THE LIFE WE POSTPONE: Professional Until We Die
I got on a train to London at 5:43 this morning.
By half past seven, I was walking through a city already full of people who looked like they were late for something.
Eyes down. Serious faces. Headphones in. Phones out. Walking quickly. No nods. No smiles. Very little acknowledgement that the hundreds of bodies moving around them contained actual human beings.
Everyone looked purposeful.
Professional.
Busy.
Important.
Or perhaps just tired.
Obviously, I have no idea what was going on inside any of their heads. Some probably love their jobs. Some were undoubtedly worrying about money, children, deadlines or whether they’d remembered to lock the back door. Some may have been perfectly happy and simply didn’t feel like grinning at a stranger before breakfast.
But it wasn’t any individual face that interested me.
It was the uniformity.
London at that time of the morning seems to have a posture.
Keep moving. Don’t obstruct. Don’t make eye contact. Have somewhere to be. Look like getting there matters.
And watching it, I found myself wondering something that has been bothering me increasingly as I’ve got older.
When did being an adult become such a fucking serious business?
Not responsible.
Serious.
They are not the same thing.
I’m 42. I have a wife, two daughters, businesses, clients, bills, a mortgage and responsibilities that absolutely require me to behave like an adult. I work hard. I care deeply about the standard of my work. If I tell somebody I am going to do something, I take that seriously.
But I also spend an unreasonable amount of time behaving like an idiot.
My wife and I take the piss out of each other constantly. We say stupid things. We laugh at things we probably shouldn’t laugh at. Our children regularly see two supposedly responsible adults behaving considerably less maturely than they are.
And I hope that never changes.
Because somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused maturity with seriousness, in exactly the same way we have confused professionalism with personality.
The professional costume
There is nothing wrong with professionalism.
I want the person inspecting an aircraft to be professional. I want the surgeon operating on me to be professional. I want the solicitor handling something important to know what they’re doing. I want builders to build things properly, accountants to understand accounts and engineers to understand why bridges stay up.
Standards matter.
Competence matters.
Integrity matters.
Reliability matters.
But none of those things require you to become boring.
That is where I think something strange has happened.
Professionalism was supposed to describe how you approach your responsibilities.
Increasingly, it seems to describe how you are expected to perform your identity.
There is a professional way to dress.
A professional way to speak.
A professional vocabulary.
A professional tone of voice.
Professional facial expressions.
Professional email etiquette.
Professional social media profiles.
Professional phrases that nobody appears to use anywhere except work.
You don’t say, “I don’t think that’ll work.”
You say, “There may be some challenges around implementation.”
You don’t say, “Nobody knows what the fuck is going on.”
You say, “There appears to be a lack of alignment between key stakeholders.”
You don’t say, “Steve hasn’t done the thing he promised to do.”
You say, “We’re currently awaiting an update from Steve.”
And everybody in the room knows exactly what everybody actually means.
We have created an entire secondary language whose principal purpose sometimes appears to be preventing adults from speaking like adults.
There are perfectly good reasons for tact. There are situations where bluntness would be cruel, reckless or commercially stupid. Professional communication can prevent unnecessary conflict.
But there is a difference between diplomacy and theatre.
And we perform a lot of theatre.
Sociologists have been interested in this for decades. Erving Goffman famously described social life in theatrical terms: we present versions of ourselves appropriate to the stage we are standing on. Later workplace research developed ideas around “presentational labour” — the effort involved in displaying the appearance, emotion and behaviour expected of a particular professional role, sometimes regardless of what the person underneath is actually feeling.
In other words, the professional mask isn’t something I’ve invented because I was grumpy on a train this morning.
We really do perform work.
The interesting question is how much of ourselves we sacrifice to the performance.
Sounding clever versus being useful
Language is one of the easiest places to see it.
Every industry creates terminology because sometimes specialist terminology is necessary. If two cardiologists are discussing a complicated condition, technical language allows precision. If two engineers are solving a structural problem, I don’t expect them to translate everything into language I would understand.
Jargon has a job.
But jargon also has another use.
Status.
Sometimes we use complicated language because complicated language signals that we belong in the room.
Research into professional advice has found that excessive technical language can actually make advice harder to understand and, indirectly, damage perceptions of the adviser’s expertise and trustworthiness. A study involving financial advice found that when technical language reduced understanding, clients subsequently rated advisers less favourably and were less inclined to seek their advice.
More recent research into science communication found something similarly interesting. Reducing unnecessary jargon did not make scientists appear less credible or less expert; in that study, jargon avoidance actually improved perceptions of integrity and benevolence.
Which makes intuitive sense.
Think about the genuinely impressive people you have met.
The really good ones tend to make complicated things feel simpler.
The insecure ones often make simple things sound complicated.
Yet workplaces frequently reward the opposite behaviour. We learn the language. We learn the rhythm. We learn which words make us sound senior and which phrases make us sound like we’ve spent enough time around board tables.
Then eventually we stop noticing we’re doing it.
The costume becomes the person.
Forty hours as somebody else
This would matter less if work occupied a tiny part of life.
It doesn’t.
For most people, work consumes a huge proportion of their healthiest adult years.
You are born. Almost immediately, adults begin preparing you for education. Then education spends years preparing you for employment. Then employment takes over somewhere around early adulthood and, if you follow the traditional route, remains one of the dominant organising forces in your life until you are somewhere in your sixties.
Perhaps later.
And unlike the ridiculous motivational version of this argument, most people cannot simply decide not to participate.
Food costs money.
Housing costs money.
Heating costs money.
Children cost money.
Transport costs money.
Existing in modern society has an admission fee, and for most people the principal way of paying it is exchanging time for income.
So you give away roughly forty hours a week.
Then you add getting ready.
Travelling there.
Travelling home.
Lunch breaks that aren’t quite yours.
Checking something quickly in the evening.
Thinking about tomorrow’s meeting while brushing your teeth.
Sunday afternoon arriving with the faint awareness that Monday is waiting.
Forty hours has gravity.
It pulls the rest of the week towards it.
And then, having already surrendered this enormous quantity of finite time because survival requires it, we somehow decided we should surrender part of our personality as well.
That’s the part I struggle with.
If I have to give you my Tuesday, why the fuck do you need my sense of humour too?
Authenticity isn’t some fluffy HR concept
There is always a danger when talking about “being yourself at work” that it slides into corporate bollocks.
Bring your whole self to work.
Be your authentic self.
Show up authentically.
Then somebody puts it on a poster next to a photograph of diverse employees laughing around a laptop, and the entire concept becomes unbearable.
But beneath the language, there is something real.
A meta-analysis covering 75 studies and more than 36,000 participants found positive associations between authenticity and both wellbeing and engagement. The authors were careful about cultural differences and how authenticity is measured, but the overall relationship was clear enough to deserve attention.
Another study of 546 workers found that greater authenticity at work was associated with more autonomous forms of motivation and better wellbeing, including higher engagement and lower burnout.
That doesn’t mean everyone should say whatever enters their head.
Authenticity without judgement is just being an arsehole.
There are things I say to my wife that I would not say to a client.
There are jokes I make with close friends that would be inappropriate in a meeting.
There are situations where I regulate my tone because another person deserves sensitivity.
That isn’t fake.
That is social intelligence.
The problem begins when adjustment becomes replacement.
When the version of you permitted to exist at work is so sanitised that the people spending forty hours a week beside you barely know you.
And perhaps worse, when you spend so long performing that version that eventually you barely know you either.
We have mistaken seriousness for competence
There is something else happening underneath all this.
We trust seriousness.
Someone speaks slowly, uses the correct terminology, wears the right clothes and looks appropriately concerned, and our brains quietly add credibility.
Meanwhile, humour can be treated as a threat to authority.
Especially as people become more senior.
The higher you climb, the more you are apparently supposed to resemble someone attending a disciplinary hearing.
Yet research into workplace humour is far more nuanced than “serious leaders are better leaders”. Reviews of the evidence suggest humour can operate as an important communication and relationship tool, although context and humour style matter enormously. More recent work has linked affiliative leader humour with psychological safety and innovative behaviour.
Again, this shouldn't be turned into another stupid leadership rule.
Tell three jokes before lunch to increase psychological safety by 14%.
Please don’t.
The point is simpler.
Being human does not automatically undermine competence.
Sometimes it reinforces it.
I have never understood why somebody being able to laugh at themselves should make me trust them less.
Quite the opposite.
The person who desperately needs to appear impressive worries me far more.
The great postponement
And this is where professionalism connects to something much bigger.
We postpone an extraordinary amount of life.
When you’re a child, you’re preparing for secondary school.
At secondary school, you’re preparing for exams.
Then perhaps university.
Then your first proper job.
Then the promotion.
Then the salary.
Then the house.
Then you’re pushing through because things are busy at the moment.
Then perhaps the children are young.
Then they need things.
Then the mortgage needs paying.
Then there are only fifteen years until retirement.
Then ten.
Then five.
Then, eventually, after forty or fifty years of being extraordinarily fucking responsible, somebody tells you that you can have your weekdays back.
Assuming your knees still work.
I understand why the idea of roughly four thousand weeks of human life hits people so hard. It converts something abstract — mortality — into something disturbingly countable.
You don’t have endless Tuesdays.
There will be a final ordinary Wednesday.
A final train journey.
A final meeting.
A final stupid joke with somebody you love.
And none of us knows which ones they are.
That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility and living every day like you’ve just been told the asteroid arrives on Thursday.
It means questioning the assumption that enjoyment belongs at the edges of life.
Evenings.
Weekends.
Holidays.
Retirement.
Special occasions.
The parts we call free time, which is an extraordinary phrase when you actually think about it.
Free from what?
Our own lives?
I don't need an extraordinary life
There is an entire industry built around making life feel lived.
Bucket lists.
Extreme sports.
Once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
Climb the mountain.
Jump from the plane.
Swim with something large enough to kill you.
Visit fifty countries before fifty.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things.
I love adventure.
But I don't want to require extraordinary experiences as evidence that my life happened.
I don’t want to tolerate fifty miserable Tuesdays so that I can photograph one incredible Saturday.
I want the Tuesday.
I want to laugh with my wife.
I want to dick about with my daughters.
I want conversations I enjoy.
I want work that interests me.
I want to walk the dog.
I want to learn something I didn’t know yesterday.
I want to say something stupid and laugh until my stomach hurts.
I want to remain fascinated by things.
I want to be responsible without becoming fucking solemn.
That ambition is less photogenic than climbing Everest.
But multiply it across thousands of ordinary days and I’m not convinced it is less meaningful.
Perhaps we have got the whole thing backwards.
Maybe a life well lived is not a collection of extraordinary moments large enough to compensate for the ordinary ones.
Maybe the ordinary ones are the life.
Professional until we die
I arrived in London this morning surrounded by people who looked incredibly serious.
Perhaps they needed to.
Perhaps five minutes later they walked into offices and became completely different people.
I hope some of them did.
Because most of us will work for decades.
That reality is unlikely to disappear.
There will still be deadlines.
Difficult clients.
Mortgages.
School runs.
Tax returns.
Meetings that should have been emails.
Responsibilities do not disappear because we have discovered mortality.
But responsibility and joy are not opposites.
Neither are competence and humour.
Neither are adulthood and play.
Neither are professionalism and personality.
We can take the work seriously without taking ourselves so seriously.
And perhaps that distinction matters more than it initially appears.
Because if life really is as short as everyone keeps reminding us it is, then spending forty years performing the most polished, cautious and professionally acceptable version of ourselves seems like an extraordinary waste of a human being.
I don't want to retire one day and finally feel permitted to relax into the person I always was.
I don't want to spend my life waiting for the parts I'm allowed to enjoy.
I want to be good at what I do.
I want to honour my responsibilities.
I want people to trust me.
And I want to have a fucking laugh while I'm here.
Because eventually, professional or otherwise, we're all leaving the building.
And nobody gets their Tuesdays back.
Sources
Van den Bosch, R. & Taris, T. (2018), Authenticity at Work: Its Relations With Worker Motivation and Well-being, Frontiers in Communication.
Sutton, A. (2020), Living the good life: A meta-analysis of authenticity, well-being and engagement, Personality and Individual Differences.
Sheane, S. D. (2012), Putting on a good face: An examination of the emotional and aesthetic roots of presentational labour, Economic and Industrial Democracy.
Joiner, T. A., Leveson, L. & Langfield-Smith, K. (2002), Technical Language, Advice Understandability, and Perceptions of Expertise and Trustworthiness: The Case of the Financial Planner, Australian Journal of Management.
Rosenberg, C., Walker, A., Leiter, M. & Graffam, J. (2021), Humor in Workplace Leadership: A Systematic Search Scoping Review, Frontiers in Psychology.
Jargon avoidance in the public communication of science: Single- or double-edged sword for information evaluation? (2025), Learning and Instruction.
Research gaps
The evidence around authenticity is substantial but the concept itself is culturally dependent; much of the published literature uses Western ideas of what it means to be “true to yourself”. Research on workplace humour is similarly context-sensitive: humour can strengthen relationships and psychological safety, but aggressive, exclusionary or badly judged humour can obviously do the opposite. There is also considerably more evidence about emotional labour and authenticity in customer-facing roles than about the cumulative long-term effect of adopting a highly controlled “professional persona” across an entire career. The broader argument in this essay — that unnecessary professional performance may contribute to the postponement of ordinary enjoyment — should therefore be understood as a philosophical synthesis of several evidence bases rather than a single experimentally established causal claim.