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Rikard's avatar

Great point about the importance of what ideas can be expressed via language!

I think this is a bleed-through from those careers that are very close to a lifestyle. Police, military, fireman, all kinds of artists and musicians and writers come to mind.

Whereas f.e. a plumber or a teacher need not "wear their professional suit" after hours, a fireman (or a nurse) is sort-of always on-call should circumstances warrant they act.

I think this has permeated the English language ever since the idea of lifelong career with a pocket watch and a pension at the end was demolished in the 1980s. Now, everyone is simply an easily replaced meat-robot the same way it was a century and more ago (Chaplin's 'Modern Times' and Lang's 'Metropolis' shows the ideas of industrialism, futurism and modernism better than anyone), and therefore identification (or rather: "identifiction") has become both the ocean to drown in, and the lifebuoy to cling to.

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JC's avatar

Just re-watched Metropolis with the restored discovered South American footage.

Agree.

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Michelle Lobdell's avatar

You just got a follow. 😊

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Stephenie's avatar

That’s very deep.

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Rikard's avatar

Thank you, but I can't take credit - it is something I was taught when I started working in a factory, at age 15, making parts for water taps.

"Who you are when you go home, that's you. At work, no-one cares because we're here to do a job and get paid, that's all." is the gist of what the older men told me back then.

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Jake Wiskerchen's avatar

I blame Google for the "bring your whole self to work" nonsense that's completely collapsed the professional work environment. No, man, bring your work self to work and leave the other stuff home.

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Rikard's avatar

I blame Google for lots of things, but this one I think is older than them. I'd date it to the 1970s, and the radical feminist ideal of "the private is political". If one grows up being taught that, /everything/ becomes political, including your identity.

As I asked students and colleagues many-a time:

"How do you hammer a nail in, in a feminist manner?"

Never fails to raise hackles, and "feminist" can of course be replaced with any identitarian moniker. It's a good question I think, for showing the folly of making everything political, when almost nothing really is.

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Jake Wiskerchen's avatar

Now it's "equity"

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