The American Scholar

Emerson’s argument that a person’s job has begun to define them in “The American Scholar” does not hold true today.
In the United States a person’s job does not have to define them. For example, if someone is a police officer, they can be much more than that as well. They can be a father, a cook, a handy man, a basketball player (probably not pro, or anything like that, but they can still enjoy playing the game); they could even go back to school to become a doctor if they wanted! It is their life and they can choose if whether or not they want their job to rule out all else. We can be “Man Thinking” if we choose to be so. In “The American Scholar” Emerson wrote, “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” This means we are never whole, never using all our parts, never using all our minds; only portions of them working at a time. Most people today use more than one portion, do more than just one job; in fact, many people have several jobs because they need the extra money.
When a police officer comes home after a busy day at the station and goes to the grocery store in need of food to make dinner, he does not watch for a speeder or for someone to run a red light; he may notice it, as any of us would but he would not memorize the plate number to report to the presently working officers. They keep work life separate from home life. Same goes for the majority of people. A teacher does not come home to her family and begin teaching her children geometry. A builder does not come home to start adding on to his house. If someone has two jobs, they keep them separate from one another, one often being much different from the other; in which case they would need several different skills. My best friend’s father is a college professor as well as a vice-president of a sporting goods store. Although these jobs keep him busy, he always finds time for family. He and many others surely don’t allow their jobs to define who they are.