Among the latest fashions in bourgeois self-criticism is the lament that Americans start conversations with “so, what do you do?” In some tellings, the question’s offense lies in its implication that what you do defines who you are. In others, it represents a thinly veiled attempt to determine how much someone earns or where he ranks in society. But while one’s vocation conveys a lot of personal information and thus invites judgment, the nature of the judgment — the way the information is evaluated — depends on culture.
“Look at the stories told by the popular culture. In the 1970s and 1980s, the best-comedy Emmy went routinely to shows with blue-collar characters. . . . From 1992 to 2017, it went almost every year to a show about white-collar adults working in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York, or Washington, few of whom were raising children.”
Waiters, truck drivers, retail clerks, plumbers, secretaries, and others all spend their days helping the people around them and filling roles crucial to the community. They do hard, unglamorous work for limited pay to support themselves and their families. Why shouldn’t they be eager to share this information with their conversation partners? Surely their replies would compare favorably with those of the derivatives trader, white-collar defense lawyer, premium-alcohol social media manager, or professor of comparative literature. If blue-collar replies instead are cause for embarrassment, or an invitation to the listener to feel superior, then something is amiss.
We are perfectly capable of awarding respect and status on the basis of sacrifice and social contribution for soldiers and police officers, teachers and nurses. What we lack is recognition that just about any job fits these criteria, that work is inherently deserving of respect. Through our public policy and our culture, we have spent decades devaluing the basic act of doing a job that supports a family and contributes to a community. The idea that people “work to live” has been replaced by one that everybody should “live to work,” leaving behind the vast majority for whom a job is not an end unto itself but rather a means to fulfilling obligations and building a good life.
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Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the new book “The Once and Future Worker.” Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Medium