My Job= My Identity

On an episode of Mad Men, Don Draper is forced to fire an employee for drinking too much on the job. (Oh, the irony.) However, he wants the employee to sober up and return to the agency, so he gives the man a year’s severance pay and tells him to get clean and come back in a year. The conversation takes place in an alley during a rainstorm. And as Draper climbs into a cab, the former employee looks at him desperately and pleads, “If I don’t show up to that office on Monday morning, I don’t know who I am.”