Your Job Titles Are Not Impressive Anymore. We Don't Care

The Teams meetings were a drag this week. The usual chalkboard-inducing, high-pitched corporate talk. The phony smiles. Fake excitement about projects nobody actually cares about. And by the end of the call, I let out a loud, obnoxious sigh of relief. Though I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious.

I felt like I’d just delivered my best Oscars performance. “I’m so excited!!!…" I nasily exclaimed. “I knowww,” my manager responds. The awkward silence settles in. click, as I close my call….” yeah, not excited at all.”

I think a lot of you have lived through this exact corporate Teams meeting scenario.

Naturally, I’m an introvert. I don’t care much for people (years and years of disappointment and letdowns will do that to you), and I don’t feel as motivated with the corporate/work world anymore. Hence, why I’ve been dragging my feet to finish my cert and licensing programs.

The truth of the matter is that nothing hits the way it used to—food, work, outings, the mall, school, Mother Earth.

And it’s not a depression thing. It’s not anhedonia or nihilism either. It’s just a lingering state of “I’m getting by… and this is enough.”

Because it is enough.

So here’s the thing: somewhere along the way, we let our job titles become our personality traits. Senior This. Director of That. UX Designer of whatever.

We built our whole sense of self around a role that a company could just erase on a Tuesday afternoon with a calendar invite and a 15-minute Zoom call. “So your role has been…”

BAM, here come the night sweats, and the terror over how you’re going to pay your bills.

Layoffs don’t care about your LinkedIn headline, nor do the companies, honestly. (And that’s obvious with all the phantom job postings we’re seeing.)

They also don’t care how long you stayed late or how many KPIs you hit. Your title gets cut, and suddenly you’re left asking a question you haven’t asked yourself in years: Who am I outside of this job? What is my purpose?

That’s not a small question. That’s the question you SHOULD be asking yourself: Who are you, really?

And it shouldn’t take a job layoff for that to happen.

Here’s what nobody also told you and what the new world is telling you now: Work is very good at convincing you that your role is your passion. The daily grind becomes your identity. The ambition cleverly tricks you into thinking it’s yours. But a lot of that was borrowed.

All of that belonged ot the company, not you.

And you quickly realize that when slapped with a layoff.

The constant pressure to be on it all the time used to go unnoticed. The grind was something we willingly endured because it used to mean something to each of us. Now that meaning has aggressively disappeared, and we’re left staring at a phone, a fancy laptop, another coffee cup, just feeling bleh.

Bleh about the goals. Bleh about the dreams. Bleh about all of it.

And that bleh feeling? It’s useful information. It’s telling you the borrowed passion was never yours to begin with.

Walk into any Walmart right now and look at people's faces. Exhaustion. Dismay. The look of someone who knows the life they're living isn't quite the one they wanted, it’s not aligned with them, but they can't figure out how to close that gap.

We've lost something. That early 2000s, early 90s, whatever era it was for you, kind of joy. The kind that didn't need a return on investment.

We don't want to climb corporate ladders anymore, network with narcissistic phonies, or post hollow advice on LinkedIn. We want peace. We want rest. We want to feel like ourselves again.

Finding that starts with separating who you are from what you do for money.

Your job is not your calling. It might pay your bills, yes. It might even be a genuinely engaging job position. But it is not the full story of you, and it never was.

We’ve now entered an era of identity collapse. People who for so long sat comfortably in that job-role identity are now having midlife crises as the job market is wrecked and the world is flipped belly up, I mean, most of us don’t recognize it anymore.

I’m sure you don’t want that identity crisis crashout. I wouldn’t want it either. So start asking yourself better questions. It shouldn’t be “what should I do for work,” but instead, “what do I actually want my days to feel like?”

This leads me to question, if you’ve come this far, that is, why do you find yourself here of all places on Substack?

When posing the question to myself…honestly, I’m on Substack mostly because I just want to write. I want to connect to that old me that used to love reading and writing for the heck of it, not for a dollar.

We have all, for the most part, lost the ability to chase joy in a hobby or craft. Instead, we’ve swapped that joy in for cheap, paper money.

I don’t like money. It’s the parasite that’s caused most issues in our world today. It’s so valueless, yet we’re forced to give it so much time and attention at the cost of our mental health and peace. But this is a conversation for another day.

If money is too expensive and hard to come by, then let your peace be easy to find. Whatever that may be. Peace should be your goal. Health should be your priority, and most importantly, looking at alternatives to what’s currently offered to us in this hollow, empty, matrix-like capitalist system we unfortunately are being crushed under.

You don’t need to care about most of these things nowadays. It’s acceptable. And I think as more and more time goes on, all those phony, ego-driven corporatee people are not going to impress anyone anymore.

Now, if you took the time to read this far, seriously, wow, thanks. I mean, you could probably have read something more ground-shattering and relatable with your ChatGPT than this sloppily written post.

That being said, I’ll leave you with unique and interesting blogs I came across this week. I call them the treasure troves of forgotten websites in the sea of the internet. And hopefully these websites invigorate and inspire you to write again.

I stumbled across this blog back in 2003, one day after coming home from a hard day at middle school. It’s been around a long time, and I’m glad to see it’s still up and running. I personally love his clean, refreshing blog design, and he’s never changed that up since the onset. But most importantly, his blog posts are the real goldmine for the brain.

If you’re someone who has also been demotivated lately to write and distribute your own art and writings because of AI, read this article. It’ll let you know that, hey, you’re not the only one, but also you should keep making and creating. Never stop.

Speaking on the topic at hand, and how, yes, jobs suck. Take a look at this article. This topic is discussed frequently on YouTube and in short-form videos. But I think better to take the time and read about it, that way you’re engaging with the topic at hand but also exercising your brain. And also, if you’re on LinkedIn, be careful not to waste your time on Ghost Jobs.