Add up the hours of your income-work career life—let’s say 2,000 hours a year multiplied by 40 years—it’s basically a quarter of your existence for those decades.
There is so much more to career than LinkedIn1—yet that platform seems to be shaping my outlook more than I’d like it too. First, my friends are impressive! Holy shit, they are doing well—the entrepreneurs are raising huge rounds, the lawyers are making headlines, the executives leading great companies, the writers publishing books. Good job, friends.
But after some (ego-doom)scrolling on LinkedIn, it’s way too easy for me to slip into a funk of self pity that somehow I’ve been a decent soldier but I’ll never be an officer. Of course this is a complicated, untrue, prideful, irrational feeling. A part of me knows I could have chosen a high-profile path. But I literally moved to New Mexico to not choose that corporate path. Yet another part of me still wants to know when will I feel I’ve ‘made it’?
For the last five years, many doors—mostly in corporate tech and venture capital—have been opened to me. I have been in the room so to speak. So why didn’t my DNA tingle at the idea of more professional leadership, money, and prestige?2 Am I not qualified? It is a tenuous relationship with authority that’s my undoing? Is it the glass ceiling? I never really even grabbed for the ring. It’s taken me some time to understand that it’s not that I lack horsepower, intelligence or skills—and certainly not creativity and imagination. What I lack, it feels, is the inner (dis)passion it takes to enjoy the corporate management game. OKRs, KPIs, CTRs, and the like, failed to excite me. Or is this even the right frame? Like there is nothing lacking inside of me. Maybe, just maybe, that was never my path to begin with. Maybe I fucking hate acronyms.
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When my dad died, I felt I had not only lost my father but I also lost one of my most important sources of career advice. Even though I often chafed at it, he did have plenty of supportive thoughts to offer; through thick and thin I always felt that I had a tremendous career cheerleader in him. Early on in my life, he actively wanted me to follow his footsteps as an entrepreneur/founder with an MBA—and considered my career in journalism to be a folly. That said, we fantasized about opening a father-daughter bookstore; he supported my desire to work largely outside corporate ranks and move somewhere more rural. By the end of his life, he was preaching ikigai. My mom has also been an avid career whisperer for me but she is much more pragmatic. Her view? Be kind, be strategic, and also always get the money. I get that too.
I also propose there’s also a whole host of systemic issues that have silently operated in the background that actually have nothing to do with me personally and everything to do with class and marriage, and paradigms that are silently perpetuated. Like my own grappling with trying to get the personal side of my life “right” seemed to be at direct odds with getting the professional side leveled up.
As much as being a working mother is a bear, I think being a single woman (or man too) has been a different headwind. This incredible piece of writing spelled out a bunch of things I have felt but never really knew how to articulate—that being an unmarried, childless, middle-class woman is a weird invisible oddity in a broad swath of American society (and the workplace). And no, I don’t think that somehow the extra cycles I have had available because I am not dealing with childcare made me “more available and eager for more hours of work.”
When you’re in your mid-career years (32-45), female and male conversations at the knowledge-worker workplace are often about a) wedding planning b) child-having c) child-rearing and d) real estate. I was getting a divorce at 35—at the point where I should be have been accelerating into a social norm I was tacking away from it. As much as a partner and family can undo a woman’s career, a partner and family can also help you build one by functioning as emotional ballast and virtue-signaling how “made” you are as an adult. (I am aware I am using highly gendered, white, middle-class ideas and generalizations to be sure; if I felt even a tiny bit marginalized at all, I can only imagine how much more so others do. This is one reason why diversity is such an important part of healthy work force—we need to widen the hoop on norms.)
So, at some point in my single-female-professional course, I said fuck it. I changed from wanting to compete for career escalation to something more like “Get enough money to switch to something that makes you happy and you don’t have fake-enjoy the rat race.”
So what do I do today for work? I’ll let you sort that out with LinkedIn but suffice I am in a much better place for a number of reasons as a communications-director-for-hire. Working remote, in the social impact field, is the right fit for me. I am quite passionate about the work I do around economic equality and financial security. As you know, I am also passionate as a writer. I have been freed from the horrors of a tech office bro culture with its open desks, brogrammers, and dirty-dishes-in-the-sink wars.
Today, in addition to my various paid communications gigs, I am excited to volunteer with the local farmer’s market institute on growing its impact for SNAP recipients—and raising its profile as an advocate of local farming and food security. I also still have my middle-class worries about money, retirement and healthcare—more than ever. But that’s a choice that feels rightish (and scary-ish) to me.
Importantly, I also have a partner who is a lovely support system. Yes, having warm homemade soup for lunch does make me a better worker. And the funny thing is, I feel my actual sense of career as defined by my own innate skills and intellectual passion has never been stronger.
And if you ever want to hire me to do social-impact things and the like, here’s my website ;-)
Here’s what’s not on LinkedIn: I was an unhappy journalist for years; it was terribly underpaid, the bad news relentless, and the industry guided by skewed incentives. So, after five years in the industry, I thought “I’ll be a therapist instead!” After one semester of coursework at NYU I realized I am a better buyer of therapy than a seller of it and I went back to being a journalist.
Next, I relented to my dad’s pressure to get an MBA (his way of saying “Make some money dear daughter!”) and applied to two schools. My big idea was to create a chain of women’s health vending to sell things like Plan B, UTI tablets, lubricants, etc. I even entered a start-up pitch competition to create a search engine for all the international sperm banks.
When I moved to tech, I was happier and earned more, but over the years I had another series of runs for the exit. I even applied to an environmental graduate program in Finland with a proposal to develop radical retraining for the communications industry around environmental sustainability.
I’ve also had many various schemes for side-gigs (forest bathing concierge, dating profile ghostwriter, treehouse yoga teacher, meditation retreat developer). Most recently, I explored buying a bookstore. I pursued this idea far enough to have an actual conversation with a retiring owner who told me, among other things, “If you love books, don’t own a bookstore.”
There was a point in early summer 2020 where I was taking inbound calls from recruiters to lead content marketing at several high-profile tech companies. Very well-paid jobs with good titles in prominent companies. But with each call, after dropping all the right keywords, I could feel the pit in my stomach harden more and more. It wasn’t the work itself per se, but I simply couldn’t muster the act to sell my energy and brain cycles to another founder for his vision. The money and tech-prestige drugs had stopped working.
This is SO relatable. I’m so not into the underpaid overstressed journalism career OR the egocentric tech rat race. I’d much rather aim for the top within my own happy medium. 🥰