Comment by purplethinking
2 months ago
I took 1.5 years off to work on an open source project (also because I was struggling with health issues), and the hardest thing was describing what you're doing to other people. I thought I was "above" social status, that it wouldn't affect me, but it did. I was essentially unemployed, that's how it felt at least. It's so much easier just saying "I do X for a living, I work at company Y". It means some company thinks you're good enough to pay good money for.
Keep it simple, then pivot. Most people don't care that much about what you do unless they're in your same industry (in which case, they'd empathize).
> What do you do?
Write software.
> Oh yeah, for who?
$GitProjectName
> What do they do?
It's a project that <short explanation>.
But enough about me, <pivot to different topic | shift focus to the other person>
Thoughtful approach in theory but, in practice, I've found people can be very intentional about trying to measure your value to the tribe (i.e., it's not only something we measure for ourselves). If the initial answers don't provide enough data, people will very often dig in.
> Oh yeah, for who?
$GitProjectName
> Oh, I'm not familiar. How big is that company?
It's an independent project, I'm just getting it off the ground.
> Do you have any customers?
... and so on.
Yes, it's easiest to change the subject but that also becomes an obvious signal. Repeating this dance a few times is enough to dampen one's sense of self worth.
I don't necessarily think this value-measuring is conscious or necessarily reflective of the person's character. It felt more like it's simply the habitual conversational pattern for a lot of people - we've been trained to quickly assess if someone is "like us" (based on very shallow criteria and heuristics).
There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.
I have a better solution: Just lie. Nobody is going to conduct a deep investigation.
> Oh yeah, for who?
Microsoft.