Opinion: Losing your job shouldn't mean losing your identity (via latimesopinion )
, few industries have been spared from layoffs in recent weeks. These layoffs are a devastating blow to workers’ livelihoods. But the ripple effects run deeper than paychecks. When you lose your job, you also lose an identity.
I once asked a Chilean guy I met at a hostel while traveling abroad what he did. “You mean for work?” he responded as if I had asked for the balance of his checking account. In the United States, how we make money is shorthand for who we are. Our livelihoods have become our lives. The pandemic highlighted the risks of a work-centric existence. Some grew disillusioned with their work. “COVID felt like an existential slap in the face,” Audrey Wooster, who left a decadelong career in sales, told me.
But knowing the value of separating who you are from what you do is not the same as actually doing so. I can’t tell you how many people I spoke to who told me, “I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t working.” It’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem. People work all the time, so they don’t know what they’d do if they weren’t working. And because they don’t know what to do if they aren’t working, they work all the time.
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