Work and identity

There was probably another thing that helped with my 2008 job loss. Before it happened, I had been to visit my Italian family twice. 

Previously I had only met the aunt who had come to visit us, but there were other aunts and uncles and cousins. You can hear things about people, but it is not the same as knowing them.

I had studied some Italian, but not a lot, and not recently. I wanted to be able to talk, so I memorized two questions: asking about their work, and for couples, asking how they met.

Given how many of them worked together, it should be surprising that they were all so uninterested in their jobs. In another way, it does make sense.

The job market in Italy -- even before the crash -- was tough. Getting jobs tended to involve knowing someone. (This also has a lot to do with why so many of the spouses worked at the same company.)

It's not that there wasn't pride of work or a commitment to doing a good job, especially with my family; our legacy is being good workers. But a lot of where you end up is luck, and because it is done through government programs, retirement and health care tend to be okay regardless. (This is especially miraculous given how often the government changes, but some of the systems function very well.)

The point is, people don't define themselves by their jobs. Their job is something they do, but their life is their family and their friends and their hobbies.

I do have one cousin who has beaten a different path, carving out an interesting career for himself. His siblings are really worried about it ruining his retirement. I don't think they need to worry, but I get why they do.

That is not a perfect system, but there are things that are very healthy about it.

It may have made a greater impression on me, because after getting back I was talking about it with one of the cafeteria workers. We had a flirtation going on, kind of, and even though we were both merely contractors, there could be ways in which I would be considered to outrank him because of the kind of work that we each did. That could be true even though I had run a cash register in previous jobs, and even though he had been doing something else before and would change to something else shortly after that. 

Without getting specifically into that, we talked about how much better that was, whereas here when you meet someone it is the first question, and the one given the most weight.

The thing that I would have said was better about the States then was that it was easier to start over. If you wanted to go back to college and change careers at 45, you could do it. 

But that was before the crash. The cost of tuition was rising, and the cost of living was going up, but we had not come quite so far in devaluing everyone. 

So back on the job market again, when everything was so much tighter, I felt devalued. Again, by the time I was working again, it was at a significant pay cut. In terms of work, I was very literally valued less.

If there was a part of me that understood that my value was not exclusively how much I earned, there was also still a part that was used to having more and being able to do more for my family and friends and random charities, and I felt that.

I felt that need to do things that I couldn't do, and there were limits to how much it got me down then, but it had a lingering effect all of the years of having that job, and then into what happened next, where depression did happen again.