How much of my identity should come from my work?

Work can provide genuine pleasure, belonging and a way to recognise your own abilities. The aim need not be to care less about it. The question is what happens to your sense of self when work disappoints you, changes or is temporarily absent.

If every setback feels like exposure of the whole person, your identity may have too few places to stand. Consider the qualities you bring to work and where else they appear. Curiosity, patience, inventiveness or care can exist without an employer assigning them a task.

You might give more attention to relationships and activities in which performance is not the price of admission. This need not become an impressive programme of balance. An ordinary friendship counts even if it produces nothing.

A job may express important parts of you. It cannot reasonably be asked to confirm all of you, every day, through decisions partly controlled by people who know only your working role.

“How much?” suggests that identity could be divided into approved percentages. A life is less tidy. Work may matter enormously during one season and occupy a smaller place during another.

I would ask whether the role leaves you free to honour other relationships and to change. Can you listen as a friend without becoming the expert? Can you be a beginner elsewhere? Could you leave a title behind without believing you had become nobody?

Jing describes additional places to stand. I would make those places real through conduct, not merely through a longer description of yourself. Visit, help, learn something, participate. Other parts of a life grow by receiving time.

You do not need to apologise for loving your work. But love is different from giving an institution sole authority to describe you. Its organisational chart cannot contain all the relationships through which you become a person.

The question “What do you do?” has developed a monopoly. We should invite competing questions to the party. “What have you recently burnt while cooking?” “Who is pleased when you arrive?” “Which subject makes you unexpectedly talkative?”

Now there are several ways into a conversation, and the job title can stop guarding the entrance in a small security uniform.

I understand its anxiety. Without the uniform, how will anyone know you are Senior Something? Perhaps they will have to speak to you. This is an alarming possibility and has not yet passed committee review.

Jang recommends becoming a beginner elsewhere. Excellent. Take the senior title to a pottery class and watch the clay remain unimpressed. You will still be there after the bowl collapses, which is useful evidence. Bring the bowl home. Its inability to hold soup may reveal nothing about your value and quite a lot about your early technique.