What kind of person are you if there’s not a word to define you?

It’s always fascinating when people try to guess what I do for a living. It happened again Saturday afternoon when I was sitting with three young women. Two of them work at the restaurant where we were sitting and a third just happened to be there.

“I’m not sure what you do, but I’m certain you’re rich,” one of the women said. “You carry yourself like a rich person — like you’re totally confident and sure of yourself. My uncle is chief operating officer of a bank and you have that same sort of air about you that he does.”

I smiled to myself. Rich? Bank executive? How in the world had she come up with that? For me?

Another of the women had seen some of my photographs before, so she said she assumed I’m a professional photographer. The third one had never met me until today. She said I must be either a lawyer or a university professor.

After they had made their guesses, I first told them — as I often do — that I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up. They laughed. Then I was more serious.

I told them that I play with ideas. That’s what I do. Everything else I do with my life — even the parts I’m paid for now — are just trivia. The answer wasn’t what they expected, but it was the most accurate answer I could give.

I play with ideas. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I just haven’t figured out how to get paid for it yet.

I’ve always hated bureaucratic forms that have a box on which I’m supposed to write what I do for a living. I’m confronted with that every time I fill out a tax return, for instance.

For most people, there’s some reasonable way to define who they are. Accountant. Firefighter. Grant writer. Salesperson. Clerk. Assistant manager. Nurse. Plumber. HR consultant.

Even for people who do a whole host of things, there are broad terms such as businessman or manager. But what about for me?

I was once a journalist. Then I started and owned publications. Was I a journalist or a businessman? I wasn’t sure. Then I was a newspaper publisher for a big company. Then a political consultant. For the last 10 years, I haven’t had a clue how to define who I really am.

If I absolutely must explain what I am today, I use this: “I’m a writer trying to make sense of a dysfunctional culture. I used to work in journalism and politics, but I now hate most journalism and all politics.”

“Writer” is such a broad term that it’s easy to use, but it says little. I’m not being paid to write anything these days, but it’s closer to my identity than anything for which I’m paid. Am I really a Realtor? Or the silly title I have with my company? It seems ridiculous. Of course not. I just go through the motions of those activities so I can eat and have a place to live.

(It’s also noteworthy that I’m not the sort of writer that the current advertising-driven media world really wants. If I write something which a certain group of people already believes, a lot of people will read it and recommend it to others. But when I write something which is far more important to me — such as the case in the last week or so when I wrote about escaping the inhumanity of a spiritually destructive culture — very few people will notice. My rule of thumb now is that the things which I believe are most important will be read by the fewest people.)

My ex-wife once sent me a book she found that she thought sounded like me. It was called “Thinking for a Living.” She told me that she didn’t know whether it was a good book, but that the concepts sounded just like me — because what I really did best, she said, was to synthesize ideas.

She explained this by saying that I was the best she had ever seen at taking unrelated ideas — maybe from entirely different fields, things nobody had put together — and synthesizing them in such a way as to develop an entirely new way of looking at things. She said I simply had a way of seeing things that nobody else saw — and I had a way of seeing answers nobody else come come up with.

So what does that make me? Even if you ignore the question of how I make money right now, what does this mean I am?

I tend to exasperate “normal” people.

“If I could do a fourth of what you can naturally do, I would be massively wealthy now,” one of my friends is fond of telling me.

Of course, this friend is motivated by making money, not by thinking or ideas or art or any of the impractical things that matter to me. He would be just as happy selling cars as he would be running a food distributorship or being a building contractor. The point to him is to make money. The specific activity is almost irrelevant to him.

My life would certainly be easier if I cared more about the pragmatic issues of making money. I do understand that I could do well at a thousand different things — if I could just care about them. Instead, I get lost in thoughts. I can’t help but ask, “What if…?”

I still need to find one effective channel for my thoughts and ideas. I need some way to sell the process that goes on inside my head. I’m not going to stop doing what I do — simply because I don’t know any other way to live — so I need to find some way to make it marketable.

I can call myself a writer. Maybe a filmmaker. If I’m really pretentious, I can even claim to be an artist. But whatever I claim to be, what I’m really doing is playing with ideas. There’s nothing in the world that’s as exciting or powerful as ideas, because ideas are what change the world.

And whether I like it or not, I’ll be playing with ideas — in one way or another — until the day I die. It’s just who I am.