The function of day jobs

I've been meaning to write a bit more about two of the three films we saw last weekend but, again, am only managing some proper blogging time on Sunday evening. In case you're wondering what the third one was, it was Woody Allen's latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which was deeply disappointing. Note to self: always pay attention to the second half of those key sentences in reviews. Similar views abound: 'Allen's most impressive work - from the last decade', 'A true return to form - compared with his other recent films' (or something to that effect). I should have known, as I should have thought more carefully about what these comparisons were made with: Match Point, Scoop, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Anything Else - against this list, The 40-Year-Old Virgin could seem positively profound.

Okay, back to the topic. Tokyo Sonata (by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, hitherto chiefly known for a string of horror films) and Revolutionary Road (by Sam Mendes, which I already wrote a little about last week) couldn't have been more different in style, plot and tone, but for me, both conveyed an important and timely message: looking around us (or, perhaps, in the mirror), the modern metropolitans and suburbia are full of people whose identity are largely - or in the case of Tokyo Sonata's protagonist, entirely - formed through their jobs. Once that's taken away, either by accident or by design, they'll be at a loss as to what to do with their lives at all. Their so-called hobbies have either been eroded by, or subsumed to, the job itself; their social connections are built within the work context (unemployment can be an infectious disease that your friends want to avoid catching); they get up and, not knowing what to do, sometimes resort to the solution of 'mock-living' their previously cocooned, repetitive work-life (there are some really funny moments in Tokyo Sonata depicting this. Funny, that is, until the illusion is tragically cut short).

I often marvel at the fact that, working in the arts, I have the good fortune to be surrounded by people who are genuinely passionate about what they do for a living, in contrast with millions of others in the city whose chief drive in the context of work would include things like security and material gain. At a time when so many jobs are being lost daily - in arts as well as elsewhere - the need to take a moment to ask ourselves some of those fundamental questions seems more pressing than ever. The Noughties version of 'Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I doing here?' could well be 'Who am I? Why am I doing what I do? Is it mostly what I do, known as my job, that defines me as a person to people whom I call my friends and family? If that's the case, isn't it rather worrying, no matter if there's a recession on or not?'

I suppose a lot of people go through their lives without having figured out - or perhaps even thought about - what they really want from life or who they really want to be. A job is easily the most visible kind of identity, and naturally becomes the most expedient kind too. But perhaps we could all use a little bit of reckoning, of recognising that the function of a day job is precisely what we hate to think it is: something to pay the bills with. If you happen to really love what you do, so much the better; but it really doesn't equal who you are - the answer to that surely consists of experiences, qualities and skills that may well not get an airing during a lifetime's working hours. No matter how grand your job title, how impressive your professional achievements or how over-sized your pay package might be, strip these all away and are you - you the person - still there? If not, what's the point of keeping the bills paid anyway?