Work as Identity Archives - Page 2 of 2

In Doers We Trust

In early 2017 the freelance platform Fiverr ran an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust” in the New York City subway. One poster read: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Jia Tolentino quoted it in The New Yorker in March 2017. She also quoted a 2016 post on the Lyft blog about a driver in Chicago who was in labor: “she stayed in driver mode, and sure enough—ping!— she received a ride request en route to the hospital.” Tolentino called it a “faux-inspirational tale.”

Poolside

In February 2014 Cadillac launched a television ad for its ELR car during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics. The actor Neal McDonough stands by his pool and asks, “Why do we work so hard? For what? For this? For stuff?”

He says that other countries “take August off. Off!” Then he answers his own question: “Because we’re crazy, driven, hard-working believers, that’s why.” The ad ends: “As for all the stuff? That’s the upside of only taking two weeks off in August, n’est-ce pas?”

Cadillac called the ad a “brand provocation.” Some viewers praised it as “an unapologetic ode to American values.” Others called it “Ugly American chest thumping at its worst.”

Busyness as a Status Symbol

In 2017 three marketing scholars, Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan, published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Its title is “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol.” They argued that in North America “a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol.”

Keinan explained: “the new conspicuous consumption is about saying, I am the scarce resource, and therefore I am valuable.”

The phrase conspicuous consumption comes from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). For Veblen, leisure was the mark of status.

Workism

In February 2019 Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic: “What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose …”

He cited a Pew survey in which 95 percent of American teenagers said having “a job or career they enjoy” would be extremely or very important to them as adults. That ranked above helping people in need and above marriage. “But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.”

“What do you do?”

“What do you do?” This is often the first question Americans ask when meeting someone new, highlighting how work is central to personal identity in American culture.

virtue and effort

The Protestant work ethic, brought to America by early Puritans and other settlers, reinforced the idea that hard work and economic success are signs of divine favor. This theological perspective aligns closely with capitalist ideals, suggesting that market success is a reflection of personal virtue and effort. Consequently, prices determined by the market are perceived as just rewards for one’s labor and entrepreneurial skill, rather than as fixed, objective values.