WHY "WHAT DO YOU DO?" IS THE LAMEST QUESTION ON EARTH RIGHT NOW.

So what do you do? I do pretend to enjoy it when I'm asked this and I usually answer that I am a writer. When they press further (because no one has anything interesting to talk about—more on that in a future post), I usually give a broad description of the kind of copywriting I usually do. Yes, I write my own stuff, to answer their next question. They think it's cool probably because it sounds enough like work but without bitchy bosses or inflexible hours. Sometimes, a more "established" acquaintance will say, "at least you're not a waiter, right?" Whatever. I always knew it would be this way. Still, the ubiquity of the question demonstrates what occurs when a younger generation steps up into its fathers' society and, I think, underscores the need for us to develop healthier ways of looking at ourselves and others.

When I was in high school, "what do you do for fun?" was the default, small-talk opener amongst peers. In college, "what's your major?" or "what do you want to be?" took its place. Already, a shift was underway from seeing one another as people with rich inner lives to units of economic production. And yet each of these questions, trite and cliché, at least aimed at uncovering some sort of sympathetic truth. To ask them is to inquire into the nature of a human being. Since college, "what do you do?" is the unsurprising victor of the small-talk wars. I am told it will remain this way for the rest of my life.

Of course, this was not the first thing on my mind when I tied to read Chrisopher Hudspeth's "19 Tips of Females in 2012" (Note: introducing it as I have is in no way an attempt to legitimize this slipshoddery as worthwhile reading. It is not. I could write a rage-filled book with no punctuation about what's wrong with masquerading this glorified anthology of vaguely misogynistic tweets as an "article."). My first attempt to read this stalled at tip #4:

"Just because a dude has a Nikon camera and is decent at Photoshop does not make him a photographer. And more importantly, posing for him doesn’t make you a model."

The question this leads us to is an obvious one: what does make him a photographer? There are a number of legitimating criteria—consider things like taking photography "seriously," actively engaging in its history and craft, or regarding it as "the dream"—that become increasingly abstract by our mid-twenties, when, basically proficient at everything that interests us, the obstacles between "the hobby" and "the real" never feels greater than one evening of single-minded devotion.

More often, rather than wade into the quagmire of serious philosophical thinking, people employ the single expedient of commoditization: to wit, you are a photographer when someone pays you for photographs.

Anyone who has ever seriously attempted to make art has bumped up against this kind of resistance at one time or another. Even Paul Varjak is asked of the infallibly loveable Holly Golightly of 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's, "Are you a real writer? I mean, does anybody buy what you write?" That Varjak is a prostitute is, to my eyes, beside the point. To society, to the Empire, it is the entire point. It is obvious what that makes Miss. Golightly.

It is obvious, also, what this makes the thousands (millions?) of aspiring artists and activists derided constantly for their perceived unwillingness to get "a job" while trying to make it. But under the conditions of the society they've inherited, some reluctance is entirely appropriate. For better and worse, the upbringing of a young intellectual builds, slowly and meticulously, her identity. At a time when she owns very little besides debt, it is the only thing that belongs to her and the thread that ties together her every experience. In a culture where she is defined as a person by the task for which she is mostly highly paid, we ask her to compromise her identity for minimum wage at McDonald's? We ask her to define herself as a fast food fry cook so that the next guy she meets at a party who asks her what she does before he asks her name will immediately identify her as low class and lacking in guile? It is preposterous and especially cruel.

And I know that the world can be cruel at times. I know that the economy is an unsympathetic reality to which we have all, more or less, agreed. I am not suggesting that naïve petulance is acceptable or that artists starve ("Hunger actually makes it really hard to concentrate." - Science). I just believe that if we must continue to extol the virtues of the "American work ethic," let's stop making our jobs the only thing we need to know about one another. Then maybe the next Picasso will bag your fucking groceries.

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