Work? It's Fluid.

I had a fascinating conversation with my parents last week about work. After selling Brand Amper to The Muse last year, the topic had been coming up... regularly. When I told them my latest update, things got... interesting.

They kept waiting for me to describe a traditional job. But that's not how today's world works. (Especially not mine.) 

That's when it hit me: work today has gone fluid. Like sexuality, gender, and seemingly every other area of life, work has broken out of traditional binaries. Gone is "I have a job / I don't have a job." In are short-term stints, consulting gigs, freelance work, and other creative arrangements that make work identities fluid... and complicated.

While talking with my parents, I saw for me how difficult it can be to adjust from a binary narrative to all those shades of gray. It's not that they didn't understand what I was saying—they're smart :) —it's more that I was asking them to put mental energy into something that had traditionally not required any. 

A few years ago, I contributed the term "profersonal™" to the lexicon to capture the idea that our work and personal lives have become intractably enmeshed. I was (and am) proud of that—it wasn't a bad start. But there's a lot more to it. 

By the end of the conversation with my parents, they were on board with my plan and excited for me. I'll have to go through the conversation a few dozen more times, I'm sure, before it sticks. But that's OK. That's how these things work.

It's a start.