“How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

This quintessentially American phrase must seem strange to anyone who is picking up English as a foreign language, since the phrase doesn’t seem to mean anything on its own merits. It means, of course, “how are you?” or “how are you doing?”

“How do you do,” by way of introduction, is often followed by words to these effect: “WHAT do you do?” Wherever you go in the world, you are largely defined by your profession. What you do is regarded as intertwined with your very identity and character.

The next time you’re at a dinner conference, sitting in an airliner, or whenever a stranger at your elbow has occasion to pelt you with a few questions, you can be sure that “what” you do is going to be a topic that is broached after “how” you’re doing is perfunctorily paid its polite heed.

English language last names show that identities are rooted in professions: Butcher, Baker, Miller, Brewer, Farmer, Hunter, Painter, Plumber, Smith (as in a blacksmith), Carpenter, and Shoemaker are just a few examples of common names that are professions.

The grand human switch from the hunter-gatherer existence to specializedtrades has brought us a heck of a better way to live. It’s not a costless windfall, though: In return, we’re faced with having to define ourselves by the professions we choose to pursue. Nothing says more about someone than the way they spend their lives over the span of entire decades.

Face it: There are a lot of cool professions out there. Some people chase a future with them. Others never lift their eyes to the stars–and they condemn themselves to the grind of lifelong toil merely to pay the bills. Which, of course, beats starving, and, face it, if we could all be rock stars or movie stars then that’s what we’d be. The limits of dreams as well as the limits of practicality have to be respected.

There is–as always in anything rooted in human nature–a profit angle to this. Find me an L.A. yuppie, I’ll find you a wanna’ be adventurer who drives a four wheel drive Sports Utility Vehicle (at 5 m.p.h. on the 405 freeway in traffic) and who fantasizes about being Indiana Jones. SUV’s are wildly profitable lines for auto companies. They’re selling more than trucks; they’re selling images and fantasies.

Which brings to mind a wildly clever magazine advertisement from a few years ago: It featured a middle-aged yuppie in business attire looking into he mirror. His reflection is clad in Indiana Jones style safari gear, complete with the trademark hat. Bold print for the ad: “Get in touch with the real you.”

The real “him” in this case was just another homogenized slice of human Wonderbread. If there ever was an adventurer in his soulless little body striving to get out, the instinct had long since been snuffed out by the grinding tyranny of institutional routine.

Of course, the brute necessity of institutional routine is an essential part of modern times. It’s like a black hole, pulling us all in with strong gravity.

Along with gravity, the law of entropy will eventually reduce all the matter in the universe to a state of inert uniformity. Will the same thing happen to humanity?