Good morning,
As we approach fall, I've been slowly transitioning to a work schedule that feels like my old life—full days of work. But explaining to myself what that work is has been surprisingly hard. Consider this letter the story of how I designed myself a compass.
Before having a child, I identified as a journalist who sometimes did other writing on the side. But after taking over a year off to be with my son, I realized I've somehow emerged as a writer, who sometimes does journalism. It might seem like the smallest shift, but in it, I’ve fallen into a fascinating portal.
For a long time I've wanted to see a map of the grayness between the things we see as life and the things we see as work. How did crucial parts of being human become "jobs"? In an age when technology is upending all that we thought was "work," it seems like one of the most important things to understand. I've come to think of this space as the gray zone between practice and profession.
When a shared human practice—something that exists in homes and communities—becomes a profession, what do we gain and lose along the way?
The Gifts of Professionalization
For those who have been reading for a while, you know that I've been wrestling with these questions for a while now—reimagining journalism as art rather than news, approaching creative work through seasons rather than daily habits, and designing work around what matters when you're a parent.
And while I’m certainly not arguing that everything should become a job or that all practices need to be paid, I am very interested in professionalization as a design tool—a way to build structures, training, rhythms, and growth paths around work that matters. Because, fortunately or unfortunately, the language of work helps.
If, for instance, we viewed home as a care studio, rather than just a backdrop to life, we’d have the language and tools to invest in it well and value it as a system whose job is to produce work that affects other systems: cultural, emotional, economic, even political.
On a personal note, it’s been through intentional design—building community, investing in mentorship, defining projects—that writing has moved from the margins of my life into the center of my work. In other words, through structured investment, I’ve moved what used to be a personal practice into a profession.
And while unpaid, the same is true of caregiving at home. Cooking for my son, for example, is something I’m working to “professionalize”—I want to get good enough at it that it doesn't consume my whole life, while also doing it well enough to help a small person grow. Treating it like work gives me a standard to strive for, a way to measure progress, and incentive to design systems around it.
The Costs of Professionalization
Still, the more I invest in such design, the more I find I have to check myself to avoid falling into the trappings of market thinking. When practices become professions or "industries"—a word I have come to understand as a mechanism for scaling talent and keeping certain people out of the talent pipeline—often, as much is lost as is gained.
Here are three examples of how this plays out:
Example 1: Nursing
I'm currently reading the book Taking Care, a history of the nursing industry, in which journalist Sara DiGregorio documents how nursing went from a ubiquitous practice—home, family and spiritually based—to a profession. With its milestones, such as the formation of American Medical Association, came gates. The rise of physicians came hand in hand with the exclusion (and even persecution) of unofficial medical providers, like midwives and lay practitioners who had been providing care for centuries. While professionalization brought important standards and recognition, it also meant that many traditional ways of caring were suddenly deemed illegitimate.
I find nursing is particularly interesting because the practice of nursing is something that has always existed and can never really go away. DiGregorio does a beautiful job showing the role nursing played in the development of civilization—whether or not you heard about them, nurses were always there.
Example 2: Journalism
For very longtime readers, you know that this practice vs. profession tension is something I’ve struggled with in journalism, a field where I've worked on both sides of the professional divide. As I've written before, while the boundaries surrounding 'professional' journalism are clear in the eyes of its producers and gatekeepers, the same is never really true for news consumers. And while, technically, journalism is a profession with institutions, ethical codes, and credentialed pathways, in reality, we all practice journalism when we share news in our circles, publish newsletters, or investigate something ourselves. Great investigations have come from so-called "non-journalists," and harmful reporting is produced by professional ones all the time.
Professionalization here has created important scaffolding—but it has also drawn boundaries that are, at best, porous and, at worst, exclusionary without actually ensuring quality.
Example 3: Home
Home is the trickiest gray zone, because it is perhaps the only place one gets to escape the trappings of productivity culture if one chooses to. Cooking for pleasure—and most other hobbies—is something I don't actually want to professionalize because it is filled with art, leisure, improvisation. As much as I want to elevate care work appropriately, at home, efficiency isn’t needed everywhere. And as I experiment with my own systems design in my home, I have to keep reminding myself of this. Sometimes, moving on a whim is the point.
Thus, the tricky tension of the gray zone: professionalization can give us structure and dignity, but it can also cut off possibilities, erase variations and divide people.
And so, I felt in need of a map.
A Map of the Continuum between Practice and Profession
Here's how I've been trying to sketch the gray zone between practice and profession. Think of it as a spectrum with three columns: on the left, practices; in the middle, the gray zone; on the right, professions.
Caring for someone who's sick at home is a practice. The gray zone is becoming a full-time caregiver to a dependent parent or working as an uncredentialed night nurse using years of family experience. On the profession side, you have nursing as an industry—registered nurses deployed in hospitals, part of a large health infrastructure.
Journaling or writing personal essays is a practice. The gray zone is something like drafting a book with editors or accountability structures. On the profession side, you have published authors with contracts, deadlines, and an industry around their work.
Sharing news with family or in a personal newsletter is a practice. The gray zone is independent newsletters or grassroots investigations that look like journalism but live outside institutions. On the profession side, you have newsroom journalism—codified and gatekept.
Cooking for pleasure is a practice. Cooking for a child—where efficiency, growth, and health matter—is a gray zone. On the profession side, you have chefs, nutritionists, or licensed meal service providers.
What I like about mapping it this way is that it opens up a view to consider the gains and the losses. The left column is improvisational, cultural, varied. The right column is structured, designed, scaffolded. And the middle is where the tension lives: where practices become work (sometimes by choice, often not), and where we have to decide what we want to keep soft and what we want to professionalize (again, by professionalize I mean invest in good design and systems).
If you want to play with your own gray zone map, here is an exercise you can try.
A Design Tool: The Gray Zone Map
Draw the Map: Try the map yourself. What are some things in your life that you do professionally? What is the practice version of them? What do you do as a personal practice? What's the professional version of it?
How you can use it:
To reflect on your priorities: I imagine for career changers or retirees, you could have entered through the other door, too. What did you used to do professionally that you now continue as a practice, because you care to?
For example, I used to do journalism professionally, but I now see it as a personal practice—I’m very diligent about information research and sharing and approach more decisions through journalistic research. I used to write as a personal practice, but I now treat it as my profession; I invest in training, community, and structured practice.To understand the power/access structures around your work: How does choosing to push in one or the other direction change who's in the room, who gets paid, and what counts as "expertise"?
To redesign your professional work: If you could redesign something you do professionally by borrowing from its practice version, how might you do that?
For example, in an interview, DiGregorio shares that if she could redesign nursing based on the inherent strengths of the actual practice of nursing, she would deploy many more nurses into community spaces as public health educators and workers because their work could be a tremendous investment into preventative healthcare. Why should we meet nurses only in the hospital rooms after we are sick when they are master listeners and health educators?
I'm still figuring out where I want to draw these lines in my own life, but mapping it this way has helped me see that maybe the question isn't whether something should be work or not but which direction I’m moving in and why.
Related Reading/Listening
I'm currently working through a few histories that are helping me understand these gray zones. Here is the one I mentioned and another I recommend:
Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World by Sarah DiGregorio — A cultural history of nursing that chronicles how caregivers at the intersection of health care and community have always worked to change the world, often invisibly. DiGregorio combines personal narratives with nuanced reporting to examine both the successes and failures of how we care for each other. Here is a podcast with the author.
The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen — A sweeping global history of work from hunter-gatherers to the present day. Lucassen examines how humanity organizes labor across households, tribes, cities, and states, exploring the constant tension between cooperation and subordination at work. Here is a podcast with the author.
Happy Monday,
Jihii