavior of the waiter is as he performs his job and thus highlights an important truth: there is nothing in inherent to being a waiter in this man's nature. His job requires him to play the part, but when he is no longer working he drops the act. At his core he is not a waiter, but a man acting as a waiter. Sartre goes on:
This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer. [...] There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.
We are conditioned by society to see ourselves as our job; this is just as true now as it was in 1943 when Being and Nothingness was first published. The ruling class requires that the working class remain submissive and obedient, and in order to do this, it is ingrained in us that we must institutionalize ourselves to our employment. However, as Sartre eloquently argues, that committing yourself to being a waiter, grocer, tailor, auctioneer is at its core inauthentic and is emblematic of living in bad faith.
I played the part of a project manager, but I always had a hard time considering myself to be a project manager. Reassessing the world under Sartre's framework of "bad faith" has helped me to better understand and reconcile this feeling. I have hopes, dreams, and passions completely disconnected from my line of work, and I'm sure that everyone else does too. And we could all benefit from recognizing that we have a bit more freedom to define ourselves than society has conditioned us to think.
This article is also published on Medium.
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