Thread for people who have not realized some career-identity alignment to remind them

you are not your job

I am not sure if there is such a thing as career-identity alignment.

vvvvv professional ilxor vvvvv

If I have a perceived career-identity alignment, it is false.

bad faith

I am not my threads.

I will never know what it's like to be a father.

Hopefully I am generous enough to myself to not hate this thread in the future.

what is "career-identity alignment"?

To not hate myself for the totally banal shit I say 99+% of the time.

sarahel, it might not exist.

IMO it is when your ideal image of your inner self aligns with the image you get of yourself based on the career you have.

There are probably words for this concept that smart people use.

what is it supposed to be? like acupuncture?

abbott are you like mad stoned or

I am totally sober, maybe if I fix that I will stop thinking like this. Or I will think more intensely like this.

Is this like when Q shows Picard what his life would be like if he didn't get stabbed in a walrus barfight, and it turns out he's a loser, and that's when he realizes being the captain is awesome, and he's awesome for being the captain?

essentially you are measuring yourself by what you do that has monetary value and what doesn't, which is silly.

sarahel you can use your imagination, I don't have the answers.

Any time you think about Q it makes life richer – that I can say with certainty.

abbott if you ever said anything banal i would like die of shock

It is silly to say "how I make money is who I am." But what do you do with the 40 hours a week you make money? They do not comprise zero percent of your psyche.

you can be an awesome person and have a crappy job where you are paid to do something that doesn't capitalize on your awesomeness at all. It's just bad logic, like what if you thought you were a lousy lay because you aren't a sex worker?

But what do you do with the 40 hours a week you make money? They do not comprise zero percent of your psyche.

And what about the 56 hours a week you spend sleeping??

What? Yes, that is what this thread is to remind people. Of course. Also: warning, you might still be bad at sex after reading this thread. The general and unknowable "you" not sarahel specifically.

i am good at sex tbqh.

Dreams and sleep are better than being awake.

See, you had all the answers before this thread became. Why did you even ask?

i didn't know what you meant by that term!

yo abbott let's get unsober together

I actually like being awake.

you are kinda your job. but your job isn't necessarily whatever shitty thing you think it is. it could really be taking care of your family. or feeling pride for supporting yourself. or whatever.

How do you even know when you've had an innermost thought?

what you're talking about is a role, not really a job.

like most of my job is about being nice to people and in gen i hate ppl.

but you like washing dishes. Do you get to wash dishes at your job?

theres enough conflict for me to keep the pieces in place. ideally i could be like that hot dude who lives w/o money

no, they hired someone to do the dishes, up until that point i did have to wash dishes.

this role v. job dichotomy sounds indiscriminate

how so?

or maybe i mean arbitrary

so which one of you guys is like, "the chick"

well, most people define "job" differently than the way you were trying to define or redefine it.

that's true

maybe they're wrong

and i also think it's kinda silly to view yourself as having one role in life, i mean, at some point you were an infant that drooled and pooped and made funny sounds and that's what you did all day, and at some point you will be an elderly person ...

Jackass 3D proved to me that role can be sustained...

u know i was making a point about how you don't have to be defined by the specifics of the particular work you are engaged in at this moment but could instead view your toil + occupation as being for a more enlivening purpose

were you?

i mean, if that's what you were getting at, sure, i more or less agree.

idk i worry a lot that i will never have a job that is not some service industry doormat bs. like i feel like i will be supplementing my income thru waiting tables well through my autumn years. its kindof nec. then that i dont think of my job as being me because i would crack up

if it is any comfort, most menial labor is less defining than say, making a living cramming as many hot dogs down your throat as possible.

I remember being young thinking your career would be invariably guided by your special talents and skills. It made me sad, because it made me imagine a future where I dealt with decaying corpses or sewage or stinky stuff because I am anosmic.

why didn't you imagine you were Teller from Penn & Teller, except instead of not talking, your schtick would be not smelling?

You are delightful.

have you always been anosmic, abbott?

What? Yes! Congenital anosmia! I should really start a consolidated thread for this noble part of the sensory world.

I think actually I prefer that topic just cropping up at random.

Wait what happened to being a teacher?!

That is still the plan! When I started this thread I was thinking of the job I have now. I taught before and it was right for me in many significant ways.

Oh ok, just checking to see if you had jumped ship or not! You're ok then. Just hang in there. Teaching is fun and right for the right people. It's very wrong for the wrong people, but you are not one of those people.

I worry moer about appearance-identity alignment, like, how I look in the mirror/to other people is not how I am inside and how can I make myself look more like how I think I am?

I dont even know if that makes sense.

i would really hate to align my identity with my job/career. i almost go out of my way not to

most of my closest friends probably couldn't even describe what i do for a living

i was thinking about this tonight, how i've kept myself at arms' length from my coworkers even though they're nice to me. i don't want my office environment to be like a "family" or a "second home" or anything too chummy, because i just want my work to be my work. i want to go home afterward and live my real life.

passed 88mph in my job last weekend, now permanent & pensionable afaik

no excuse not to post here more imo

heh 'is ilx interfering with your work performance' or w/e that thread was

i was thinking about this tonight, how i've kept myself at arms' length from my coworkers even though they're nice to me. i don't want my office environment to be like a "family" or a "second home" or anything too chummy, because i just want my work to be my work. i want to go home afterward and live my real life.

I agree with this 100%, but I'm worried about not being seen as a Team Player. I'm angling for an office/facility job, how do I keep this from happening?

that's what's sort of awful about the whole thing imo-- so many people end up spending more waking hours in the company of their co-workers than they do their signif others/family

having trouble with this right now after working hard for the past year and a half to go through a career shift and being mostly unsuccessful, and this week getting turned down for an internal job change that would have made my life a lot easier and made me feel more like a professional. think the big problem was losing a lot of my creative identity when my band stopped playing, i still do little projects on my own but when i used to have career setbacks i could say "hey i'm in a cool band, who cares about jobs" and now i can't do that anymore.

working 55 hours per week at two jobs and commuting six hours per week not helping either

whine whine whine

I commute 10 hours a week, but I only have a 30 hour work week.

i am working this year for free (part of licensing) and while i am mostly okay with this, i find it a lot harder at 30 years old, as a second career, than my peers who are +/- 22