If I am going to turn my sporadic ramblings into something worthy of a Substack, I suspect I need to begin by being more honest. Not performatively honest, the kind that comes neatly packaged into a lesson. Honest in the way private thoughts are. In lieu of overthinking the format, I have written down a reflection on something I am currently moving through… the career transition identity crisis of one’s mid-twenties.

There is a strange grief in leaving a prestigious firm. On paper, you lost nothing, in fact you gained experience, relationships, and retained or even grew, your ambition. The challenging part is loosing the answer to the question.

Who are you? “I work at X.”

Prestigious early career paths give young people a name, story, and a socially legible answer to “who are you?” The crisis of leaving is therefore a shedding of identity structure. A symbolic death where the person must discover which parts of the self were real, which were trained, and which were only reflected back by the institution. The bargain becomes dangerous when the institution becomes not just where you work, but who you are. I believe this could apply earlier for some, perhaps to certain universities too? The firm converts institutional prestige into personal symbolic capital. (sidenote: Bourdieu’s ideas on symbolic capital, and méconnaissance; Society fails to see that a person’s prestige is actually rooted in their economic wealth mistaking this for innate talent, high morality, or personal merit.) The logo becomes borrowed status.

Selfhood requires us to step outside ourselves and find confirmation in the eyes of others. Hegel overturned the isolated Cartesian view of the mind (“I think, therefore I am”) to argue that consciousness requires an external “other” to reflect and validate its existence. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” Leaving hurts because the recognitive structure collapses. You no longer receive the same automatic “oh wow” response.

Reflecting on the strangeness of experiencing such a transition period for the first time, I am impressed by the emotional weigh that is carried in attachment to such structures and symbols. The institution did shape you. Some of what it gave you is real: discipline, speed, resilience, analytical sharpness, confidence, friendships, ambition. Rather than reject the identity, one should ask, which parts of that identity do I choose to keep when nobody is rewarding me for keeping them?

“life must be understood backwards,” but “lived forwards.”

Kierkegaard, on the uncertainty of transition.

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Cool things I found this week…

I. The Eclipse of the Sun in Venice, July 6, 1842, by Ippolito Caffi (1842)

image

II. Paper like screens

III. An essay: You and your research

Link: You and your research, a stroke of genius: striving for greatness in all you do by R.W. Hamming

IV. Interface experiments

https://ryanstephen.co/

V. Aquatic Museum

https://aquaticmuseum.xyz/catalog

VI. LIVING DIGITAL SKETCHBOOK

https://liumichelle.com/sketchbook