From Consumerism to Identification Through Occupation

I was recently reading The New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, one of my favorite books at the moment, and he commented on the drive for people to identify with objects. This is so noticeable with mass consumerism and marketing in the west. Sorry for stating the obvious. Our society makes people think they need that shiny thing to be better. But my thought is, we are becoming more aware that we identify with objects, but not as conscious that we identify with our occupations, and are looking for ourselves from them. The movement of the identification with things is evolving to the identification with occupation.

When we meet someone new one of the first questions we ask is what do you do? I am guilty of this and I believe most adults are. It is really just that old song and dance of sizing people up. The bureau of labor and statistics shows that people between the age of 25 -34 stay at their jobs less than an average of 2 years but most within this age range most really stay less that 12 months. We all know statistics can be bent to our needs so I looked at several different reports and came to the same conclusion.

I do not agree with most on the subject of why this is happening. Most of the resources I have come across on the matter claim out generation are such techies and feel we are so arrogant and feel such entitlement that we can never be happy with where we are. I agree to some extent but I believe it goes beyond this. I belive it is more personal and on some level spiritual. I think we go to job after job looking for ourselves, thinking the next job will finally define us, and give us our identity. This explains our diminished sense of self when we are laid off or fired, even though statistically we would have quit in a few months anyway. There are some that are exceptions to this. They know their jobs do not define them, when someone asks them who they are they do not answer with a job title. This serial job jumping is in direct alignment with a shift in conciousness, which may be happening. Sorry to go all New Age on you, but until we come to the realization we are not our jobs and can not be defined by anything outside of ourselves some of us will be playing job hopscotch for a long time.