What do you do?

"What do you do?" implies "Who are you?" and means "How do you earn money?"

This entangles our identity with the way we earn money.

This limits us in two ways. We lose our agency in choosing the most effective way to earn money. And we lose our agency in choosing the identity we want to craft.

It requires emotional labour to dissociate the two. And culture makes it more challenging.

But, if we try, we can have different answers for "This is how I earn money", "This is what I do" and "This is who I am".