Opinion ‘What do you do?’: What being jobless for a year has taught me about life and society

When I told them I was unemployed, or taking a break, I was met either with an awkward, embarrassed silence or the kind of forced cheerfulness nurses adopt at the sickbed of particularly bad patients when they tell them it’s going to be okay. Occasionally, I’d be rewarded with a look of genuine amazement if I got creative with my responses, like “pursuing crocheting”, or “spending time with my dog”.

The more I had these conversations, the more a theme began to emerge — most of us are incapable of speaking, and even thinking, of ourselves without the context of our work — more specifically, our jobs.

While on the face of it, this seems perfectly innocuous, it can have far-reaching consequences.

Take, for example, the case of the Mckinsey employees who died by suicide a few weeks ago, and another IIT-IIM graduate who revealed that they had come close to giving it all up when they were rejected in the final round of the same consultancy because they “felt like a loser.” Even Radhika Gupta, CEO and Shark Tank judge, recently opened up about how she came close to death by suicide after a string of rejections in her early twenties.

These are not isolated incidents — career-related suicides in India have been at an all-time high since the pandemic. The 2021 NCRB report found death by suicide due to “career problems” had risen by a whopping 41 per cent with cities like Bengaluru and Delhi reporting the highest number of such deaths.

While these statistics have rekindled the conversation around important policy issues like work-life balance and the need for increased action around mental health at the workplace, there is, I would argue, an even more insidious, and perhaps more fundamental, question at play that we, as a culture, need to address: Who are if we not our jobs?

Historically, this question was moot: You didn’t get to choose your job, and more often than not, it was built into your name. But over the past century, with the rise of education, social mobility and globalisation, and greater opportunity to choose our jobs, they have become increasingly linked with our identity. In the past couple of decades, with the rise of a “workism” culture that glorifies work for the sake of work itself — with everybody from productivity bros on Youtube to tech billionaires extolling the virtues of the “70-hour work weeks” — jobs have now also become a marker of our self-worth.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Indian “middle-class” family, where it’s hammered into us that a white-collar job is the only goal worth striving for. For many of us, this manifests long before we actually start our careers — in the classes we pick at school, the universities we attend, even the friends we make. The elusive “stable job” is the prize at the end of this never-ending race. But what happens when the system we consider infallible fails us? When despite getting into the top universities, we fail to secure our “dream job”? Or get laid off through no fault of our own? Our sense of self-worth is put at risk.

Experts warn that over-dependence on work as the sole validator of our sense of identity can lead to “enmeshment” and leave our mental health vulnerable to things that are beyond our control. This becomes even more critical in a post-pandemic world, where the nature of work itself — especially “full-time” work — is changing. It is becoming increasingly precarious with the Great Resignation, global economic slowdown, and AI-related job losses (yes, all the science fiction on this was, in fact, accurate). In a culture where our sense of self doesn’t exist without the context of what we do, we’re having to renegotiate, repeatedly, not just with our economic condition, but the very idea of our selves. No wonder work is not working for most of us — over 71 per cent of us are rethinking our careers — and perhaps our sense of self, as per the India Hiring Tracker Survey 2021.

But even if you wanted to start de-linking your job from your idea of self, how do you unlearn years of cultural indoctrination? Well, if there’s anything I have learned from being “jobless” last year, a good place to start is by replacing the question “what do you do” with literally anything else. So the next time you are at a party talking to a stranger, try asking them what movie they watched recently, or what they like to do in their free time, or even what they ate for breakfast and you might be surprised to find out things you’ve never known before, things that make them who they are, beyond what they do for work.

The writer is a social impact consultant, specialising in mental health, public health and health behaviours