I am still mulling over my one word or phrase that would sum up ‘what I do‘ in my current life. It appears to be taking longer than expected. A work-in-progress.

Why does it matter though? The condo-resident who asked me, ‘What do you do?’ was probably making polite conversation, and wouldn’t have cared about what I did or didn’t do. Sometimes, some people ask questions like, ‘How are you?’ or ‘How was your day?’ but they don’t actually expect or want an answer. Certainly not a long drawn one. It’s more perfunctory. At the time and for a while, it niggled me. Now, not so much.

That said, I did wonder. Especially as I am at the tail end, as one of my ex-colleagues and good friend described our shared phase/stage in life, when finding, having a job and progressing in a profession are not considerations. I’ve done that already. 

Maybe… it’s part of that conventional thinking, upbringing or societal expectations of the yesteryears. Back then, I went to school and university, learnt a few things, both relevant and irrelevant. Got some semblance of an education, so to speak. But the end goal was to get a job and work, at least for me. I didn’t know people or know of people, in the general age group, who didn’t work or ran a cutting-edge or out of the ordinary business. Not like now with the burgeoning and lucrative business of social media-assisted influencers, and prevalence of successful, wealthy but not necessarily degree-totting tech entrepreneurs.

Naturally, I hoped that the jobs I applied for, from advertisements in hardcopy newspapers, paid well. Offered value and was appreciated. Had a good career path with growth prospects. And, I would be happy doing it/them. However, the country was in a midst of an economic crisis the very year I graduated. ‘Malaysia fell into a recession in 1985, with its gross domestic product (GDP) contracting 1% that year. The unemployment rate rose to 5.6% in 1985 and 7.4% in 1986[1].

Still, I managed to get employed. It wasn’t a vocation that was on my preferred list but it was a job, my first. In a slim pickings market like Alor Setar. Getting the job boosted my confidence. The starting salary, sadly and strangely, wasn’t that much different from what is being offered now. I moved to KL to take on my second job. Having work gave me a level of financial independence, which was a really nice-to-have, to pay the bills and have a roof over my head. Social independence to enjoy a little more leisure activities like dinner with friends and buy a few nice things that I couldn’t afford before. Personal independence to make decisions/choices. Yay. Naturally, work had its ups and downs – people, support, recognition, internal politics etc.

After my fourth job, I started my own one-person writing business. Followed by a two-person consultancy. Then back to a one-person consultancy with enough clients to keep me afloat with regular work. The money helped. The work provided a sense of purpose and accomplishment. The camaraderie, the sense that whomever I worked with, at any point, was in the trenches with me, was a good feeling. We had a laugh and griped about our ‘common enemy.’ And, achievements like building positive relationships with clients, developing resourceful ideas/concepts, and garnering media coverage, to some extent, validated my self-worth in terms of the experience and skills I had amassed over the years. There were invariably work bothers. Some solvable. Some not. But the need to have work and to work was a constant.

Despite work taking precedence in my earlier life, I’d like to think/believe that it did not define me. Work was what I did. It wasn’t who I was. To be honest, my personality did not match what I did for a living. Journalism, yes. Public relations, no. This is true. My ex-partner and I are both quiet and reserved individuals, still are, and we couldn’t fathom how we ended up being in public relations. Which explained our recurring feeling that we should be somewhere else, doing something else. Anyways, despite thinking, believing, and hoping that work didn’t define me, I’ve defined people, enough times, by the work or jobs that they did and do. Not in a pigeon-holing sense, but as a reference point, if that makes sense.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” For many of us, a large portion of our days is spent at work; in fact, the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime[2].

So how? For me, having a job/work was important, and it might have, to some extent, defined me. And, that might be why I was trying to come up with a description or label of ‘what I do’ now. Hmm.