You weren't meant to escape your life

The broken promise

I saw a post on LinkedIn this week that really set me off.

A friend and fellow creator, Janel, wrote about how retirement has “lost its grip” on our generation. She surveyed her audience about what end-of-career success looks like for them, and nearly 30% said financial freedom, while less than 1% said status and recognition.

Her takeaway from this was that, more than status, our generation is working towards optionality.

But this hit me in a slightly different way.

The paradigm shift: retirement isn’t promised

For a while in corporate America, the deal was pretty sweet (if you could get in). Putting in a decade or two at a blue chip coimpany like 3M, Accenture, or Allstate meant a high six-figure salary with plenty of benefits and perks, relative job security, and the prestige associated with working for a household name.

It had its trade-offs (i.e., long hours and little if any remote work), but in most cases, the rewards were worth the headache. There was the adage of putting your time in and paying your dues.

But now, those dues don’t come with a payoff. When a major fintech company lays off 4,000 people, they’re not just letting go of analysts and interns. These directors and managers who were putting in the hours to reach the next rung of the career ladder are learning that someone’s already shaved off the next 10 rungs.

Not to mention the effect that tariffs and war waging can have on your investment portfolio.

Your ideal retirement isn’t promised. So what should you do instead?

How to build a life you don’t need to escape from

Chances are, you didn’t choose your career. Your identity did. I’ll share more of what I mean by that soon, but for now, it’s worth auditing how much of your current professional path was willfully chosen by you, vs what you felt led to do via the forces of inertia and your environment.

If you’re not quite sure how to start discovering what kind of work you should be doing, here are a few questions worth asking yourself (be honest):

1. Are you living for the weekend, or just enduring the week? Everybody needs a break occasionally. But if you get a pit in your stomach every Sunday around 6 PM, and find yourself counting down the days until Friday, that’s something worth examining.

2. What would you do if money & status were no object? It’s a cliche, I know, but it’s worth asking. Strip away the salary, or what your friends and family may think. If you truly got to choose, what would you wake up and do tomorrow? Hint: you do get to choose.

3. What are you most complimented on at work? Oftentimes, our skills are hidden in the compliments we’re ignoring. When do you get praised at work? And what do others come to you for help with?

4. When did you last lose track of time at work? I’m not talking about doomscrolling, or your Monday status call. When did you last lose time actually in the work? That feeling of flow tends to show up when you’re doing work that genuinely fits you. If you’ve never felt that at work, that’s also worth noting.

The first step is rarely quitting your job or blowing up your existing career. It’s usually just paying better attention. Noticing which parts of your life feel energizing or expansive, and which parts feel like you’re avoiding something.

You can’t change what you can’t acknowledge.

ICYMI

So much has changed over the last few years. I became a parent, lost my job, and built an incredible community online and in-person around the idea of being a first-gen professional, or “first” in your family.

But with that growth, some people may not see the full picture. Especially if this Substack is the first time you’ve seen my content.

So I thought I’d take this time to reintroduce myself:

The uncomfortable truth about designing your career

Something I’ve said before is that if you can see the full path laid out in front of you, chances are you’re living somebody else’s dream.

Building the kind of work environment you feel you won’t need to retire from sounds nice, but it can be very tough to put into practice. And oftentimes it requires more inner work to reveal itself.

My job loss prompted some intense emotions and conversations about where I was heading professionally. It was tempting to launch myself into the job search and begin shopping my resume around, but I had to come to terms with the fact that the path that I was on was no longer serving me. Which opened me up to pursuing the career I have now. And that comes with a lot of excitement and a ton of uncertainty.

But is it worth it? Absolutely.

read previous notes here

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