One of my guilty pleasures is predictions. Every December-January, I consume a lot of information from climatologists, economists, futurists, technologists, and reporters of all flavors all giving their best thoughts for the year ahead.
To save you some time, here are the keywords for 2023: AI changes everything, major healthcare breakthroughs, rising worker rights, grinding war—with a twist, oh boy!, and ongoing climate chaos, especially around water (oh hi, atmospheric river). Lastly, financial systems are going to break down.
If you’re an astute follower of the news, you probably already know all this. Hardly crystal ball stuff. It’s easy for a shudder to run down my spine when I think about the last idea of financial markets hitting bottom (October-November if you’re into the deep spook.) But this is where my personal mantra for 2023 is relevant: Surrender.
In this case, surrender is not to roll over and ask for a belly scratch (though I’ll take it) but a daily reminder that I take the action, I let go of the outcome.
I feel like I am approaching 2023 as I would a big steep ski hill — apprehensive, open, ready to get pushed and potentially get kicked in the ass, but hopefully not break anything.
Right livelihood
My biggest goal this year is a renewed focus on finding the Right Livelihood. A major contracting project I have been working on since 2020 is winding down next month and I am on the lookout for what’s next. But it’s not quite as simple as just grabbing the next rung. It’s clear to me there is some unfinished emotional business in my relationship with work.
When I was graduating from university, I felt paralyzed by the idea of establishing a career. There was no obvious “doctor/lawyer” spark inside of me. My best 22-year-old thinking was “I like books, reading, and writing so that’s what I’ll do.” And I went on to work in publishing, get a Journalism degree, and work as a general news reporter for a decade. I then rode the wave of VC tech communications for nearly another one.
I was talking with another reporter friend recently and she was like “Well, you can never go back to that.” She meant that the bubble of flush tech money that dominated 2010-2020 was over. Nope. (Sample headline from January 3, 2023: Tech Layoffs Are Happening Faster Than at Any Time During the Pandemic. Yoinks.)
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I was offered a long-term contract to work under a well-funded social impact grant. It was the right move to leave tech — and I found a good holding pattern with a good mission — but now it’s time to jump again.
But here’s the honest part of this jump: Hiding in the shadows of this “work relationship history” is shame that I am even in this position at this stage of my career. I can hear my dad’s voice and his disapproval that I didn’t follow the script right into a lucrative MBA degree. Shame I have pursued my personal growth just as much as my professional growth over the last 20 years. It’s an old, old echo of a voice. Yet it has the power to gin up that long-ago anxiety that I am simply not enough. Zap that right there.
“Pessimists get to be right. Optimists get to be rich.”
I read this tagline on a Substack post recently and I sorta hated it right away. I could smell the hubris. But it stuck in my mind — and now I believe it to be true.
One of the dysfunctional ideas I have with work (and maybe even life) is about being right. I have died a thousand deaths on my emotional sword over all sorts of rightness in the past. It brings to mind another sentence from a piece of 12-step literature that I re-read this week: “The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel.”
So maybe it’s about surrendering to optimism this year even in the face of click-bait predictions, old ghosts, and limiting beliefs.
That despite a job market that’s flooded with hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, and all my pearl-clutching fears about money and health insurance, I have the opportunity to be of service and to revise, innovate and design something new for myself that I really love.
Last fall, I took a fellowship in climate studies that, strangely perhaps, filled me with optimism. I was surrounded by like-minded people from all over the world, it was learning and sharing; it was putting our skills to work on something big and important. I felt connected to the big world in a small way. And I was struck by this fact: We are the agents of our own suffering — and we have more ways out than we know if we open our minds.
So with that, I announce: In 2023, I will get a senior communications role in a climate/impact-related field. Oh, I wouldn’t be a proper professional writer if I didn’t have a call to action for you: Share your network with me. Share me with your people.
Thank you for reading and happy new year! Go on, give Bruno a belly scratch.
PS What’s your word for the year?
My word for 2023 is Tranquilo. You don't have to do it all. It's OK to log off. It's OK to ask for help. It's OK to just be and not always be going.
Word = light
Super read, as always. Happy new year!