On the subject of this post: TED – Alain de Botton on Career and Life Anxiety, there is a very nice short three-minute audio interview in the Guardian about work.
Alain speaks about the difficulty in describing a specialist work. Far greater difficulty is actually describing the general professions that people think they know something about. The truth is that all professions are exceedingly specialized today. So if you tell someone you are an architect, a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, etc., people think they know what you do. At least with an obscure profession there is hope that eventually one can find a description, at least after several follow up questions but with the classical “commonly known” professions there is not even a hope that people would understand and appreciate what you do. One would have to overcome a life long mythology induced by books, movies, televisions. A hopeless task indeed. Someone who manufactures plastic containers knows what to put on his tombstone, he has an identity, no such luck for an engineer. And incidentally both are pretty limiting in announcing a human being, expect a specialized profession by the very nature of the narrow absurdity hints that there must be more to the person, it gives you a way out.
Further reading: