AND THE ONLY TIME YOU EVER "DO" ANYTHING AT WORK...:

Work is an ennobling and enriching part of human life, but career isn't necessarily, nor is having a job. Work in its purest form is ubiquitous and profound: the ancient origins of the word itself mean simply "to do". Work is doing, a doing that gradually accrued the sense of exertion, effort, labour, but also with a trace of artistic, scholarly, or constructive context. The sense is retained in the modern idiom "What do you do?"

Yet, curiously, this question now receives answers at variance with the key verb: instead of telling people what we "do" we tend to tell them what or where we are: "I work in government", "I'm a business development manager", "I'm the part-owner of a café." Sometimes this is because a single word like "doctor" or "accountant" is enough to convey to a lay audience some semblance of the work involved.

In other cases it's because the actual work encompassed by a single job title is too eclectic and diverse to be neatly summarised. But in every case such responses are encouraged by the general consensus that work is about more than what we do, that it is part of who we are, helps form and shape our identity, and gives substance to the demands of our pride or ego. "Work" in the sense of "what do you do?" is understood in terms of career.

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