Letter 07
Re: The Job Is Not the Life
Dear Immigrant,
In the first years, it is easy to confuse the job with the life. The job is what you came for, in the practical sense — the income, the visa status, the structure of the day. It fills the hours and it provides the identity marker that the new country understands: what do you do. You are what you do, in the way the new country reads people, and having a job is the evidence that you exist in a legible form.
But the job is not the life. The life is everything the job does not cover: the relationships, the community, the things you do because they give you something that money does not measure, the interior growth that happens outside of working hours.
Immigrants who reduce their lives to the job are, in my observation, the immigrants who are most likely to arrive at year five or year ten having built financial stability and nothing else. They have the salary and the apartment and the credit score. They do not have the community or the depth or the sense that the life they are living belongs fully to them. The job was the means. The life was supposed to be the end. Somewhere in the accumulation of working hours, the means became the end and the end was forgotten.
Protect time for the things that are not the job. This is harder than it sounds when you are working long hours and recovering from long hours and calling home and managing paperwork and trying to survive financially. There is not much time left. Use what there is for something that feeds you.
The job provides the platform. The life is what you build on it. Do not confuse the platform for the building.
From someone who eventually remembered to build,
A former immigrant
dearimmigrant.com
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