Blindness – "Sounding Off By Profession" Clip from Tariq West on Vimeo.
It strikes me as odd how we use occupational labels to describe people outside of a work context. I remember sophomore year of college when I was applying to finance internships and several friends took to introducing me as “the banker”. They probably meant it flatteringly mostly, alluding to my apparent ambition; they may also have been calling me a pretentious d-bag.
It bothered me. I wasn’t a banker. If I worked in finance or at any other job, I would hope people could find something more descriptive of me than my occupation. You know, like social commentator or paradigm shifter or peace keeper (I can dream right?).
Watching the film Blindness reminded me of this pet peeve. In an early scene, the newly-blind victims of some mysterious ailment introduce themselves as “pharmacist,” “taxi driver,” “financial planner,” “optometrist” etc… It begged the question of how they each settled on those labels as the most relevant ones, even above their names or hometowns.
The filmmakers seemed to make the point that our positions within society are fragile and not as weighty as we tend to believe. If we were stripped of our sight and left to fend for ourselves, the precious labels we construct wouldn’t matter.
A viewer could almost as easily take away something much more insidious; that economic labels are what remain when everything else is stripped away, and that our truest selves are somehow related to our economic agency. This is why I find occupational labels problematic.
Why don’t we introduce our doctor friends as “healers” or our lawyer friends as “justice advocates”? Probably because the labels themselves connote a sort of institutional ethos vested with virtues such as healing or the pursuit of justice. But that is not all they’re vested with. They’re laden with status and reek of economic utility.
Other occupations that are not institutionalized professions, such as “hotel maid” or “tax driver”, are even less useful as labels outside of a work context. They do not reveal anything about an individual’s inner life, about who they are and what they would like to offer the world.
Not all doctors are healers nor all lawyers advocates for justice. Some taxi cab drivers are sophists and humorists, some bartenders, spiritual counselors and entertainers.
Occupational labels can be useful, valuable even. We may short-change ourselves though, by applying them as defaults rather than just when they are useful for conveying economic information (i.e. what skills and knowledge we have to sell).
Surely we can find better, truer ways of describing ourselves, of conveying not just what we are “certified” to do, but what we choose to do and why. Go ahead, try it. Come up with a label for yourself that better describes your inner motivations, your person.
Now put it into circulation.
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This post is featured on: The Daily Get Up, Brazen Careerist
Originally posted on Tariq's Tumble