The trouble with the question everyone asks

Wherever you are in the world, there is a question people ask to work out who you are. It is not the same question everywhere.

Americans ask what you do, usually within four minutes of your arrival. The British circle around it more politely and get there eventually. Germans often ask outright what you do “beruflich”, which is more direct than the English version and less apologetic about it. Somewhere else it is your family, or where you are from, or who you know in common.

The wording varies but the function does not. Whatever form the question takes, a role answers on your behalf. It tells people roughly how to place you, roughly what you are worth taking seriously about, and roughly what to ask next. It is enormously efficient, and you never have to think about it, because the job description does the work that a self-description would otherwise have to do.

Then at some point the role changes, or ends, or stops matching the person holding it. And the question that took no thought for thirty years suddenly has no ready answer.

This is a vocabulary problem, not an identity problem

The conclusion most women draw at that moment is that they have lost themselves. We think that conclusion is wrong, and it is worth being precise about why.

Nothing has been lost. What is missing is language. You have spent decades never being required to describe yourself in any terms other than function, because function was always available and always sufficient. Nobody, including you, has ever asked what remains when you take the title away, so no words were ever developed for it.

Being under-described is not the same as being undefined. The women we meet at this stage are not vague about themselves. They are extremely clear and extremely inarticulate, which is a strange combination and a very common one.

What to say instead

There is a way of answering the question that is not a job title and not an evasion.

It usually sounds like a set of interests rather than a set of credentials. What you are curious about at the moment. What you are working on, in the widest sense of working. What you have changed your mind about recently. These are harder to say and considerably more interesting to hear, and they have the useful property of being true regardless of what happens to your employment.

They also filter the room quite efficiently. A job title invites people to place you. A real answer invites people to be interested, and the ones who are not interested move on, which saves everybody an evening.

Why it matters more than it sounds

This is not really about small talk.

The language you have for yourself determines what you can plan. If the only way you can describe your life is by naming your function, then every question about the future becomes a question about your next function, and the range of imaginable options collapses to a list of job descriptions. Widen the language and the options widen with it, immediately and without any change in circumstances.

This is the least expensive intervention we know of at this stage of life. It requires nothing except the willingness to practice describing yourself.

Most people find this harder than they expect, and the difficulty itself is worth paying attention to. If the answer runs out after a sentence, it usually means the roles have been doing the describing for a long time. That works perfectly well until the roles change.

Then try it again tomorrow. It comes more easily the second time, and that is the useful part. Nothing new had to be invented. The words were simply never asked for.