The Luxury of Knowing
Reflections on career clarity and the luck of finding it
This was originally posted on twitter
We notice when we don’t belong. We often don’t fully notice when we do.
This happens everywhere, but especially in tech, where the systems are remarkably good at pulling people in and the groupthink is even better at keeping them there.
You can spend years inside the bubble before you realize you never questioned whether you were in the right place.
Careers are strange because growing up is infinite. You show up to your first job and someone hires you, pays you, and you spend months toggling between imposter syndrome, overconfidence, and existential doubt about what you do or don’t know about work and life.
One of the luckiest breaks of my life was figuring out what work I wanted to do ~20 and feeling a deep sense of fulfillment from investing.
I didn’t appreciate it then. I do now.
Finding your direction professionally can be the difference between moving through the world with clarity and moving through it with a low-grade hum of anxiety that never turns off.
When you have this clarity, you take it for granted. When you don’t, the cognitive load compounds and cascades into everything else.
Work is not everything, but for a lot of people, finding some clarity professionally makes room for the volatility of real life to be tolerable. Perhaps this comes from the worth society assigns us for being “productive” while it rarely gives us that same credit for being successful in our personal lives.
Carrying that lack of clarity takes its toll either way.
Over the years, I’ve mostly carried that weight on/off in my personal life but I’ve watched friends carry it professionally for months, years, and decades. To carry it in both places simultaneously is exhausting in ways that are hard to describe.
But what makes it harder is that we treat professional clarity like a permanent condition.
What gave you direction 5-10 years ago might not now. This is hard to admit when everyone seems oriented towards ‘their next job being their last job,’ and can be especially difficult when surrounded by others who have found their clarity.
I’ve found it helpful to think about chapters instead of the entire book of life. Find fulfillment in this chapter, knowing you might need to find it again later. The impermanence creates freedom where permanence creates pressure.
If you’ve found your place in your career, sit with that for a moment. The luxury of knowing is rarer than you think, and we probably underestimate just how much that impacts our day to day lives and the lives of those closest to us who aren’t so lucky.
If you haven’t, the weight of that searching is real. Most people just don’t talk about it.