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.

The “day in the life” video trend captures how much we care about occupation, or, what takes up our time. Work is also a vocation: we are called to it, like how the hero begins his trek with the call of a mission—a destiny—that feels beyond him.

Just like a lover, work can excite us, comfort us, make us feel fulfilled, and make us feel worthy or purposeful. When your work doesn’t make you feel whole, you can feel something is off. This is what people who push for AI-automated-everything miss out on: work isn’t simply a function of adding human labor to squeeze out product (and profit), it’s a process where we inject our humanness into the things we touch, it’s how we express ourselves and how we achieve a kind of directional living. Many Tesla drivers say they don’t always use autopilot because they enjoy driving.

When people refer to something I’ve written and I can identify exactly which post they’re talking about, they often ask if I memorize my own writing. I don’t memorize anything, but because I put so much soul into it, I can say I know my posts, the way matrimony makes a union of flesh, the way “Adam knew Eve his wife…” in Genesis 4:1, “…and she conceived,” the way we use the word “conceive” to describe both the beginning of a pregnancy and the budding growth of an idea (a CONCEPT), a creative project, or a new venture. Something about a labor of love…

Work as prayer

The word “bachelor” comes from baccalaris, Latin for farmhand, meaning that an unmarried person is “married” to their work—their vocation, their role in the economy. In pop culture, someone who’s fully dedicated to the hustle and getting rich is described as “married to the money” or “married to the game”.

In religion, those called to celibacy do not consider themselves “single” the way secular culture understands it, they consider themselves attached to their work, which is not detached from the sacred: in Christian and Zen monasteries, work is carefully designed to be part of daily life along with prayer and meditation. In the 14th century, “bachelor” also meant a junior member of a guild or university and then for low-level ecclesiastics, like young monks and newly appointed canons—it’s where we get the “bachelor’s degree” from.

No labor is truly secular. Even when your job isn’t directly creative or religious, work and the soul are intertwined. In the myth of Pygmalion, the marble statue comes to life because its sculptor fell so madly in love with it, as if to say, “when you love your work enough, it transcends the material world to meet you at the depths of your human soul.”

This answers the dilemma: are you good at something because you enjoy it or do you enjoy something because you’re good at it? I say, the more you love what you do, the more it loves you back.

Tibetan monks meticulously craft mandalas over several days using colored sand and funnels, then finish it by destroying it in seconds.

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Brooklyn, June 2025

I’m in Brooklyn for the week because of work (Gumroad!) and a live reading hosted with some other Substack stars (last chance to get your ticket). What stands out to me about American (but especially NYC) businesses is heritage. A city that prides itself (rightfully so) on productivity, competition, and greatness does so with sturdiness and longevity because it values tradition.

Steinway & Sons and Russ & Daughters are examples of businesses rich with family myth. Like genes—like sons and daughters—work is something that can be passed down generationally. Businesses like that remind me of the story of Pinocchio: it’s about breathing life into inanimate objects, it’s about turning your enterprise into heirloom because it carries a soul. With a genuine heart, clear vision, and true dedication, a wooden marionette becomes a real boy—a son, a child, a product of love.

What will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

— Laurentian Shield, F. R. Scott

All work is liturgical: liturgy, the ritual of worship, comes from Greek: laos (people) and ergos (work), which together translates as “ordinary person’s work.” A liturgy means taking your soul with you everywhere we go. So, yes, ordinary actions matter: cutting hair, taking out trash, writing code, knitting a scarf. Work relates to the soul as much as it does to a function: In the medieval world, professions had patron gods (Saturn for carpenters, Mercury for clerks, Venus for gardeners, to name a few).

There’s no such thing as “just a job.” People in great careers often began in something humble, adjacent, or totally unrelated. Only in hindsight do they see how it led them to where they are. All work is vocational.

So, how should you answer, “what do you do”?

I don’t know. But, at the very least, I think you should answer it as if the question were,

What feels like a calling rather than a choice?
How do you express your individuality?
What part of your job fulfills you? What do you tend to with obsessive care?
What part of your job challenges you? What part feels like devotion?
What do you create that others enjoy? How do you bring beauty into the world? What have you poured yourself into that began to resemble you?

~

Go make love,

Work or play? (Young Student Drawing by Chardin. I wrote about him here)