What Do You Do?

In early January, two days into the new year, I stopped at Subway at 8 p.m. to buy a sandwich. The restaurant was empty and the fluorescent lights and yellow paint were about the same shade of somber. A woman, apron-clad, emerged from the back and took my order without looking at me. Turkey sub, cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise. She removed a pre-sliced roll from a large plastic container and put it down on the white counter length cutting board before her. Next she took the turkey, already portioned out and wrapped in plastic, because every Subway sub needs to have the same amount of turkey, and placed it evenly on the roll. Then came the cheese, four perfect triangles, that were, when laid out next to each other, miraculously, the exact same length as the bread. Tip-to-tip, end-to-end. Next, four tomatoes, one per slice of cheese, and then the lettuce, a fistful (her fistful), before an airy, noisy squirt of mayonnaise that lasted about two and a half seconds. She brought my perfectly engineered sandwich to the register and began to put it into a plastic bag. “That’s okay,” I said, “I don’t need a bag, I’m going to eat it right away.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I have to,” she replied, “It’s company policy.”

“Of course,” I thought.

In America and much of the modern world, the question “what do you do?” is closely tied up with the more important one, “who are you?” As staunch individualists and rather fervent egoists, our self-conceptions depend heavily on the work we do, the individual force we are able to exert on the world we seek to shape.

The need to leave some mark on the world that proves, in even the smallest way, that we were once here, is hardly unique to the modern world. One can say with only slight exaggeration that it has been the central preoccupation of humankind. On some fundamental level we all want to do something to recreate our own existence in terms more permanent than life. Some carve their names into the stall walls of bathrooms or into the rafters of buildings. “Brooks was here…so was Red.”

However, most who attend Harvard and other such places are not content to simply carve their names into walls. Rather, we seek to etch our existences into time itself through the careers we choose. When someone says, “I am a doctor,” it is more than a statement about the way he makes a living. His career is the embodiment of his individuality. It is the medium through which he expresses himself to others and impresses himself on the world.

John Dewey understood this connection between the job you do and who you are, and he didn’t like it. He thought it better to get rid of “the notion…that the creative capacities of individuals can be evoked and developed only in a struggle for material possessions and material gain.” Dewey felt that a society runs into all sorts of problems when one’s sense of individuality and one’s job become the same thing. If you really want to understand Dewey’s concerns, go to Subway and carefully watch seven dollars an hour make your sandwich. Then, once your sandwich has been put in the plastic bag, think about how different you and the Subway employee are. Depending on whether you’d rather lose your appetite or vomit, do this before or after you’ve eaten.

The benefits of going to Harvard are frequently extolled, but rarely really understood. Connections, prestige, education, experience, yes, they’re all here, but they miss the point. They’re simply symptomatic of something much more valuable. In a society that conjoins individual self-expression with work, our true privilege is the ability to personalize our work, to make it an extension of ourselves, while still earning a living. We are able to create things in the world that are contingent on their creator—they wouldn’t be the same if someone else did them.

One cannot say the same for a Subway sandwich, of course, which is supposed to be the same regardless of who makes it. That’s the whole point. Precise preordained amounts of bread, turkey, cheese, tomatoes and mayonnaise. It does not matter who makes the sandwich, it always turns out the same and while one earning seven dollars an hours makes some semblance of a living, she in essence makes nothing else. There is no self-expression, self-creation or individuality—just a paycheck, just a job, the suffocation of self.

And that’s the grand difference between you and me and a Subway employee. We conceive of ourselves so differently that it’s hard to imagine how she conceives of herself at all. I’m sure that she does, in some way, but I can’t seem to understand it; I just can’t get past the sandwich.

The confusing thing, though, about many people in our position is that freed from the need to take a job because of the paycheck, we often do so anyway. Instead of seven dollars an hour it’s seventy grand a year, but the principle is still the same, materialism reigns. Where the Subway employee needs, we want and though society has a tendency to exalt our position, individuality falls prey to both equally. The greatest opportunity afforded by our privileged position is the chance to invert the pernicious relationship that subsumes the self to money. But instead of seizing this opportunity we often squander it, expressing a willingness to sacrifice anything if the price is right.

So you think about what John Dewey had to say and you think that he was trying to save the Subway employee. And then you think about it a little more, and realize that maybe he was trying to save you, too.

Kevin Hartnett ’03 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.