What’s left of you when the job, the title, and the org chart disappear.
My body has been stuck in survival mode for years, as if a persistent threat looms around every corner or arrives with every inbound text. Part of it, I’m sure, is the 24-hour news cycle, global politics, and social media feeds ratcheting up my FOMO. There’s the reality of AI displacement and its related doom cycles: Am I keeping up? Am I replaceable? How much relevancy do I have left? Add in the malaise of modern corporate life and dread becomes ever-present.
Work is a weird proposition. How much of our lives are consumed by it, how much of our self-worth is rooted in it, the years we spend preparing for it, and how quickly it can vanish without warning.
As most denizens of Corporate America can tell you, the 9-5 is an illusion or a quaint remnant of a pre-smartphone past. There are the days we get in early to prepare for a meeting. The nights we stay late to meet a deadline. There’s the weekend catch-up or the nighttime messaging with your boss to prove you’re available, leaned in, and ready for that next promotion.
Then there are the mental tolls, like hidden fees on our time, that often get overlooked. It is time spent on the Sunday scaries, fighting imposter syndrome, lying in bed at 3 a.m. wrestling with endless rumination: replayed conversations, running imaginary scenarios, and mulling over the question “is it all worth it?” in exchange for nice salaries, health benefits, and a sense of identity.
Work consumes way more than forty hours a week, so it is no shock that many of us build our identities around who it tells us we are. Pride in the company we work for, the title we’ve attained, the place in society our salary affords. That isn’t a bad thing in itself. It helps us position ourselves, gives us a system to identify ourselves, a shorthand to communicate where we fit. A place to belong. But what happens when the scaffolding of our identity is dismantled—when we leave a job, when we get laid off, when a position just doesn’t work out? What happens when our role is replaced by AI and a whole category of work disappears? Not only do we have to contend with a financial disruption but an existential one. Who are we without that job that consumed so much of our day, the company that signaled so much of who we believe ourselves to be, and the status that shaped how we look at the world?
These questions are very familiar to me. Over the last couple of years I’ve been through several changes that have caused me to take a deep look at how it is I define myself. I moved from Chicago to New York for work. I graduated from my MFA program after 4 years of consistent class work. I navigated my way through reorgs, adapted to management changes, and survived round after round of layoffs. I left my long-term role at a company that I was very proud to be a part of and moved into a different discipline and a new role at another organization only to have the pieces not fit together. It felt like quicksand and in many ways I was relieved when we parted ways. But it hurt nonetheless. Feeling like I’ve failed at something always does.
All of these shifts and pivots left me feeling drained, unsure, questioning. But I also started to realize that my mind and body had been strained for years. The sleepless nights, the 12-hour workdays, the fear of layoffs had kept me in constant state of survival mode. I talk a lot about our lizard brains, the primal instincts that are meant to keep us safe but that are unfamiliar with the complexities of modern life. My lizard brain had my heart pounding. I fought very hard to be in control of my own fate. In the end, I’d clung so hard to my corporate identity that I lost myself in the process. And no matter how hard I tried to worry away an outcome, I think I might have hastened its arrival. And there it was. Now what?
Grief. I had to take a moment to grieve. Look at it up close and pay attention to what was changing in my mind and body. Of course, my instinct was to force resilience. To take it all in stride. It’s just a job after all. Chin up and get to work finding a new and better one. I could just replace the job stress with job search stress. Fill my time with network outreach and endlessly scroll LinkedIn. I could lose sleep worrying about what went wrong. But I fought that instinct, at least for a little bit. I allowed myself time to grieve. A day, a week, two—I decided it was a bigger risk if I didn’t take a moment to examine what it was I had lost than it would be to jump towards the next thing. Because if I didn’t recognize what had made me feel so drained then I would just repeat the pattern. I would just kick the can down the road.
I’ve come to understand that we lose much more than a paycheck and health benefits when we lose a job. Losing income, of course, is a huge stressor and rightfully so, but there is so much more tied up in work. We lose structure: the meetings, the deadlines, the QBRs. We lose the dopamine hits: the new email, the Slack messages, the atta boy/girl from a leader. We lose our bearing: the job title, the company, our place in the org chart. Without the structure, the dopamine, and the bearing, it is easy to get lost.
I felt unmoored, all alone on a piece of wreckage, feeling every swell, no land in sight. I allowed myself to experience it and in doing so dislodged myself from a previous way of thinking. What was stripped away by the loss wasn’t my actual identity. It was a context. A frame. The title, the company, the place in the org chart—even the salary—were never the source of what I brought to the work. All those things formed a narrative I believed, but one that was insufficient.
My compassion, my curiosity, the work I’ve been most proud of, those things I keep. Not the job. Recognizing this has given me a renewed sense of freedom. My chest feels like it can expand fully and I can finally breathe. I’m exploring. I’m watching courses on MasterClass; I’m reading literature again; I’m walking new routes. What is essential to me? What new paths can I follow? I am energized by not having an answer.
I’ve been listening to Lorde’s album Virgin and Madonna’s Confessions II, albums that capture the essence of reinvention and made it feel physical. I’ve been on the dance floor, walking Central Park to reset my nervous system. The old narratives about where I should be by now and what productivity looks like are dropping off me like temporary scaffolding. I’m weaning off the dopamine cycles, learning that rest is not a moral failing. I’m listening to the world around me and finding quiet enough to hear my own frequency.
These questions of identity, I suspect, are only going to grow. Artificial intelligence will keep reshaping work and we’ll have to keep redefining how we humans fit into it. But I feel a deep urgency to understand who I am outside of a title or a company. An ache to define myself in a more enduring context.
I’m on that blank page between chapters in a book. It is a moment to breathe and contemplate what just ended before carrying on with the story. I don’t know what comes next, but for now I am resisting the urge to flip the page.