Severance
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
Boom! You have just been born. One moment you’re nothing, next moment — whammo! You’re a baby.
Nice going, baby. Congrats! Make sure to update your LinkedIn.
Before anyone can react or comment, babies becomes kids. A toddler becomes a tween. Adolescents become adults. Well, most do, eventually. Some faster than others and few as quickly or completely as we’d like.
The progression from infant to adult is a process of continuous change. You gain wisdom and abilities, empathy and patience. Your tolerance for alcohol increases, and for assholes as well.
You hope for fewer surprises as you grow older, but change is continuous and constant. Your tolerance for assholes, developed so patiently, suddenly disappears. Some abilities falter, while others are enhanced. You’re no longer confident you can select the appropriate emoji for any given circumstance. In the other hand, it takes a lot less time to figure out what to wear.
One moment you’re quite spry. The next, you’re unable to transition to or from a sitting position without emitting an involuntary sound. You tolerate surprises, revelations, improvements, and disappointments. You finally learn how to give a really good hug.
Throughout this lifetime of continuous change, is there anything that stays the same?
Space and Time
Time passes. The world spins. Borders change. Governments and markets and hemlines all rise and then fall and then rise higher than we ever thought possible before crashing down again. The motion is predictable, but takes us by surprise every time.
Technology inches ever closer to perfecting its terminal business of first compromising then destroying its creators. Young people become far smarter than previously thought possible, all while remaining way dumber that we can comprehend.
Our language evolves. Maybe devolves is the better word. It definitely involves everyone else in a global conspiracy against you, as the meaning of words suddenly change or invert without proper notice.
Your habits, your health, and your beliefs all change. You quit smoking, but took up daytime drinking to deal with the stress. You take up running to help you quit drinking, and that destroyed your knees.
You quit texting your ex, which is good because it makes your friends happy. You’re still talking to your ex’s mother, though, which gives your friends some concern. They wonder: Is that, like, appropriate? Don’t worry, you assure them, we’re all in a really good pace.
Throughout all this, is there anything about you that stays the same?
You might say your body stays the same, but you might not say that to anybody over 40.
Your cells are continuously, silently, imperceptibly being created and destroyed. Every cell toils to perform its assigned function while simultaneously creating the ones that will replace them when they die. They’ve automated their own obsolescence, like managers overseeing layoffs at a big tech company.
Did you know that the cells in your skin regenerate as frequently as every few weeks? The oldest cells in your body are in your bones — but even they last no longer than about 15 years. That means if you’re over 15 years old, literally nothing about you has stayed the same. If you’re not over 15 years old, this is not appropriate reading material for you. Please turn off your iPad and GO TO BED. Do not make us come up there again.
Does your family stays the same? You wish! Your family can’t even get through a holiday dinner without a divorce, disownment, or disinheritance. Your family is “related” to you, like the items on the right side of an Amazon product page. It’s an association of people with similar DNA, selected by nature over generations to ensure survival, perhaps, but not solvency.
If there’s consistency in your family, it’s that the net amount of disappointment and disapproval remains constant. It’s the conservation of discontent — familial sorrow can neither be created nor destroyed.
It surely doesn’t stay the same.
Same Shit, Different Day
Ok. So what does stay the same?
There is one thing that stays the same through the maelstrom of heartbreak, ecstasy, creation, and destruction.
That thing is:
Whatever you decide.
Yep. The only things that I can depend on to remain constant throughout my life are the specific aspects of it that I choose.
The few things begun in relative youth that persist into old age — friendships, religion, hobbies, that outfit you will never fit into — they are all still there for the same reason: because you choose to keep them around.
You choose, select, or decide the things that remain permanent. Like that tattoo, your best friend Bertie, and the way you take your coffee. You decide which things are temporary, that you’re just trying on, like a borrowed outfit, a pilates membership, or that trial subscription to Paramount+.
Let’s say, for example, that I decide to abstain from couples yoga for the rest of my life. I create that idea, develop the intention, and I begin to align my behavior with it. I will not practice couples yoga today. I will not do it tomorrow, or the next day.
My behavior may stray from my intention. I accidentally relapse while wife and I vacation in Costa Rica. We practice two hours of utterly divine couples yoga at a seaside resort taught by a topless Swiss instructor with an eyebrow piercing which, weirdly, actually looks kind of good on them.
This changes nothing! I can go right back to abstaining from couples yoga when we get back to the States, because my intention is for my abstention from this practice to persist for all of my days.
What if, in a fit of ecstatic self-discovery, I decide to make a daily practice of couples yoga? What if I commit to maintain for the rest of my natural life? That’s cool too. What matters is that I’m deliberate about the intentions that I set to become my habit or practice. That’s how I define what aspects of my are essential to being me.
This is not really about yoga. It’s about your career. I will now get to that point, and illustrate how it relates to making emotionally intelligent career decisions.
Career Choices
My intention to preserve, promote, or propagate some aspects of my life determines which practices are likely to persist, survive, and continue no matter what else happens.
In my career, there will be distractions, interruptions, abstentions, abstentions from abstention, et cetera. However, outside actors cannot alter or influence my intention if I don’t permit them. That’s because I have made permanent certain aspects of my professional identity that I keep safe, through practices that are invulnerable to layoffs, firings, bankruptcies, distractions, and so on.
I accomplish this by severing1 aspects of my professional identity from the parts that belongs to my employer(s) or clients. I ensure that I continually invest a fraction of my time and energy in practices that are not influenced or controlled by anybody else.
If the Soviet Union is reconstituted, if the wrong person is elected president, if the seas continue to rise so high that we all move to the mountains…
If I get fired from my job, if I rage quit my job, if AI makes talents obsolete, if my boss fails to deliver their promises for the third year in a row…
It’s my decision to cultivate a professional life that I keep safe and separate from my daily work, and I want to try to inspire everyone else to do this to. In my coaching, I sometimes call this the “Side Hustle” option or “Your Etsy Store” for a stakes-lowering example.
Personally, this newsletter fits in that space for me, along with coaching, some other writing, consulting, and my other side projects. For you it might be doing some freelance work, volunteering as a mentor, trying to professionalize your hobby. As long as it is yours, and you own it, you can make it temporary, or you can make it permanent.
I can try it on just for one weekend, like your my friend Ainsley’s hooker boots. Or I can tattoo it on in a rushed expression of misspelled inspirational mishegas.
Another great thing about setting your personal intentions is that they cannot be broken or interfered with by outside actors. Not even by a very good actor, like Julianne Moore.
Example: Let’s say I have decided that I am going to make my expertise in design systems a major part of my professional identity. I start investing some free time in writing, participating in communities, doing a little freelance work, helping a friend’s startup with their brand — whatever.
Let’s say my boss is the amazing actor Julianne Moore (who at 62 years old is starring in May December, which by the way was made for only $20 Million — less than 1/10th of a Hunger Game) and tomorrow, out of nowhere — boom! Julianne Moore fires me.
Fuck you, Julianne Moore! (Just kidding, I love you J.M.! She is also amazing in Sharper on AppleTV — totally transcendent, check it out.)
Anyway, let’s say I am fired from my job. Or, I’m not fired but my boss doesn’t respect my contribution, or even seem to realize that I exist, and relegates me to a stupid corner of the company. Or, let’s say the company has a shitty year and kills my main project which was my only hope at becoming a manager in this lifetime.
If any or all of those things go wrong, but I have set my intention to focus on I don’t know design systems. Even if everything else changes, my intention and focus stays the same. If I have gotten involved in a community online related to my intention — to my passion, talent, interests, goals, whatever — I might lose my job or my promotion, but I can keep that community. They cannot take it from me.
My job might change — I could lose it. My company could change — it could go out of business. The trajectory of my career could be interrupted. No matter what happens I get to keep the aspects of it that I created by and for myself. That’s the result of setting my intention to create and maintain those elements of my professional identify.
This is the single best thing you can do to keep yourself safe in our current cruel, despotic, demonically unpredictable working world: Decide on something about your professional identity that really matters to you. Set your intention to promote or at least maintain it, no matter what else happens at work.
The corporate world dazzles with false promises of success and safety. Perhaps now more than ever, more people are waking up the idea that corporations can’t be trusted to take care of us from cradle to grave.
They can’t be trusted for kindness, fairness, sensitivity, or generosity. There is no guarantee that they won’t take everything you give them for twenty years or more, then turn around and cast you aside without so much as a phone call.
Don’t trust a corporation to be kind to you. Don’t even trust it not to be cruel. If you feel apprehensive about starting up a regular practice of investing in your own professional identity, stop worry about how, and start worrying about when.
Some of the people suddenly laid off in the last few years have lost everything. But a corporate employer can’t take away what isn’t theirs. I want you to be one of the people who, if their job gets taken away, have something truly valuable that’s left.
No matter how much the world changes, that’s one thing you can count on to stay the same.
Spoiler alert: I think this is what the plot of the Apple TV+ Series Severance is about.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. And yes. The other thing I feel they can’t take away or pollute is the bond in the relationships you build through work. It’s the only part you can control and possibly take with you in the end.