How to answer "what do you do?"

A meditation on jobs & how to work with love

Occupation

Another word for “jobs” is “occupation”, which really means “to be seized.” (Latin, occupatio, to take possession of).

“Occupation” used to refer to sex. In early modern English, “to occupy” was a dysphemism (a derogatory euphemism), for example, in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 2 (act 2 scene 4)”:

A captain? Gods light these villains will make the word as odious as the word occupy, which was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted.

English hasn’t changed that much. Today, we still use the term “getting busy” to describe…getting busy. Or, Fifth Harmony’s song, “Work from Home.” Or, Missy Elliot’s “Work It”:

Sex me so good I say blah-blah-blah
Work it, I need a glass of water
Boy, oh boy, it’s good to know ya

But is work really that different from love, beyond the slang? We like to say that we chose our work, but from the perspective of fate, we can say that our work chose us—it found us, claimed us, and it’s working us.