Love’s Labels Lost: Behind Gen Y’s Career Identity Crisis

Last week, someone referred to me as a writer. I like the sound of that. So much more flattering than newly-unemployed former policy wonk/project manager (sounds like the name of an Alanis Morissette album, doesn’t it?). Writer has appeal not only because it links me with something I love to do, but also because it’s one of those neat little labels that both confers identity and gives others a summary of what you’re about (allowing them to call up the characteristics they associate with this title) in a single word.

Photo by Steve Wampler

Writer, like doctor, plumber, librarian or prostitute, is a known quantity. The nuances may go undiscussed (Is she a pediatrician or an oncologist? Are we talking Ashley Dupre or Hookers at the Point?), but you can be relatively sure people get the general gist of what these positions entail should you identify yourself or someone else with one of them.

Considering that most of us are predicted to switch careers no less than 451 times during our working lives, the days of tried and true job identities are becoming a thing of the past for Generation Y. What I am today isn’t what I was yesterday and won’t be what I am tomorrow. You can refer to flexibility and challenge or you can talk about transience and insecurity. How attached should and will we get to our current incarnation when we’re working and living under the knowledge that it likely won’t last beyond the next 3 – 5 years? While there’s a certain frisson of excitement in knowing that the future is unwritten and that our path to retirement isn’t just a straight line to the horizon, the pressure to keep hustling, keep reinventing ourselves, keep contorting, twisting and coming up with new ways to give employers what we think (or have been told) they want is downright exhausting.

Not that neat labels are without their flaws. While they might provide an enviable shorthand in a professional context, taken at a more broad social descriptor level, they tend to fall short. The problematically binary nature of gender (male/female), sexual (straight/gay) and political (left/right) identity, anyone? But you can’t deny that there’s something elementally comforting in being Joe the lawyer from Wichita. You might also be a million other things, but it’s a starting point, a place to hang your hat. You belong to a universally-recognized category. Your title fits neatly on a nametag during cocktail parties. You can respond to the question of What do you do? in one word and not a rambling paragraph in which you attempt to encapsulate the entirety of your fragmented job description before the other party nods off into their Chardonnay. Forget the 15-second elevator pitch, you can do it in 2.5, you lucky SOB.

And yes, I’ll be the first to tell you that you’re not your job title, your salary, your corner office or convertible. And I mean every impassioned word of those diatribes. But I will also admit that when it comes to the inherent uncertainty of drifting through one’s twenties, the palpable envy you might feel for those who can sum up their trajectories in a single word is not only understandable, but completely natural. Doesn’t mean you want what they’ve got, just that surety is in short supply and we can’t help but occasionally craving a little more of it for ourselves.