Earning a living shouldn’t be at odds with life. I have a niece who is not yet five. The last time I babysat, she was jolted awake by a bad dream. As I lay with her soothing her back to sleep, she confessed (with a tangible level of stress): “I don’t know what to be when I grow up!” The worry of what to do for work was literally keeping this child up at night . How did this happen? What is it in our environment that is already putting career pressure on children? I can’t help but see this is a symptom of a larger issue — a cultural obsession with defining ourselves by what we do , not who we are. I’ve always dreaded the question “what do you do?” To me, it feels unimaginative and betrays a work-centric worldview. The cycle of living to work can feel inescapable (already) so it worries me when work becomes our first way of relating to each other. The more that mainstream culture becomes a cult of consumption, the more tied we are to production, earnings, and deriving meaning