# Starting Over: What to tell Sarah, at the edge of professional oblivion. 

I came across a sad post recently from a woman on LinkedIn— let’s call her Sarah—who spent over a decade, in her words, as a *top 2% recruiter*, and was now finding it impossible to land even the most basic of roles. It was one of those earnest, help-me / trauma-essays, with the comments below full of support, shock that Sarah was *still* unemployed, and love-heart emojis — the most potent form of emotional currency we offer, always in silence.

I feel for Sarah, who is part of a growing group of professional refugees flooding our feeds, as the snow globe of the global economy is shaken; tariffs, AI, and layoffs — shake, shake, shake. When I imagine myself in Sarah’s shoes — what it would be like, in that moment, as she drafts the words — it feels like a mixture of humility, shame, and survival-driven desperation, the latter of which makes the hairs on my arms stand tall. This late-stage survival instinct perfectly demonstrates how tough human beings can be, but watching it unfold on social media makes me very sad, for we are so very fragile, so easily put on tilt. Perhaps these posts are ‘*a reminder to consider yourself lucky’,* I tell myself, or maybe some kind of omen. Either way, there are more of them, and more every day.

**Professional MADAY**
----------------------

Reading these posts has me conflicted. Instinctively, the system 1 part of my brain feels for Sarah and her kin. Yet it’s also confronting to admit there’s an element of judgment too. The more calculating part of me, floating somewhere between my prefrontal cortex and my amygdala, tries to model what led them here — what miscalculation occurred — and perhaps, what can be done about it now; solution mode, as they say. We all do this, on some level. We recognise the plight of others and overlay it on our own circumstances. Not only do we notice the misery in the world, but *knowing* that out there, it’s bad, tells us something about how *we are doing* by comparision. Misery is a feedback loop, of sorts. I did not know Sarah, so I of course did nothing, the algorithm was simply ‘letting me know’  I might be interested in this car accident*.* Once I’ve read her story,  in a bleak way, I have internalised her plight and suffering for my own purposes, for content, to spew back out, which is how *you* ended up here. You also, in a way, have Sarah to thank. This loop of misery, pity and judgement, has a darkness about it. Yet ultimately, I say nothing to Sarah, thoughts and prayers perhaps, but my non-contribution adds to the growing silence that many contribute, by not contributing anything at all. Silence, of course, is a kind of message too.

If I think texturally about the moment people post such a thing — a kind of professional rock bottom—where you’ve tapped everyone you know and everyone has failed to help—this must be viscerally awful, a combination of feeling like a car hit you, and also, never more alive alive. I felt this way when my father died. It is perhaps then not without some sense of irony that these moments now occur most commonly on social media, the only source of professional rescue, which is powered by the same super-intelligent forces likely responsible for the economic collapse which caused the post to begin with. It is both cause and the solution, both marble and the sculptor. In the face of modern technology — which is on one hell of a run lately — it is clear that it’s driving most of our lives, with no accountable driver in sight. As Magneto, the great X-Men villain said to humanity at a similar moment of profound, paradigmatic change, “…you have new Gods now.” That we do. They hear our prayers, and inflict the kinds of pain that would make us pray more frequently. Both cause, and solution.

Yet this professional-rescue-me-post had a *variation* I had not yet seen. Sarah was not *looking* for a job, exactly, or help finding a specific one, but instead, sought ideas about *what she might pivot* to, where, if there was such a place, she could start all over. It’s plausible this was itself a clever ruse. That asking for help on where she might pivot would more effectively generate *greater* engagement than the trauma-ish post *exclusively* seeking a job availability; consequently, this slight of hand might increase her chances of finding the actual job she wanted. It’s also curious that Sarah, very obviously, is a recruiter, a job designed to help people find careers that suit them. Who else might be better suited to solve this problem than Sarah herself? But putting the *true* motivations aside, let’s take it on face value; Sarah is at a crossroads, and would like the hive-minds support. In her mind, this *new home* she was hoping to migrate to wasn’t obvious to her, it required input from the crowd.

In a world of chatbot super assistants, the world at her digital fingertips — more information than an ancient God — she still had no idea what it could look like. I suspect, on some level, that it is because she knows a whole set of professional doors, all around the world, are beginning to close. She *suspects* something, she just hasn’t said the quiet part out loud. Either way, she seems to have accepted the erosion of her status and her way of life, it is not coming back, her place in that world is gone. She’s been kicked off the island, voted off the tribe. Now, the only question remaining was what world would have  Sarah and allow her to start all over. With the tides rising as AI and economic turmoil plunge into the waters, few islands remain above water. Put simply, she was asking what most young people ask, at that defining moment in young adulthood; what, the fuck, should I *do* with my life?

**You were never in control, you are special**
==============================================

I started working in technology in 1999, just before the .com boom. I was 17 years old, had never finished high-school, nor gone to University, and from this vantage point — parents working 16 hours a day running a corner Deli in suburban Western Australia — working in tech and earning fairly good money was more than adequate for my ambitions, fixed at no discernible point. By 2001, it was unclear that working in software would turn out to be as globally transformative as it was, or as Andreessen put it, that “software might *eat* the world.” For me, financially speaking, life was good from the start. I was earning $14,000 a year and it felt like more money than I knew what to do with. I could go to Nando’s on a Friday night and buy anime DVDs, pay my power bill, and if I really locked things down, buy a mobile phone that was slightly out of my budget, so long as I was careful. My TV was on a payment plan.

I never got into technology because I thought it would be lucrative, I simply liked playing Quake II and messing around with computers. I was interested in RAM upgrades and having enough cash to splice two Voodoo2 video cards together to render graphics in a pleasing way. Spending all day doing something similar *and* being paid for it seemed like a natural fit. It wasn’t so much of a *choice*, but a *non*-strategy of avoiding a *real* job entirely.  That was 25 years ago, and lately, it has occurred to me that very few times in life do we get these wholesale *factory resets* on our career expectations; I had never seen one, afterall. No time in my career did it feel like the entire sector was collapsing, nor my job in it. It has shifted, sure, and morphed a lot, gone through some high points and lower ones, but it has remained fairly solid. When Sarah said, “…I have gotten used to a certain standard of living,” she was starting to make contact with a key message in Buddhist dharma — everything changes, and nothing lasts forever. I had never made that same contact. For me, everything professionally was carved in stone. *Nothing* changes, everything is the same, forever, and ever.

**The intoxication of number go up**
------------------------------------

For many white collar technology and tech-*adjacent* workers, from the centre of the economic hurricane, it appears everything *will* last forever. It’s also easy to confuse that worldview as having some causal relationship to something you decided on early in your career, as if you predicted it — this would be a mistake. With labour markets as complex as they are, you likely had little idea where one market would go as a youngster. On balance, for most who entered into the space, came down to a little luck, and a temporal lottery, we were born in a golden age of sorts. If you got into technology around the same time I did, you’ve landed in a good industry at an opportune time. It was emerging, and it just so happened that your interests, the demands of the market, and technological advancements all converged on a salary band that put you in good standing compared to your human peers. Either way, you’re in it, and because it’s always gone up from the start, you might assume, that’s because you are very clever. We all like our egos stroked, and so tech workers, captaining a boat on an ever rising tide, are likely to feel a bolstering effect for our self-esteem.

For insiders, the last 20 years have been remarkably encouraging and even in the midst of the current economic turmoil, AI companies — the apex of the software cinematic universe — are single handedly bolstering most of the S&P 500. It seems, from inside, as if these careers will just go up indefinitely and any drastic deviations *off* this golden track will be of our *own* choosing. We might, for instance, decide to stop being a senior product manager and open a used bookstore instead, or voluntarily plateau, settling into a certain level deliberately — a perfect tradeoff point between responsibility and reward. Maybe this accommodates changes in life (kids, sickness, laziness), but in general, if we *wanted* to, it *could* keep going up forever. Its our choice what happens.

**Manifesting your destiny, a sacrament of the few**
----------------------------------------------------

Having an internal locus of control  over our own career, has both intrinsic appeal (inflating our ego) and external encouragement (hustle/career-core videos). We also like to think this way because the world seems less chaotic if we do; professional control has a cognitively calming effect. We are also told that if we *choose* to think this way (manifesting), we are elite people for doing so. But there is something vastly wrong with this line of thinking. This has mostly *never* been true, both over time, and even right now. Nobody, almost nowhere, is driving their careers in the way they think they are.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) believes there are roughly 2 billion people globally who work in informal employment, often without contracts, protections or predictable income — 2 billion Sarah’s. Even in higher-income countries, a growing share of the workforce is at best, precarious. Freelancers, gig workers, part timers, many who had a stable sense of career trajectories are now finding the rope of corporate stability very slippery; everyone is falling, and starting to hit the mat. According to the OECD, one in six workers, even in advanced economies, is in temporary or non-standard employment — often involuntary. In developing countries, it is closer to three in four. Most people, then, lack this option of navigating a career entirely. Much of society cannot simply *choose* a particular path, many are locked into careers they do not want and even more frustratingly, have very few options of escaping. For billions of people, a crowd-sourced rescue on LinkedIn is simply not on the cards. But for those of us who *have* had the sense of being in control of our own destiny, I suspect, we are about to get a firmer sense of how the rest of the world lives. As I said, everything changes, nothing lasts forever. We are, given enough time, likely to experience that first hand.

**A Malthusian Middle Period**
------------------------------

Historically speaking, population has tended to grow faster than resources have (especially food) needed to support that growth. This has meant any increase in wealth or productivity in a population is quickly absorbed by population growth. This has kept most people poor and survival-focused for most of human history. This is our *default* condition. Even with improvements, people remain, as much as they try, close to subsistence levels. This is known as the *Malthusian Condition*. In Nick Bostrom’s 2024 book [*Deep Utopia*](https://nickbostrom.com/deep-utopia/)*,* he highlights that the industrial revolution was a turning point for this form of stasis. “Since that point onward,” he says, “economic growth has been rapid enough to *outpace* population growth, allowing humanity to escape the Malthusian condition.” Technological development created a breakpoint, encouraging us to believe that moving forward, things *were* going to be different from here on out. We could count on progress moving in a more linear way, out of poverty, out of misery. Living just to survive was a thing we could finally let go.

![From House of X: Issue 01](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1120/1*45aKWtFKImAIuppH6KWl3A.png)

From **House of X: Issue 01**

Sarah, though, expresses a kind of performative, emotional erosion when that upward trajectory — this escape of the Malthusian condition — stalled. She is now worried about survival again. In this post-industrial world, many in white collar careers have been conditioned to believe that progress is, and will always be, linear. But for the billions out there this is not true already, and now, it is not true for Sarah either. Sarah was caught off guard by a simple illusion she had created for herself. She has been living in a kind of duplicitous space of her own making. One where it is clear jobs are eroding, but also, where she expects her very industry to support her indefinitely and in the same standard of care. This illusion allows us to *intellectually* acknowledge that things can change — that industries collapse, that jobs evaporate — but we don’t *really* believe it inside the illusion. It is a kind of dual accounting of ideas we hold simultaneously about our professional environment. The tech industry is collapsing, but also, we will always work in it, and always earn good money.

**Feeling the collapse, but believing we are immune**
-----------------------------------------------------

Thinking that nothing will put us close to the brink of survival in the modern age, is a huge assumption; possibly an error. Mostly, its just a myth, a story of a great flood we tell at dinner parties, but not taken literally. For billions, *nothing* has changed in recent years — it is as awful as it has always been, and there are floods everywhere, constantly. People in subsaharan Africa are not farming, then becoming customer success managers, leasing a Tesla model Y, tweeting about getting made redundant, and suddenly, going back to farming. No. Most of humanity has missed that middle-step opportunity completely. They have remained static. What *is* new is that the outliers — the Sarah’s of the world — are coming more towards the mean, wading into the water where most of our species has been swimming for generations. The duplicitous illusion is starting to become a singular, terrifying one.

A quick side quest: so why can't we see the reality before us, in moments of loosing ones job, even though every feed we see online more or less is painting a vivid picture? Neil Van Leeuwen’s *dual map cognitive theory* of belief explains why we can and do craft such dualistic ways of looking at the world; both watching our peers get made redundant and entire industries destroyed, and yet still believe that our careers will always thrive, and our places in it. Our faith in technology-aligned professional endurance, in his way of thinking, could be a kind of *make believe* people willingly engage in as a form of locking ourselves into a community, even if the belief is not grounded in reality*.* The reason, I believe, we deny our susceptibility to professional oblivion isn’t just a cognitive error but an intentional strategy to keep us bonded to, and in, the techno-professional managerial class.

Leeuwen’s 2024 book [*Religion as Make-Believe*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674290334)— which outlines this theory of belief— argues that humans can hold two parallel types of cognitive attitudes at once: factual beliefs, which guide our real-world navigation, and religious credences, which operate in a more imaginative, socially expressive register. These credences are designed to both create group identity, and uphold sacred values, which allow the groups to know who is in, and who is out. Perhaps much of the more extreme ‘woke ideas’ that formed in the tech sector years back, were the beginnings of these sacred values. As a white collar tech worker, we too feel part of a community. If we were to admit that these careers might be eroding at a larger scale, it would cast assertions that the broader ‘church’ could soon vanish— a form of heresy. The beliefs that people hold, as Neil points out, don’t necessarily need to be *true*, they just need to be “emotionally significant” to bond people together and maintain group cohesion. If it were to collapse, and people started to admit as such, it would send alarm signals to others in the community that soon, everyone might be disconnected from the group, a daunting emotional virus not wanted in a world where everyone, living life on zoom, is already deeply lonely. It is therefore easier to simply ignore the truth, and perform a make believe, that the careers and the industry as a whole, will endure. It is why I feel that many in the industry, from Bill Gates to Andreessen, when they say which jobs will survive, are frequently those *in* the tech industry alone. This feels to be a form of sacralising our entire sector. We are putting elements of the tech industry on some kind of religious footing, suggesting it too, like Christ on the cedar, can save any soul who embraces it.

The tension between this duplicitous illusion for Sarah—between knowing, and acting as *if* we know—is changing, because people are now, religious or not, very unsure how to pay the most basic of bills. Not knowing how one will eat or pay their kids tuition has a way of reprioritising just how firm we hold religious ideas. Often, as Leeuwin points out, people leave a faith not when they stop believing in the religious stories, but when the society at large no longer interfaces with the faith in ways that are practical. A christian, for instance, is less likely to leave the church if they suddenly question the story that Jonah lived in a whale, but more likely to do so when the church makes a decree that would prevent them from playing a sport they have loved since being a child. What Sarah is experiencing then, is not just a professional collapse, but a form of religious disenchantment. She is starting to realise belief in her industry is not enough. That at bottom, when you are cast out from the congregation, you are ultimately, on your own.

**The trauma of the adjustment period**
---------------------------------------

What Bostrom doesn’t say is that the escape from the Malthusian condition was *not* inevitable nor is it necessarily permanent. While we might have escaped it during the industrial revolution, who is to say that will endure? It’s true that AI might push us into an age of superabundance forever, but the transitional period is likely going to be one of short term, dramatic adjustment. In the way that one moves back in with their parents when things get rocky with a relationship, maybe, as the economic environment takes a beating, we will move back into our apartment in the Malthusian Heights. AI might also break the environment in ways we couldn’t forsee. It’s conceivable that wealth (perhaps *all* the wealth) could consolidate into a handful of super-individuals who essentially (deliberately or by mistake) enslave the rest of humanity financially. This too, is a norm humanity has been familiar with. Either way, in the short term, if economic growth *does* stall, or even go backwards, due to AI disruptions, ecological collapse, Trumpism, or resource limits, we might find ourselves back in a scarcity loop — back with our Malthusian roots. Our careers are *not* guaranteed, just because they have been so fruitful thus far. To think this way has a tone of faith, more than economics. Technology careers are not human rights, nor are the salaries we consider normative. Iran was once a lavish metropolis, Detroit, once one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Things change, nothing lasts forever. There is, then, going to be a *gap* between where we are today and an age of abundance, if it comes at all. I do not fear the final stage, the age of AI where I can rub on Aladdin’s lamp and make wishes come true. I long for it. Where robots clean my windows, do my taxes, and amuse me over dinner. What I fear is the gap in between, because, quite selfishly, that is where I live. It’s where I’m employed.

It’s easy to forget, in white collar land, we are free from many of the universal laws of the jungle, because our workplaces do not reflect the natural world very well. It is hard to break this spell. Yet when we are lost in the woods, and come across a bear, it does not matter whether you sit on the board of directors of your kids’ ballet school, or you believe, very deeply, that you matter to your companies quarterly project. The fictions you hold in your reality are not present among the trees. Wasps do not know what a Gantt chart is. Nature, as they say, knows no kings. That bear will eat your liver while you watch — zero regrets. The safety and predictability, then, that people feel in their careers could vanish in this gap, and even start to *renormalise* back to what has been, for most of human history, *normal*. We are drifting into that gap today, we are probably well into the first act. This is what is *new* about the world, and why there are more Sarah’s everyday. We may need to wrestle with the idea that salaries we are used to, especially those of us who have earned six figures for quite some time, could have been a temporary abnormality in the grand scheme of things — a lull could be on the horizon, and this lull might be longer than we expect. We may be, perhaps ironically, at the consequence of the very invention those salaries were used to create; a machine to do all the work. “We have new Gods now.”

**The Fragile Architecture of a Good Life**
===========================================

Perhaps where this professional apocalypse becomes most painful for those in a situation such as Sarah’s, is when the scaffolding of her life reflects her expectations, and which constants she holds true. If we invest $1,000 in a stock, for instance, and it goes to $1,000,000, we are likely to be very happy. But if, weeks later, it goes down to something like $100,000, we are *still* happy  but *also* maybe a mixture of regret (that we didn’t sell at the right time) and disappointment. But broadly, we’re still happier. But that variation in joy from high to somewhere in the middle, doesn’t cause us huge amounts of problems if it happens quickly and we don’t reshape our lives while it’s occurring.

Where it becomes problematic is when we get $1,000,000 and start to erect lifestyle scaffolding — to buy boats, homes, cuban-link chains, monthly pecan-peeling services, and equestrian facilities. If we start to *assume* the spoils of economic winds is some kind of constant, something we can count on in the future, we make the scaffolding more permanent. When we do this, we load up our lives with the confidence that our future will look like our current situation. As soon as we expect these rewards in the long run, and start factoring those features into how we live, we become vulnerable to rare economic events. We have failed the most basic principle our grandparents told us about — saving for a rainy day.

This leaves people with, essentially, different economic strategies they can make through life. So Sarah, here are some options.

**A story of extremes: hoarding syndrome or or delusional indulgence**
----------------------------------------------------------------------

No matter what career you land in, it is best to consider what to do with the money you make, so as the middle period, which is likely to come, will feel less painful. The first path is to never spend anything, and to plan for catastrophe at every turn. To earn millions and spend pennies. To be frugal to the point where you spend your entire life in a kind of pseudo-state. This is no fun, and is living as if you are somebody else; living, as the zen master said, *in front of our bodies*. In this state, you never quite live up to your economic capacities, nor below them, and so, never really reap any of the rewards you worked for to begin with. Money is an economic scorecard at best, not a way to realise utility in any practical sense. I know people like this. They are often very rich, yet appear very poor, and frankly, don’t seem to enjoy life very much. They seem to worry a lot. They are also, paradoxically, frequently hoarders of things, from batteries to bird cages. They have both money to buy anything they want, but also a reluctance to part with much of it for even the most basic of items. Everything has value, they say, because there is always, in some remote scenario, a circumstance in which they might need something from storage. So they keep it all, just in case. Sell nothing, buy nothing, because one day, it’ll be obvious when the right moment to capitalise on the wealth will emerge; it never seems to. This group seems to see money as a kind of game of monopoly, of indefinitely preserving optionality. Where the point of the game is to get the money *itself*, not building hotels or winning the game. The goal is to have the *option* of buying the real-estate, never to do so. That would just be wasteful.

The second end of this continuum is to live as my mother did, spend like there is no tomorrow because you never know if there will be one. I have heard people say this is common with baby boomers or those informed by geopolitical events which occured, at formative moments, the belief the world might *actually* be gone. The constant threat of atomic war, being born during mortal conflict, is likely to have shaped these spending schemas, even subconsciously. Generational categories being good or bad predictors aside, this kind of view commonly plays out in people who have had existential scares, close calls, terminal illnesses, proximal deaths or traumatic events, all of which teach them, very plausibly, there *might not* be a tomorrow, so best to enjoy today while you can. If you get a dollar, spend it immediately. “You could be dead tomorrow,” my mother would say. She is alive and well, with a home full of cheap trinkets— no money though, zero for emergencies.

We can think of both of these points on a continuum between having money and never using it, and never having it and using what little you have urgently. At one end, *Homo Hedonicus*, the one who spends like no tomorrow, and the other, *Homo Frugalis*, the cheapskate with an attic full of political flyers from the 1970s. The real question is what is optimal? If we end up like Sarah, close to the survival zone, if we play our cards right and scaffold our lives on the perfect spot on this continuum, we might be able to reduce the effects of a professional apocalypse in this middle period and avoid making that post, one day into the future. So, do we aim for the middle point? How much risk are we comfortable with? How good are our predictions? How do we not end up out on the street when something unforeseen comes, but also get to enjoy the fruits of economic labour as we earn it. How do we both enjoy the rewards of working in a lucrative space, while also seeing that we are lucky, and one day, the tree may bare no fruit at all?

**Moral Liquidity**
-------------------

While less popular than it used to be, effective altruists have frequently proposed *earning to give* as a lovely strategy to go through life. While yes, this has been tainted by some bad mascots, committing large scale frauds, for instance, but it remains a good way of thinking about money. It puts distance between it and your sense of identity. Money, in this view, is not so much a way to scaffold your living standards, but as a tool for doing good in the world, and, as William McCaskill’s book title suggests, for doing good *better*. This idea of decoupling income from lifestyle means that, circumstances being possible, you *can* live modestly while still having high financial throughput toward causes you value. Wealth then, from this lens, is not about boats or bunkers, but a tool for *impact resilience,* a way to absorb uncertainty by investing in others or the future, not exclusively yourself.

What’s particularly clever here is that the insulation from uncertainty isn’t personal luxury, but a form of moral liquidity. You don’t protect yourself from bad times by buying more comfort, but by keeping your identity flexible and allowing your sense of purpose to move with the changing tides. It’s not unlike a psychological hedge fund: you feel less existential dread when the job vanishes or the salary dips, because your meaning isn’t pegged to market price.

**Stochastic Resilience**
-------------------------

Another way to look at things is complex systems theory. Resilient systems (you hope to be one) don’t bet on the future being predictable, but instead, diversify across a wide range of possible futures. This, I would like to think, is how I’ve set things up. Essentially I’ve begun *hedging various bets* across industries and ways of living which I think might be rewarding ways to spend the rest of my career. I’ve put some effort into capitalising on my professional experience, found time for intellectual academic work, and put time into community building and some non-profit initiatives which I hope will create opportunities for others. Instead of thinking about what job I want to do, I’ve instead simply said, *how do I want to spend my time*, and tried to diversify activities slightly to give me some sense of economic, habitual, and personal diversification. Through this lens, Sarah may instead, free herself from the stress of picking another career path so firmly— which may itself suffer the same fate as the one she just endured— and instead, try and do *a few* things at once, to give some sense of portfolio diversification.

But this also means accepting that *you will be wrong* — not once, but repeatedly. And rather than resist that, you start to build a life that *absorbs error*. You become a probabilistic creature, less concerned with optimising a perfect outcome and more concerned with *not breaking* when reality doesn’t conform to your preferences. It also means you never really commit to anything substantially You’re in the dating pool, but never quite getting in deep with anyone in particular. Doing lots of things *sounds* good, but frankly, as I find it, it can be exhausting. Having 200 tabs open on your computer does not, at times, feel like multitasking, so much as it feels like an attention related psychopathology. Probably, despite the fact I haven’t chosen such a path, it is likely better to do one thing you are good at, which you can derive status, money, and enjoyment from, and just do that, even if it makes you less economically resilient. If it fails or goes away, you can always find something else which mimics all the rewards you just had. So I acknowledge, hedging across pursuits is hard. To do many things over multiple categories requires a much thinner investment across each group. This is, in its own way, not ideal. Choosing this strategy then, you end up where the payoff isn’t perfect alignment between dream and world — it’s survival, in duplicate, across many imperfect realities. It feels like the gravitational optima for everyone with ADHD.

**Reversibility**
-----------------

The third way of looking at this choice is that we can favour decisions which are *reversible.* If it turns out we have made a mistake, then being able to roll back and do something else can be a productive strategy. Some call this *optionality,* and many young people make this strategic choice in how to spend the early parts of their careers, spending habits, jobs, internships, and even relationships, in ways that allow for their decisions to be thrown into reverse. This strategy though, to be clear, is not about never committing, but preferring flexibility where the future is unknown; never more true than today. It is avoiding one way streets, not avoiding driving completely.

But as Taleb warns, optionality can become its own prison. You get so good at keeping doors open that you forget how to walk through any of them. In [*Antifragile*](https://www.amazon.com.au/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/dp/0812979680), Taleb mocks the consultant who optimises every move for prestige and reversibility, only to find himself forty and still polishing PowerPoints in a career he never really chose — management consulting. Optionality has a shadow, then: the illusion of infinite future freedom that slowly calcifies into path dependence. The key, then, isn’t just reversibility, but knowing when to stop hedging and start living.

Each of these strategies — hoarding everything, spending easily, earning to give, diversifying your life across potential futures, preserving reversibility — has its merits. I myself have chosen the diversification option, but have no sense if it is right. And like I said, I am frequently doing too many things for fear that picking one will be incorrect. As I’ve aged, I’ve felt this behaviour take on greater urgency. With less time on the survivability clock, the stakes are higher. Every choice matters more, there is less time for mistakes. No strategy, however, as far as I can tell, offers guarantees of softening the blow of the *adjustment period* between white collar careers of today, and the age of superabundance. Some of us may dodge the pain for a while, but not forever. These options above, (there are likely others) are not formulas, just framings. And perhaps that’s the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this whole thing: there is no optimal path, for us, or for Sarah, only local heuristics that work until they don’t. I didn’t offer Sarah a place to pivot, I instead, just painted a picture of how to think about money, which if she reads this—and I suspect she won’t—is the worst kind of help; I answered a different question. No matter Sarah’s choice, remember, you can be generous and still broke. Flexible and still blindsided. Optional and still stuck. You can one day be a top 2% recruiter, crushing life, and the next, farming beetroot on your mothers farm in Malthusistan. Maybe, then, the best we can do is stay humble in the face of our future selves and as the Buddhists say, exhibit equanimity and non-attachment. We could spend like we might live forever, save like we might not, and none of it will suffer us pain. We could choose paths we can exit from, but also, eventually, have the nerve to commit. This might seem, in my own way, an act of not committing, of hedging my bets on giving advice. An act of not picking a preferred path and instead, simply laying out options and letting my dear reader, fend for themselves. Perhaps that makes me some other kind of creature, *Homo Optionis* maybe. This species, when the next reset comes — because it will — will try not to act so surprised. I’ve got options, it’ll say. No LinkedIn post needed. Not yet.