A son of a friend of mine left college to pursue organic and sustainable agriculture, working on farms with a plan to do this long term.

I recently sent him a link for the National Young Farmers Coalition, a group that works with young farmers to help them succeed. The response to this was “I’m not a farmer.”

That made me think about identity. Who are we? How do we think of ourselves? What makes us one thing and not another? How important is all of this?

When I worked a regular job 60 or 70 hours a week, I had a very clear answer to the question “Who are you?” At various times, I was an executive producer, a teacher, a small business owner. This defined me in many ways. Some that were good; some that were constraining.

Now, I’m not sure what I am, and this is somewhat unsettling. I would never call myself “retired” — I still work and still need to work. But I no longer have a job that I spend as much time on nor one that I feel as strong an identity with. I freelance and do various jobs off and on, some of which I love, others of which I don’t, but none of which are “me.”

There are many other things I spend time on as well. I grow food. I bake and cook. I read. I write. I do wood working. Some of these seem more than hobbies, but none is a full time occupation. None is “who I am.”

Sometimes it helps me deal with these metaphysical questions to make up a narrative, and the story I’ve toyed with for this is that instead of working a job to buy things like food and housing, we’ve just jumped right into producing our own food and housing. That’s not quite exactly the whole story though (not to mention the fact that we still rely greatly on the outside world).

How did this work a hundred years ago? Did people ask each other “What do you do?” Did they think about identity in this way or some other way? Or did they just go about what they needed to do to survive without existential angst?