工作与生活是否应该保持真性情？Should You Keep Your True Self at Work and in Life?

Reposted from Zhihu Daily

I want to begin here by raising the question of what I will call the work face.

Take the flight attendant’s smile, even her resolute smile; the smiles of so many highway toll collectors, or the smile gone stiff because it is so hard to hold. Call this the smile of the standard workplace script. Or when you visit a prison or handle business at some sensitive government office, the icy look of the guard or sentry who must keep his distance from you, and so on. Think it over quietly: cashiers, doctors, vegetable sellers, clerks in government offices; when you deal with them, each wears an expression typical of the type. This is what I mean by the work face.

In the best-trained cases, such as the flight attendant’s smile, and in the cases most constrained by the profession, such as the coldness of the guard or the sentry, what shows on the face is a produced expression, not the showing of a person’s true feeling; in the workplace it can even be hard to detect any individual difference at all. Where things do not reach that degree, there is both a work face and some individual difference showing through: the vegetable seller, say, haggling over a price, yielding a little or holding firm, whose expression may shift a great deal with the bargaining, or only a little.

The work face can hide your “true self” remarkably well, or it may often appear with your “true self” smuggled inside it. If we can accept that judgment, then we may say: the work face has its joys and its angers, but these are not necessarily the outward color of what a person truly feels at that moment.

The work face is only one of a person’s social roles. Husband and wife, brothers, friends, elder and younger generations, superior and subordinate, colleagues, acquaintances and strangers: these too are social roles played for one another, and these different roles, openly or covertly, also dictate your expression. Say your mood is foul right now and you are about to start cursing, and you look up to see your stern father arriving, or your immediate boss standing before you. Wouldn’t you rein it in a little?

On the balcony at home you keep many potted plants; whether bougainvillea, gardenia, sago palm or firethorn, are they not all different now from their kind in the wild? Beyond pruning and shaping, you even bend them out of form on purpose, and their whole growth is further constrained by the balcony’s sunlight, the size of the pot, the soil you chose and the fertilizer you apply. Yes, each still has its own name, each is still itself, and yet none can escape the rules of the pot.

Or take what grows wild in the open. An individual plant usually stands within a community, of one species or of many, bent or straight, lush or withered, and it too is constrained by the community; a dense forest can even strip the weeds below of the very conditions for growth. And if a certain population size is not reached, a species may simply vanish. Group and individual, in truth, define each other and condition each other.

Now let us come back to the true self, the true temperament: what is it, exactly? At this very moment, what is your mood really? Why do different people meet the same event, or the same person meet the same event in different circumstances, and not necessarily feel the same? Or again, why are some people quick to anger while others love to laugh? In fact this too traces back to your genes and to the earlier experiences of your life. Can you pick out which part is the true temperament you were born with? Does such a true temperament even exist?

The truth is, a person is born unfree, defined by relations of every kind. At the same time a person is born needing freedom, for without it even those relations would wither away. For a social being, not to know the former, not to be practiced in it, is to lose one’s good sense; not to know the latter, not to hold onto it, is to lose self-reliance and self-respect at the root. In fact, the freedom of the latter is won by striving from within an understanding and a use of the former.

Now to answer the second question. Reality tells us that whether at work or in life, the space allowed you for facing the world with your true temperament is limited. You may feel your superior acts a little too freely in front of you; or perhaps he is only relaxing in front of you after being constrained in front of his own superior. When you get to let your true temperament out depends on how tightly you are bound.

There is a phrase: to follow the heart’s desire. Whenever you feel yourself truly in that state, that is your true temperament, your true feeling, showing itself. But think again: how often does that happen? And what is this desire? Childhood, youth, early adulthood, middle age, old age; the desires of each stage, and the desires under each kind of work, differ enormously, and what desires arise depends in turn on one’s earlier experience and preparation. It is not a simple thing.

Perhaps the asker ran into something in particular before raising this question. In practice there seem to be two ways of handling it:

First: without desire, one is unbending, though holding that line is not easy. And what if it is merely the slackness of desiring nothing? Want a little less, contend with no one, step back and find the world wide, let it all go; you may gain a little more ease, but that kind of ease may be exactly what many people do not want.

Second: this is something often said by a friend of mine, a man of rough fortunes and great success in his work, now an old man. I have quoted it once on Zhihu and will say it again: “Conduct yourself so that everyone likes you; do your work so that everyone needs you. First do well the things you ought to do, then go do the things you love to do.” It is the summing-up of his whole life, and well worth savoring. When you truly reach that final clause, it means you have arrived at a stage of relative freedom, and you can follow your heart more often, and show your true temperament more.