What do you do for a living?
I’ll be going home for Christmas Tuesday, back to a small town of 7,000 people on the edge of Ontario and Minnesota, a place where designers and bloggers are a very foreign concept that I’ll inevitably have to explain to anyone asking “what I’m up too now”.
People don’t really get what a designer or a blogger is there, and explanation of either is usualy meet with confused looks and attempts at comparing you to something almost unrelated. People expect me to be working in some sort of IT support job, despite the fact that I’ve been doing graphic design for 5 years, because it’s somewhat close to what they think design and blogging is and it’s a “real job”.
Family is the worst for doing that, I’ve focused my efforts on my design company only to have my family tell me about a job at Wal-Mart in the electronics department I should apply for in an attempt to find me a “real” job. And don’t get me started on when someone happens to ask them what I do. It’s probably partly my fault for not having the patients to explain what I do till they understand, but it’s not easy to quantify for everyone. Which is why I’ve been everything from a web designer to a media consultant in attempts to find something they can easily define themselves.
Regardless, for my parents and my grandparents generation, if it’s not something that exerts some sort of physical effort and requires you to get up at nine in the morning to go to an office it’s probably not a “real job”. But this holiday I’m going to take a bit more time to try and explain my career choice and hopefully get an understanding nod at best.
I’ll describe the blogging part of my income as a writer with a weekly column about design issues, and the designer part as a consultant specializing in helping small businesses compete in the marketplace. Both of those at least sound like a “real job” I think, and both a true.
How do you explain blogging for a living?
Vincent | December 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm #
Why not just have a laugh with your family about the fact that you get people to give you money because you know how to write really good letters to the public? To them it may seem that all the people whom are paying you are pretty silly to give you money for that reason, but as you might say, it’s money and that your not really complaining… you enjoy it really?
There’s my 2 cents for this blog post. Nice way to finish it, start and finish with pretty much the same sentence.
wwstewart | December 15th, 2007 at 6:42 pm #
Very true. Good post…
except for this…
Jonathan Street | December 15th, 2007 at 8:27 pm #
wwstewart, except for that and the other three (can anyone find more?) errors.
I’m lucky in that I’m primarily a full time student. In theory how I spend my days should be easy to explain. In practice after six years pursuing my university education, when the norm is three, it is getting harder and harder.
I think there are two issues here. Firstly the idea of being paid to study is difficult to get across (and you John Leschinski, imagine being paid to design websites. How extraordinary!). Secondly, the longer I spend in university the more specialised my area of expertise becomes.
It is rare that people understand what it is we do. Then, even after lengthy explanation (filled with many ummm’s and ahhh’s from us as we try and dumb down our descriptions) we have to get across the notion that we can even make a prosperous and fulfilling career out of what we do.
I wish you luck. Though if your family is anything like mine it won’t be enough
JamieO | December 15th, 2007 at 9:55 pm #
If you want to appear all wise and stoic, you could memorize this passage which is a Yiddish proverb about Foolish Behaviour but told in such a way that you could re-use it to challenge your families’ perception that working by the clock is the best way to use your time on this planet. You know…. ‘eff with ‘em a bit.
“A fool has a fine world.”
The harder we strive to avoid working, the more flak we take from the unenlightened majority who actually think that work is important. We Men Who Do Next to Nothing know that although the grasshopper and the ant lead very different lives - one a creature of leisure, the other a creature of endless toil - they come to the same end, either squashed under somebody’s boot or fried by a kid with a magnifying glass. So why work so hard? Why work at all?
So some people call us fools. Why? Because we don’t have a six-figure salary, a stock portfolio, or furniture in our apartment? But while we’re gorging on Little Debbie cakes and perusing the new swimsuit edition, what are all those wise guys doing? They’re working. So we must ask ourselves: ourselves: Who is the fool, and who is the wise man?
The moral of the story, “What good is furniture if you’re too busy to sit on it?”