What Do I Do for a Living? Confronting an Identity Crisis. (2/2)
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In part one I ask what it means when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t officially recognize my job, and reflect on the challenges of describing what I do for a living to those who don’t understand the scope of my work. I also explore professions with which I might find affinity—writer, storyteller, and journalist—and come up short. Where does it leave me if my perceived value to society isn’t “counted” and can’t be easily explained?
The exploration continues…
Am I… an Essayist?
In a previous life I wrote essays for several publications on an array of topics: the privatization of the military; the echoes of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua today; the difficulty separating artists from their art; on Rothko’s blurry paintings as a manifestation of an unmoored identity; on solitude. One essay I’m proud of is an introduction to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, in which I liken the protagonist’s frustrating refusal to work (“I would prefer not to”) to the ambiguous demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement,1 which occurred in the same downtown Manhattan neighborhood as Melville’s novella. (Incidentally, Bartleby’s job has much in common with comms; if you haven’t read the masterpiece, get on it.)
In that previous life I also interviewed fascinating artists, writers, and philosophers, including Noam Chomsky, Shahrnush Parsipur, Salman Rushdie, Maya Lin, Cornel West, and many others. I love interviewing people. The art of the interview is a skill I’ve translated from private pursuits to working for The Man, but it comes with the usual limitations of doing so in support of a corporate narrative. (See the writer section in part one.)
Back to the essay. One of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, says:
Essays are occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.
Oh how this average man loves writing and thinking “about all sorts of different stuff,” which is why I am most at home within the essay, a form popularized by the 16th-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Essay is derived from the French essayer, which means “to attempt” or “to try.” My long-form writing attempts to uncover a kernel of capital T Truth.
Ergo, my favorite articles to write for the Mixternal Comms Playbook are lengthy explorations of comms-adjacent subjects:
a two-parter on orthogonal thinking
an eight-part think piece on communications as craftsmanship
a nine-part whopper on overcoming the innovator’s dilemma
a lengthy polemic against applying for industry awards
And this two-part navel-gazer, which I’ve been crafting for nearly four months.
But few—if any—of MCP’s readers sign up for my deep thoughts on tangential topics. Indeed, none of the essays above crack the top 10 list of popular articles, as judged by views. (One essay does make the list: When Should We Say Something About Social Issues? A Way Forward.) What happens when what I want to write about isn’t what my readers want to pay for?
Close to 90% of MCP articles are of the how-to type, and I cannot recall a single essay I’ve published for a corporate blog or intranet. Essayer as I might, I am not an essayist.
The opposite, in fact. In the comms world it seems anyone with an opinion on storytelling swears by the untested gut feeling that employees have no attention span. This is ironic, considering we trust these same employees to pay attention to something long enough to do their job. Anything secondary to their main role is a “distraction,” and therefore must be “snackable” (and while you’re at it can you make a TikTok-like video, mmkay?).
And yet, these same employees—a.k.a. humans who have lives outside of work—are buying print books, audiobooks, and ebooks at steady or increasing rates. These same humans—a.k.a. employees—have no problem sitting for 60-minute town halls, to say nothing of 90-minute soccer matches and four-hour football games (then getting lost in post-game analysis and statistics for even more minutes and hours). So-called “prestige television,” defined by complex storytelling over many hours (and often many years), remains popular. Long-form podcasts are ascendent and long-form blogging is making a comeback.
Why assume our (human) employees only want or can only handle short-form content? Why assume everything has to be read or viewed (in our parlance, consumed) in fewer than 60 seconds? In a fantasy comms world my teams would produce for intranets and blogs lengthy pieces à la The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the NYRB, whose subscription rates are holding steady or trending up.
The fact that you—a human who is also an employee—are still reading this says something: Employees will go the distance, so long as the content is useful and interesting.
If it’s the case that anything secondary or tertiary to one’s main job is a distraction, what value should we place on a role that measures success by how effectively it diverts employees’ attention? (Obsessions over clicks, likes, comments, and open rates, anyone?)
Am I … a Communicator?
“The Great Communicator” was one of Ronald Reagan’s nicknames. The 40th president was known for a persuasive speaking style that connected with audiences. He was adept at using television—as ubiquitous as social media today—to speak directly to Americans (and the world.)
To be a communicator2 is to encompass a multifaceted role transcending the simplistic notion of merely conveying information. A communicator is also a bridge builder, connecting different parts of the company to get everyone “on the same page.” In my career this has meant reinforcing a company narrative, ensuring content carries a “through-line” regardless of the medium, channel, or audience segment.
Communication across a corporation, however, isn’t always simple (though if internal comms pros could be Queen for a Day, they sure as hell could simplify unnecessarily complex comms).
Playwright George Bernard Shaw sounds like a disgruntled comms pro when he observes, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” The results of any employee survey will tell you the same.
Am I… a Craftsman?
On the first evening of my wood carving apprenticeship,3 I was asked separately by three carvers what I do for a living. What, I don’t look like a wood carver? I played it straight this time and told them I was in corporate communications for a semiconductor company. Their eyes glazed over, and two immediately returned to their basswood animals.
But one brave artist held my gaze, daring me to explain. I buckled under the pressure and told him I spend my day at a computer. I’m here because I want to do something with my hands that doesn’t involve a keyboard. Could I have made it further—to an actual conversation about my work—if I had given a more accurate answer? That, in truth, I work in corporate communications for a wafer fabrication equipment company and, on the side, I publish a newsletter for corporate communications professionals. My guess is that many of the Mixternal Comms Playbook’s readers would rather talk about wood carving, even if they’ve never held a Flexcut® #3 chisel (9mm).
How can I capture my comms role in a neat sentence when there’s so much variety week to week, day to day, hour to hour? In addition to writing, for example, I must master complementary skills like editing and publishing. Contrast my reality with those of writer John McPhee, storyteller Neil Gaiman, and journalist Maggie Haberman (see part one), all of whom have separate people and teams that edit, fact-check, publish, and promote their content.
The multitude of tasks I must navigate day to day, hour by hour reminds me of craftsmen like the furniture maker Gary Rogowski. One could be forgiven for thinking he’s “just” a furniture maker, like 3rd+ level LinkedIn connections can be forgiven for thinking I’m “just” in corporate comms.
But Rogowski reminds us in his memoir, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction, that if he wants to eat he must sell his work. So, in addition to being a craftsman, Rogowski is also a businessman, operations and logistics manager, designer, salesman, networker, marketer, customer service agent, and delivery driver. To say nothing of the various skills he must master to be “just” a furniture maker, such as math, design (aesthetics), woodworking with sundry tools, technical drawing, modeling, knowledge of material (e.g., oak vs. teak), sustainable practices, and, unless he’s a purist, computer-aided-design.
And so it is in the comms world, where the writer is the editor is the publisher is the promoter is the data collector. Oh, and the 23 other things I (and my kind) do as comms pros every day, often across a dozen unrelated programs. A writer, editor, publisher, and promoter, yes, and also:
project/program/campaign manager
strategist
budgeter
executive adviser/counselor
data analyst
designer
administrative assistant
people (and hiring) manager
knowledge librarian
host (podcast, webinar, dept. mtg., etc.)
tech troubleshooter
web/intranet/chat tool guru
coach/mentor
stakeholder manager/approval chaser/cat herder
internal customer service agent
researcher
public speaker/presenter (.pptx 😫🔫)
party/event planner
multimedia producer (video, audio, photography, stage)
social media content creator
vendor/contract/agency manager
therapist
Aaaaand professional meeting attendee. About 40% of my week is spent in meetings. Of the time that’s left, a majority of it is spent not writing (see above, plus this tangent4). My job, like yours, requires versatility, changing jobs throughout the day. I may be a “writer” or a “storyteller” or a “manager,” etc., but only for a few hours a week at a time. Are a few hours enough to sum to a graspable job title?
Thank goodness for Walt Whitman, whose profundity girds my waking days:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)The difference between Rogowski and me is that most of his time is spent doing the thing he loves.
Am I…Replaceable?
What happens if what you (my reader) need—tips, how-to’s, sample comms, (not essays)—will soon be written by your personal workplace chatbot?5
In the next couple of years hiring for corporate communications professionals will plateau and then dip because assistance from artificial intelligence will negate the need for junior employees. For the first time all of us will actually be able to do more with less, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. First AI will come for PR, then employee and executive comms. We’re all in the crosshairs.
What does this say about the nature of my creativity, of my contributions to my employer—to our profession?
Around 13% of American jobs are writing-intensive, according to The New Republic’s Samanth Subramanian. “Many of these jobs are likely to evaporate,” she says, “but when this is aired as a concern, the champions of automation have a standard lexicon of liberation.” Subramanian cites the charged battle cry from Dennis Tenen, author of Literary Theory for Robots: “Freed from the bondage of erudition, today’s scribes and scholars can challenge themselves with more creative tasks.” We’ll see about that.
For how long does anyone care about the intranet article I sweated over, the exec memo I was asked out-of-nowhere to draft that entirely upended my day and stressed me out, or the “thought leadership” LinkedIn post that took weeks to fine-tune? Employees don’t care that a human called Shaun Randol drafted the content, to say nothing of the thousands of pieces that have gone down corporate black holes over the past 15 years. Ultimately what matters is the message, not the man (or the robot) behind it, right?
The thing about that introduction to Bartleby is that it will be here long after I’m gone. It has been printed on paper and bound between emerald green covers. It literally exists on bookshelves (or, more likely, in $1 bargain bins). Maybe in a hundred years some android will paw through a flying car rummage sale and find at the bottom of the crate a beaten-up paperback—an antique book with ideas generated by a human named Shaun Randol who once lived and had something thoughtful to say about a great society that convulsed for a split second.
Meanwhile at work, the hours and days and weeks and months and years go by and everything I have to show for it is ephemeral. As quickly as I churn them out my creations disappear into a digital void. Poof, gone. Unlike the arborist, sewer pipe cleaner, or carpenter (or wood carver!), a decade later I cannot point to a finished comms product and declare, I did that.
What that android won’t find at the bottom of the sale bin is this essay or any of the thousands of intranet articles with my byline.
Am I…Frozen?
To return to the question that started all of this: what do I do for a living? This essay has been an attempt to, as Joan Didion says about why she writes, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.”
What it means… what does it all mean? Indeed.
I've rummaged through a wardrobe of possible affinity identities, trying on suits that don’t quite fit. At least now I know what I don’t do for a living. I’m not in PR, HR, or Marketing. I’m not a writer, storyteller, journalist, essayist, or craftsman (or umpire, arborist, sewer pipe cleaner, or neuro-micro-anthro-medeival-pharmacology-forensics expert).
So what do I do? And how do I explain it so that people walk away knowing something nuanced about this world of corporate comms…and describe it in a way that bores neither the interrogator nor me?6
Over ~5,500 words I thought I would move closer to an answer only to find I’ve spun in a circle. Or maybe I never even moved. I’m paralyzed.
Another word for paralyzed is frozen. Ironically, the person who may have the best advice for how I should move on—Elsa, the protagonist in Disney’s Frozen—isn’t a real person and doesn’t have a real job (she’s royalty, also not classified by the U.S. government).
According to the songwriters, Elsa’s anthemic solo “Let It Go” reimagines her as a complex, vulnerable, and sympathetic character who, like me, is “struggling to control and come to terms with her gift.” (If I may be so bold to say I have a gift, the gift of being able to communicate an idea effectively.) Frozen’s scriptwriter adds that the song—like this essay—is a cry to come to terms with who she is and to release an inner torment she’s kept to herself for too long.
The sadness is that while Elsa becomes free, she is still alone.
***
So what do I do for a living? What do we do for a living? It’s complicated. It’s complex. It can’t be easily explained because it’s convoluted, and yet it can’t be any other way. I know everything I do for my job, but I still can’t easily explain what my job is. What a conundrum.
Maybe I need to take Elsa’s advice and let it go—let go of the desire to explain myself. Maybe I just need to accept that my professional role—like my self —contains multitudes. When someone does ask What do you do?, I should be satisfied with whatever answer moves the conversation along.
The new age writer Eckhart Tolle says “Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.”
I surrender.
For two months I partook in the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s Financial District. You guessed it: I published essays about the life-altering experience.
A communicator facilitates information by conveying it, making it manifest, and revealing it clearly. Another kind of communicator spreads disease (related: see part one, footnote 7, point 3.)
That’s right: wood carving—at my town’s carousel where all the animals and decor are hand-chiseled. I started with a flower and have moved on to a hobby horse. Long-time readers may see I’m finally combining my aspiration for professional craftsmanship—as espoused in my mini-book, Communications As Craftsmanship: How Communications Professionals Can Rise Above Banality —with traditional craftsmanship.
Sure, spinning up a three-part content series on Event That Wasn’t On My Radar or wrangling teammates to cobble together a mini strategy on How Our Team Manages New Operational Thing is, at face value, fairly straightforward. But now I’m suddenly saddled with managing what Cal Newport refers to as an “overhead tax,” the administrative work rather than productive work: meeting after meeting (after meeting), notes, research, email after email (after email), newly-formed chatrooms, check-ins, updates, one-off queries, random scrambles, wild goose chases, drafts, reports, rewrites, approvals, reviews, presentations, etc., etc., etc., all of which adds hours of work to an already crammed schedule. Ignoring the price of the overhead tax is a costly oversight when someone is asked to take on any comms activity.
Substack lets me disallow my content to be used by the learning platforms used by generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. I checked that box so, at the very least, the Mixternal Comms Playbook’s “voice” and whatever original ideas I may have remain mine. For now.
It’s tempting to get snobbishly philosophical, to test the limits of how much drivel you’re willing to swallow. If you love footnotes as much as I do, this one’s for you. In an early draft I had a section inspired by René Descartes’s revelation, Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. I wondered: Can I will my job’s significance simply by declaring it? Cogito, ergo communico, ergo sum—I think, therefore I communicate, therefore I exist. I concluded that I could not because every job requires some level of thinking; in that way comms is not special.
It’s no coincidence I write this essay during a time when some people experience a mid-life crisis. Is this mine? This month I turn 45, a nice round number, and Death is a mild fixation. While searching for an answer to What do I do? I was reminded of the opening lines of Dante’s “Inferno,” translated by Jean Hollander, which resonate with this essay’s theme:
Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh—
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.Where the “midway” is what I hope is being shy of the halfway point on this earthly journey; the “dark wood” is coming up against this identity crisis; “how hard it is to tell” echoing the difficulty answering the question that kicked off this essay; recounting “the other things I saw” is reflecting the comparisons to other professional identities.
Again, snobbish, but such is the desperation, the grasping for any handhold, however tenuous, on a subjective reality, and my quiet desire for your affirmation.
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Disclaimer: Besides running the Mixternal Comms Playbook I am the editor-in-chief of Digital Publications at Lam Research. The views in this newsletter are my own.
Dammit, Shaun. You've been cutting a bit too close lately.