THAT'S MENIdentifying ourselves solely with our career can lead to terrible problems when it ends, writes Padraig O'Morain
WHEN I was growing up in Kildare, there was a farmer in the area who made the unprecedented decision to sell his property and retire to the nearest town.
This was at a time when the notion of retirement did not really exist in rural Ireland.
More importantly, though, it was a time when farming defined who you were. Very few farmers made any sort of decent money out of their work but their identity was the identity of a farmer.
For that reason, farming counted for more than the money that could be made from it. This attitude eventually frustrated young farmers who turned to more financially rewarding ways of making a living when the economy improved.
When this man decided that the time had come to cash in his assets and to live in some comfort on his capital, it was as though he was cashing in his identity.
That, I think, is what puzzled other farmers so much about his actions - actions which would seem perfectly normal today.
Yet it seems to me that today men are still more likely than women to identify with their work in the way that farmers used to do. Women are seen as having a variety of roles. A woman who has a child and who is out of work is not generally seen as unemployed. She is regarded as a full-time mother.
This may or may not suit her but at least it means that her whole identity is not tied up with the job she used to have.
Moreover, women who believe that at some stage they are going to have to interrupt their careers when they have children are less likely to identify with those careers as the be-all and end-all of their lives.
For men, unemployment, retirement or chronic illness are the factors that are most likely to take them out of the world of work.
Many men, when this happens, are thrown into a crisis about who exactly they are.
If you take your entire sense of self-worth from your work, then just what are you and who are you when you haven't got the work any more?
I have seen men who identified themselves totally with their work and who seemed to physically shrink in the months following retirement. On the other hand I have seen men who did not identify completely with work but who enjoyed it nonetheless and then went on to enjoy retirement.
At least you can plan for retirement. But unemployment these days can come so fast that there is no time to plan for it. For many, unemployment brings huge emotional challenges.
Both men and women who are unemployed and who see themselves as unemployed (for instance, women who are not mothers) have higher rates of depression than the general population.
"Unemployed" is not an identity any of us wants to have. So what else are you? Are you a parent, a brother, a sister, a friend, a student or a home-worker - and is that enough?
If you have not been used to thinking of yourself in these terms, the transition can be a tough one to make.
And suppose you were really good at your job and that the firm you worked in did well but was shut down because an extra bit of profit could be squeezed out of moving it to a low-wage economy - how do you adjust emotionally to that?
I do not have any easy answers to these questions. But it seems to me that they are questions we need to ask ourselves when we are still involved in the world of work, and with the realisation that this world could be taken away from us at any moment.
Who are you? Who would you be if you did not have the job to go to any more? Your future happiness could depend on working out the answers to these questions.
As for the old farmer, I spotted him one summer day in Naas sitting outside his front door, basking in the sun. The other farmers still shook their heads but I really hope he was as contented as he looked. He was, after all, a pioneer in the world of work, living and human identity.
That's Men, the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas