Your job is boring: Dinner party Britain needs some new chat
It’s time we stopped defining ourselves and everyone we meet through our work.
“Why do we bother with all these stupid fancy job titles? Why didn’t you introduce me for what I really am — a full-time carer for my husband and father,” she asked me, voice quivering, in front of a few hundred people.
It was a spine-tingling moment. I was chairing an evening debate about family and work in a draughty hall when the academic sitting next to me confounded all of my preconceptions. One minute she was a lofty intellectual — the next: a real person dealing with a whole load of personal hell.
We do this a lot, this defining ourselves by our work. Too much, probably. Whenever we meet someone new, we kick off proceedings with: “So, what do you do?”
We know this question won’t yield the most interesting response or give us the true measure of a person. But we ask it anyway. Even with old friends, we tediously trot around the same routes of job chatter.
So, for the sake of friendships everywhere, I am proposing a revolution in conversation.
This obsession with “what we do” persists because it is a safe place socially — not because it reflects reality. We know the traditional career path is breaking down. Earlier this week, a study from Brighton University’s Business School revealed that smug freelancers are among the happiest and most productive workers. They don’t have a set identity or company to parade as their calling card. They just have themselves and they’re better off emotionally.
Britain now has the highest num- ber of self-employed people in Western Europe, 4.6 million or so, and patterns show that once they’ve gone it alone, they rarely return to having a boss. They’ve tasted the joys of autonomy — something which often tops the lists of what employees crave in the workplace, ahead of money and promotion.
It’s hardly surprising. Middleclass millennials, and I am one, know more than any other generation that money doesn’t equal happiness. We put little store by cash simply because most of the time we can’t earn enough to enjoy the same spoils as our parents — such as home ownership. Instead we tend to value freedom and creativity. We want our jobs to reflect our interests, not because we are cash rich, but because we are comfortable enough to want to satisfy the urge to do something that means something.
This pervading sensibility is why companies like Escape the City, a group which helps disenchanted corporate professionals to “do something different”, are flying. People of all ages are searching for more from lives than just work. But our conversations haven’t caught up yet. In the UK we are terrible at having adventurous discussions. We are held back by cultural straitjackets — afraid to take a leap and ask deeper questions.
Roman Krznaric is a founding faculty member of The School of Life — which runs courses aimed at answering life’s big philosophical questions and hosts dinner parties with “interesting conversation” on the menu. Literally. Diners can only ask each other probing questions such as: “How have your priorities changed?” Or: “What have you learned about love?” and so on. It may sound trite — but we need it.
The last dinner party I attended was a blast, as everyone was willing to push the boundaries. The best stories of the night came when one person asked who would be in everyone’s pantheon of hate — because their father had recently revealed his nemeses in his autobiography.
The working class went through a similar identity crisis in the 70s: with the closure of factories, came the dilution of identities gleaned purely from work.
Now the middle class finds itself in the same spot. With so many other strings to our bow, we crave more because we are more. So take that leap. Your family and friends will thank you.