How Do You Describe Your Job?

Sometimes, I find a post recently that struck a nerve. It highlighted something I've observed countless times at family gatherings, social events, and casual encounters: that moment when someone who works in tech or another digital field stumbles through explaining what they actually do for a living.

The awkward pauses
The oversimplifications
The resigned "it's complicated" followed by a change of subject

I've seen it happen to friends, colleagues, and even caught myself doing it.

But what if that hesitation, that inability to translate our professional lives into accessible language, is trying to tell us something important?

I remember the first time I realized I couldn't properly explain my job to my lovely grandmother, mbah Chuzaemah. I was in the year one into a role as a "digital content copywriter" at an agency. The title itself was a mouthful of corporate jargon that meant nothing to her. I tried various angles like
"I help companies figure out what to write and post online,"
"I analyze what people read on websites,"
"I create plans for digital messaging," or simply
"I write posts in social media"

...but each attempt felt hollow, lacking the substance that makes someone's eyes light up with understanding.

What bothered me most wasn't that she couldn't grasp the technical aspects of my work. It was that I couldn't translate my daily reality into words that carried meaning or conveyed purpose. The language simply wasn't there, and I began to wonder why.

2016, clear as hell, at family event, I remember when my father tell his stories about teaching at vocational school, about his students that made everyone nod in recognition. Even my mother, a PNS, civil servant—a profession often stereotyped as boring—could explain the satisfaction of helping the school she handles make sense in ways that resonated around the table.

Yet there I sat, with a job that consumed forty hours of my week, unable to communicate its essence to the people who cared about me most.

It's taken me years to recognize what that communication gap was revealing: when we struggle to explain our work to others, we're often struggling to justify it to ourselves.

This isn't about intelligence or articulation skills. Nor is it about having a job that's too complex or technical for "regular people" to understand.

Maybe Einstein could explain relativity to children.
Heart surgeons? They can also help patients understand complicated procedures.
What about nuclear physicists? They sure find ways to convey the mysteries of quantum mechanics to general audiences.

The difficulty arises not from complexity but from disconnect. When what we do daily doesn't connect meaningfully to our values, interests, or sense of purpose. When passion is absent, so too is the natural language that flows from genuine enthusiasm.

I've noticed this pattern repeatedly in my own career trajectory. The positions I've had where I could easily and eagerly tell friends about my day were those where I felt aligned with the mission. The roles where I dreaded the inevitable "so what do you do?" at parties were those where I was going through motions, collecting a paycheck, but leaving my soul at home.

Digital Detachment

There's something particularly pronounced about this phenomenon in digital professions. Perhaps it's because so much of the work exists in abstract space like copywriting, creative thinking, data, content strategies, user flows, SEO rankings. Unlike the carpenter's chair that you can sit in or the teacher's lessons that shape young minds in visible ways, digital work often feels removed from tangible impact.

I know people who manage social media accounts for major brands who struggle to explain why their job matters. Data analysts who can't articulate the purpose behind the reports they generate. Developers who code features they can't connect to human needs. UX designers who have lost sight of the actual humans using their interfaces.

The digital economy has created fascinating new career paths but also novel forms of alienation. When your work exists primarily on screens and data in clouds, the distance between your labor and its meaning can widen imperceptibly until suddenly you realize you've been speaking in acronyms and metrics that matter to no one outside your industry bubble. Blah.

Possibly not even to yourself.

The Test of Passion

This has become my personal litmus test for career decisions:

• Can I explain what I'm doing, really explain it, not just recite a job description, to the people I love?
• Can I make them understand not just the tasks I perform but why they matter?

If not, I've learned that's a warning sign worth heeding.

It's not that every job needs to be world-changing or deeply meaningful in some philosophical sense. But whatever we do should connect to something we value enough to want to share it, to make it comprehensible to others. That connection is what transforms work from mere employment into a vocation, from something we do to something we are.

When I hear friends struggle to explain their digital careers to parents or partners, I no longer attribute it to the complexity of technology or the generation gap. Instead, I wonder if they're experiencing the same disconnection I once felt, going through professional motions without the underlying current of purpose that makes work worth discussing.

Beyond the Paycheck

Of course, there's privilege in this perspective. Many people work jobs they don't love because economic necessity demands it. Not everyone has the luxury of aligning passion with paycheck. I acknowledge that reality.

But even acknowledging those constraints, I believe we owe it to ourselves to recognize when we're settling for dispassionate work, when we're hiding behind complexity or avoiding conversations about our careers because the words don't come easily. That recognition is the first step toward change, whether that means finding new meaning in current roles or plotting paths toward work that resonates more deeply.

The ability to explain our work simply isn't just about communication skills, it's about connection.
Connection to purpose.
Connection to values.
Connection to the parts of ourselves that recognize meaning and want to share it with others.

The Measure of a Life

At some point, we've all sat across from elderly relatives who ask well-meaning questions about our jobs because they want to know us, to understand what fills our days and shapes our lives. These conversations are windows into something profound, the integration of our working selves with our whole selves.

I think about my dad often, who worked for yeaaaaaars in school. He could explain his job in one sentence: "I teach children about electricity."

Simple. Clear. Connected to human need. He wasn't passionate about every aspect of teaching work, but he understood how his daily effort linked to something larger than himself.

That's what I aspire to now, not just work I can explain, but work I want to explain because it reflects something essential about who I am and what I value. When someone asks "What do you do?" I want the answer to be more than a job title or function. I want it to be a tiny window into my purpose.

Because if I can't translate my professional life into language that matters to the people who matter to me, perhaps that's life itself telling me something needs to change.

So now when I find myself struggling to describe what I do, I don't blame the complexity of digital work or the listener's lack of technical understanding. I recognize it as an internal alarm bell, a signal that I've drifted from passion and purpose. And I've promised myself I won't ignore that signal again.

Our work may not define us completely, but it occupies too much of our limited time to be unexplainable, unjustifiable, or disconnected from what we value. If we can't find the words to make others understand what we do, perhaps we need to find work that speaks more clearly through us.