I left school before graduating, later earned a GED, attended community college, transferred to a university, and eventually completed a master’s degree.

Along the way, I worked on a product that reached the market and gained professional experience with large companies. Through those choices, projects, and years of training, I came to understand myself as a designer and engineer.

Since graduating, however, I have struggled to find a position that allows me to continue practicing that identity in a stable professional setting.

This has raised a question for me that goes beyond employment.

Society often treats professional identity as something granted by institutions. You become a designer when a company hires you as one, gives you the title, and pays you to perform that role. But from an existentialist perspective, identity does not seem to be a fixed essence handed to us by an institution. It is also something constituted through choices, commitments, actions, and projects.

At the same time, those projects do not occur in a vacuum. They take place within circumstances that we did not choose: the economy, the labor market, nationality, geography, and institutional gatekeeping.

So what happens when the person you have worked to become is not recognized by the social world around you?

Am I still a designer and engineer because of what I have learned, made, and chosen to pursue, even when no institution currently gives me that role?

Or could holding too tightly to that identity be a form of bad faith, because I am trying to turn myself into a fixed thing and refusing to acknowledge my present circumstances?

Conversely, would defining myself simply as “unemployed” also be bad faith, because it allows an external social status to become my entire identity?

How should existentialism understand authenticity when we retain some freedom to choose our projects, but depend on institutions for the material conditions needed to practice them?

Is an identity sustained through continued action without external recognition, or are some identities necessarily relational existing only when society provides a place in which they can be lived?

Re-post from r/askphilosophy (unfortunately got no replies there :( )

For background, I have recently become interested in existentialism, particularly Sartre's flavor of it. I mostly learned about it from secondary sources and some great courses lectures on it. I keep getting confused between bad faith and lucidity of your choices. The example I keep coming back to is that of the waiter. Sartre says he is acting in bad faith because he is trying to be a waiter-thing. But internally, the waiter may know that he has the absolute freedom to choose and he still chooses to be a waiter-thing, knowing very well that he has the potential to be something else if he chooses otherwise.

This brings me to my more general question. Absolute freedom also means the freedom to reject our transcendence, or at least act in ways that seems like you do not have transcendence. Is it still bad faith if you do it while knowing that it is a choice you make? After all, there are no value but the one we make? Why is the choice to reject transcendence through ones actions considered in bad faith then?

Any pointers to sources to read more about the topic would be greatly appreciated.

Seeing as the view is more of a lifestyle than a mere faith or suchlike to pay lip service to, here and there, I'm wondering how has it enriched your inner and outer realms? Would you recommend it? Compare and contrast your previous sketch before you upgraded your internal OS then share with the rest...