When we first moved to France, I thought the biggest culture shock would be the cheese aisle. Or the near-theatrical use of bonjour and bonsoir as social punctuation. But no.
The real shock was this:
Nobody talks about their job.
In France, your job is not your identity. And asking someone what they do for a living, especially upon first meeting, is downright taboo. In fact, it’s kind of rude. Like asking how much someone weighs, or what they paid for their house. It’s just not done.
Which is…wild.
Because in America, “What do you do?” is essentially the handshake after the handshake. You’ve barely exchanged names before someone hits you with it, as if your profession will unlock your worth, status, and conversational direction in one tidy phrase.
So you can imagine our disorientation. We were freshly landed in the French countryside, charmingly awkward and overly eager, trying to make friends as adults (a nearly impossible game in any culture). We connected quickly with a lovely couple - parents of a classmate of our child - and before we knew it, we were exchanging lunches and dinners, sitting around tables swapping stories about everything except the thing we were so desperately craving to ask:
What do you do?
We were like addicts white-knuckling our way through detox. At one point, I caught myself clutching my wine glass like it might whisper the answer if I held it tightly enough. It was excruciating. Every fiber of our American conditioning screamed to ask - just ask! - but we resisted. Because no one else brought it up. And that silence said everything.
After one particularly delightful lunch, our car ride home became a game of “Guess Their Profession.” My husband and I turned into amateur detectives, squinting at Instagram feeds for clues. But of course, there were none - only photos of vacations, children, gardens, food, and dogs. Their work was invisible, swallowed up by life itself. Imagine that.
It was maddening. And fascinating.
Even more unsettling was how hard it was for us not to talk about our work. Americans are trained to introduce themselves as a résumé with legs. I found myself fumbling for other ways to explain who I was, what I loved, why I mattered. It was like acting with no props. Like not knowing what to do with your hands.
But gradually, a beautiful thing happened.
We started talking about other things. Real things. We talked about our children, and upcoming trips, and food we loved, and things we were reading, and thoughts we were having about life and parenting and all the different names the French have for a pumpkin.
And somehow, in the delightful awkwardness of restraint, we remembered something simple and profound:
We are more than our jobs.
Not just in theory, but in practice. It became a kind of unspoken permission to reimagine who we were, beyond work, beyond titles, beyond LinkedIn bios and business cards.
Eventually, of course, we did find out what our new friends did for a living. But it happened organically, like overhearing a detail rather than extracting a résumé. And that made it feel…honest. Earned. Human.
It’s not that the French are anti-work. They work. They just don’t worship it. And that subtle cultural shift has affected us deeply. We’ve started doing more doing - real doing. Gardening, walking, reading, cooking. Not because it’s a productivity hack or a self-improvement ritual, but because it’s part of being alive.
We’re still American, of course. And we still occasionally slip up and ask people what they do ‘for a living’ before remembering where we are. But we’re learning.
And what a gift it is, to meet someone and discover who they are before what they do.
Maybe one day, someone will meet me and know my favorite song or how I take my tea before they know what I do for a living.
Maybe that’s what I’m doing here: relearning how to be a person, not just a professional.
Maybe I’ll never ask about someone’s job again.
(Just kidding. I totally will. But I’ll wait at least three dinners before I cave. Two or three dinners.)
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Love this post!!! So spot-on and inspirational. Here is my favorite part:
"And what a gift it is—to meet someone and discover who they are before what they do."
Definitely, a better way to live.
So very true and well written, thanks for sharing! It’s such a refreshing way of realising what is important in life. I didn’t have a job for over ten years when living in France. It was never an issue as I would still have a lot to talk about with my French friends. However, when we visited Holland and people’s second or third question was what I did for a living, it would make me feel so awkward. I was busy doing things, just not earning money for it. But I didn’t want to make my activities bigger or more glamorous than they were. It often made me feel like a looser, as in Holland, too, your identity is much related to your job. And I definitely prefer the French way, as there is so much more in life to talk about and get to know the real person.