This poster hangs in the art classroom at my daughter’s school.
Look at how early the training starts. We teach five-year-olds that "being" is a verb that requires a job title to finish the sentence.
When we get older and burn out on our careers, we try to fix it by just adding softer nouns. We say we are more than our jobs—we are parents, philanthropists, photographers, adventurers, seekers. We just build a different, more acceptable resume to prove we exist.
But that misses the truth, too.
Before a kid knows what a meteorologist or a benchwarmer is, they just are. Before they even know how to recognize their own face in a mirror, they just exist.
That doesn't disappear when we grow up. Underneath the executive title, the political party, the tax bracket, and the belief system, that exact same quiet existence is still sitting there.
You don't have to be a anything. You can just be.