This question has been doing the rounds on x this week, with people suggesting it is a the most dull and or pretentious question.
The fact is, people like to ask what people do for a living when meeting new people. It helps us contextualise the person, offer some understanding of their background, and potentially explain the reason they act the way they do.
It is also a way of gauging where people are in the social pecking order. Whilst it’s possible that a self made millionaire might have a penchant for dustbin collecting, it’s unlikely enough that if someone told you they were a binman, you’d place them in the appropriate rung of the social ladder.
There is also some pretence in scoffing at the question and decrying it as dull and uninteresting. To thumb your nose at such a question subtly implies that your life doesn’t revolve around a vocation or core of employment, which in and of itself is a nod to being financially stable and not dependent on an income from a job.
For me, the question has been increasingly difficult to answer.
Since I was laid off from my last paid role in June, I have not been looking for work. My portfolio is ticking along very healthily and by all metrics, my modelling shows my investments will throw off enough money every year to sustain my lifestyle.
By all accounts, I am retired.
But when people ask me what I do, at 38 years old if I say “I’m retired” I’ve only ever been met with a mixture of responses between disbelief and derision. For those that don’t immediately disengage at this point, the question is usually followed by a string of questions about my personal finances – the kind of questions you would never politely ask anyone else, such as “How much money do you have?” “How did you make your money?” or “How much money do you earn?”
Lying, ofcourse, is an option. I could simply say “I am a teacher” or “I am a pilot” but that seems like a needless thing to lie about, and in the event of any follow up questions you’d simply end up telling ever bigger lies – for no good reason. Worse still if you meet a pilot or a teacher and they began to engage in industry specific talk, you’d be pretty adrift.
So being honest is off the table, but so is lying.
For a while, I resorted to saying I work in “consulting” which is about as broad of a career as one can get. And I did work in consulting, I was a marketing consultant and own a consulting company that I invoiced via, but I’ve broadly wrapped all that up these days, so it does still feel somewhat dishonest to say “consulting” as it would not stand up under follow up questioning: “What do you consult on” or “Who are your clients” would truthfully be answered with “nothing” and “nobody”.
To get a satisfying answer to this question, I decided to go back to the basics and examine what is it that I do that generates the income I survive on?
That would be managing an investment portfolio, then.
Given that I own a BVI company, with the flimsiest of corporate filing, done locally on my laptop on a Sunday afternoon in a hotel room, I assigned my assets under the company ownership and issued myself an employment contract for employment managing the company investment portfolio.
This formalises how I generate my income, and looks good on visa application forms. It also gives me something respectable to reply with when asked the question.
“What do you do for a living?”
I’m an investment manager at a private family office fund in the BVI