Who am I without my job?

Try it now, while it costs you nothing. Answer the question “who are you” without mentioning your work. Most people reach straight for the next role down: I'm a father, I'm the one who holds everything together, I'm reliable, I'm the strong one. Look closely and each of those is also a job. Unpaid, loved and real, and still defined by what you do for someone else. Take those away too. Imagine that nobody needs anything from you. There's usually a pause, a reach into a space that comes back with less than you expected.

In my book Obsolete I call that pause the most important thing in the book. It's the distance between your functions and you. If there were a fully built person under all the doing, the question would get an answer the way “what's your name” does, without a hunt. The hunt is the tell.

How the job became the self

Nobody decides it. Work gives you something to say at parties, a shape for the week, a reason to get up that arrives before you're properly awake. Over the years the job carries more and more of the load of being someone, and the version of you that would exist without it goes quiet from disuse.

Being needed also works as an anaesthetic. A life full of work and people who depend on you leaves no quiet afternoon for the question to come up. For most of history that held, because the work lasted about as long as the body did. The two ran out at roughly the same time.

What happens when the function ends

I watched it for twenty years in the chair, mostly with men, and I watched it in my own family. When my brother and I left home, my mother, who had kept a house and a family for thirty years, started volunteering at the local hospital, going room to room changing the flowers. When my father stopped working he took to riding the community bus that took older people on day trips, helping them up the step. Good, kind things. Look at what they are, though: the same function, rehomed, found fast, before the silence could open.

In hospice I sat with a ninety-one-year-old man who turned down an operation that would probably have given him five more good years. He had provided for everyone, and everyone was now fine. “I never did the work to understand who I am beyond providing for others,” he told me. Without a function, he couldn't see what the extra years were for.

What AI changes

AI can now do a growing share of the work people are paid for, including work that happens at a desk and feels like thinking. In the podcast series The AI Replacement Revelation I asked what that reveals. If software can perform your function, the function was always more procedure than person. That's a hard sentence about a job. It says nothing about your worth.

In the first episode of that series I used the image of a crutch. A crutch is essential while a leg heals. The trouble comes when someone never puts it down and their sense of themselves fuses with the support. Many jobs have worked like that: they carried the weight of earning a living and asked very little of the person doing them. When that kind of support is taken away, the reaction is often fear and anger, and underneath the fear is a question the job used to hold at bay. What do I actually want, and what am I capable of when I'm not following someone else's procedure?

What's new is the timing. The function may now leave in your forties or fifties, with decades still ahead, and the body may keep going long after it used to stop. The anaesthetic is being withdrawn while you're wide awake. That is the central argument of Obsolete: Who Are You When the Machine Can Do It All, and Death Is Optional?

How to start finding out

• Ask the question while it's cheap. On an ordinary day, while the job is still there to hold you up, ask who you are without it. Write down what comes back, including the pause.
• Watch the reach. On the empty afternoon, notice the pull to fill it with a task or someone to help. You don't have to resist it every time. See it for what it is.
• Choose one thing nobody needs from you. Decide it's required, by you and of you, for its own sake, and show up for it as though someone were waiting. In Obsolete I call this manufacturing your own necessity.
• Test it against silence. If the reason survives weeks with no thanks, no pay and nobody noticing, it belongs to you. If it dies when the applause stops, it was another function in disguise.

While your worth lives in usefulness, it's held by whoever you're useful to: an employer, a market, a family whose needs will change. Moving some of it back into your own hands is slow work, and it's the work that makes a long life worth having. If losing your work has tipped into something heavier than this question, talk to someone you trust, or to a professional, before anything else.

Where this comes from

Obsolete is the full argument, from the hospice rooms to what AI and longer lives now ask of us. On The Architect Speaks: Why you're really afraid of AI taking your job, The AI Replacement Revelation: what your job was actually worth, When the job goes, what's left: ground vs scaffolding in a life, and Why your work became your identity and burned you out.