A lot of our personal identities are interwoven with our jobs. “I am a plumber” or “I am a doctor.” No one says “I do engineering for money, but it’s not my identity. I am a poet, a pirate, a philosopher, I am anything but the mercenary you see before you, working 9 – 5 in exchange for money.” But maybe that should be our attitude. Poet James Dickey used to work at an advertising company writing ads for Coca Cola and Lays. He was incensed that an executive introduced him as one of their writers who does poetry as a hobby. Advertising was his hobby, poetry was his life! He later said “I sold my soul to the devil all day and tried to buy it back at night.”
Maybe we wouldn’t find it so hard to quit toxic jobs or switch from unrewarding careers if we viewed our jobs as just a way to make money and not an extension of our identity.