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Posted on 05/17/2026 5:52:12 PM PDT by libh8er
FOR DECADES, THE FORMULA for career success was simple: go to school, get a job, climb the ladder. But the ladder is now collapsing before our eyes. And honestly, good riddance. The career ladder isn’t just an outdated metaphor — it actively blocks people from finding more fulfilling work.
Think about it this way: In school, there are clear markers for success. The goal is to get good grades. This continues into entry-level roles, where workers strive for raises and promotions. Tracked careers like law and consulting are attractive, at least in part, because they offer legible paths for advancement. Rather than having to grapple with what you personally value, you can always reach for the next rung
I call this “ladder logic.” Ladder logic is the belief that higher is always better — and that progress only counts if other people can see it. Ladder logic creates what William Deresiewicz, a professor of English at Yale University, calls “world-class hoop jumpers.” In a now-famous commencement speech, Deresiewicz observed that his students could memorize any formula, ace any test, and “climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.” In other words, they are excellent sheep.
Ladder logic promises certainty: If I follow the rules and get good grades in the school of life, I will be successful. But ladder logic has costs. Eventually, you can find that you’re playing a game you’re not actually interested in winning, and yet, after tethering so much of your self-worth to your career, choosing to step off the ladder would mean foreclosing part of your identity.
Thankfully, the 2020s all but killed traditional notions of the linear career. The combination of a global pandemic that shifted workers’ perspectives on work, mass layoffs that undermined the promise of employer loyalty, and the rise of AI has rendered the ladder metaphor nearly obsolete. Instead, we’ve entered the era of the nonlinear career.
A nonlinear career is one that doesn’t follow a predetermined, step-by-step progression within a single field or organization. Nonlinear careers might involve lateral moves, industry switches, or professional reinvention. Instead of a series of rungs on a ladder, they look more like a series of lily pads, each hop a new opportunity for growth. The ability to reinvent your professional identity — once mistaken for a lack of focus — may be the defining career competency of the coming decade.
For many, this is great news: Our professional interests were never meant to fit neatly into lines on a resume. But the transition to nonlinearity requires more than just a new metaphor; it requires the capacity to not know exactly where you’re going and to be OK with that. Call it uncertainty tolerance.
I just published a book called How to Not Know, in which I spoke with philosophers, psychologists, and economists about how to get better at navigating uncertainty. Here are five tips for developing more uncertainty tolerance in your career — and life:
Find your anchors. When we are certain about some aspects of our lives, it becomes easier to hold uncertainty in others. For example, getting clear on your values or a commitment to live in a certain place might make it easier to hold uncertainty in your career or relationships. Your anchors are what keep you steady when the winds change. Ask yourself which aspects of your life will remain constant no matter what the future holds.
Shrink your planning horizon. Most people try to map out the next five or 10 years, then feel destabilized when reality diverges from the plan. Practicing shorter planning cycles — what do I need from the next six months? — builds tolerance for ambiguity over time. This has only become more important in the age of AI, as 10-year plans quickly become outdated. Rather than stay fixed to a rigid plan, treat the future of your career like a hypothesis that’s open to revision.
Diversify your identity. A lot of anxiety about uncertainty comes from tying your sense of self to a specific job title, company, or career trajectory. This is a lesson many learned the hard way during the pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of loyal employees were unceremoniously laid off. Much like an investor benefits from diversifying the stocks in their portfolio, we benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and identity in our lives. Doing so means you can remain standing even if one pillar of your identity crumbles.
Make small bets. Uncertainty tolerance isn’t built in the abstract — it’s built through repeated exposure to low-stakes unknowns. By exposing yourself to uncertain situations where you’ll be forced to learn, you expand your capacity for the unknown. As best-selling author James Clear writes, “The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty.”
Choose curiosity over fear. Part of what makes uncertainty so uncomfortable is our brain’s tendency to catastrophize. It’s easy to always frame uncertainty as a threat, but uncertainty can also be the birthplace of possibility. Nearly every scientific discovery, world-changing business, and mind-expanding piece of art began with someone’s willingness to persist through the fog of uncertainty. Curiosity has the power to reveal the opportunities that fear obscures.
The greatest benefit of a nontraditional path is that you have to figure out what you care about. Rather than an employer telling you what to value, you have to do the work of deciding for yourself. But the result is greater alignment between your working life and your values. A strong internal compass is more useful than anyone else’s map.
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School was intended to make a better “you”, not provide a career.
Favoring women at the expense of men, and overall DEI agendas, and elimination of honors/advanced studies for students because not everyone is smart enough (funny they dont apply that logic to sports too) have helped destroy it as well.
Proper thinking is you are always self employed, personal services incorporated.
But, very few people are qualified to be self employed.
Quite a long time ago, that intention changed to make a better worker.
I was mostly self-employed. Those time I worked for someone else were not among the happy times. Large corporations are the very worst. I avoided those entirely.
.
“Fulfilling work”
“meaning”
“values”
Our whole culture for decades has taught us that these are good ideas. “Follow your dreams”. A lot of people think this is just good advice.
I don’t.
We work so that we can earn money so that we can support our family. If you like the work: great. But that isn’t what it’s all about. It’s about the money. And sometimes you do the work, even if you don’t like it, but you do it because the money is what your family needs.
What I see in the 21st century is corporations that do not value workers, and don’t even value customers. The corporations are squeezing money out of everyone, because the stockholders want dividends and the executives want bonuses. The result is that some people work a full-time job and cannot even afford the rent to move out of Mom’s basement. That’s not right.
If your focus is on “fulfilling” work, you will live forever in Mom’s basement. The real key is to find a job that pays well — and at least to some extent, I think the Employers have some obligation to pay their workers a decent wage.
This is NOT a new idea. The article is basically an ad for the author's new book.
Best to start with FU money from your family.
18 years self employed here. Sine the scamdemic lock downs I was forced to limit my horizons to weeks when it use to be years. Entire product lines disappeared over night and I went from very comfortable mid 6 figures to 95% losses. Once I adapted to the new reality and stabilized my earnings at about 90% of what I was doing Boden appointed his commie morons to make dictates on a near daily basis and opened the borders to every turd in the world. It has picked up since Trump has been back. But then there are things you can’t expect. The owner of my building died and an awful property manager was put in charge by the family who just cancelled the lease, wanted me to sign a new lease with a five year term at triple the cost with a 5% increase every year. They gave me thirty days to vacate. And I have been packing. So when you’re self employed, prepare to be out of business through no fault of your own and lose everything in 30 days.
The best thing you can do is always keep your skills fresh and never rip off anyone. Protect your name and reputation because it is worth more than anything else. When reaching out to my customers one bought the assets and we will be forming a new partnership in a bigger better shop with a much bigger customer base.
Sounds like somebody rich telling you that poverty is fun.
.”Large corporations are the very worst. I avoided those entirely.”
I never directly worked for large corporations. But I did consulting for them. What would take a multi billion dollar company with thousands of engineers and designers years I would do in weeks on my own. They are so stuck in the culture of “dynamic inaction” they think they are accomplishing something when all they accomplish is wasted time in endless meetings and email chains. I didn’t have to participate so had time to actually work. AND I had no union rules. If anyone wonders why an aircraft by the big makers is so expensive, spend a day on the shop floor and watch how the unions operate.
1. God has already planned out your life - sticking with His plan is usually best.
2. The “nonlinear career” folks risk not actually learning enough about a business to be useful. The ladder has the advantage of actually learning something before you go up a rung.
3. People these days rarely remember one of the most important principles in business - the Peter Principle. People seek promotions to the point that they get promoted beyond what they are actually good at, then wonder why they are consumed by stress and worry. Find what you’re good at and stick with it a while. Competence is, IMHO, more rewarding and satisfying than the job switch carousel.
“ Our professional interests were never meant to fit neatly into lines on a resume. But the transition to nonlinearity requires more than just a new metaphor; it requires the capacity to not know exactly where you’re going and to be OK with that. Call it uncertainty tolerance.”
————-
You mean that you could start your career doing one thing…and in the middle of it, your company needs help doing something else…and bam! All of a sudden you’ve changed your focus. And then BAM!! It happens again?
Wow. This author might just be on to something. //sarc
How come kids don’t know this? They aren’t stupid. So it has to be something else.
“School was intended to make a better “you”, not provide a career.”
Talking like that around here is likely to get you labeled a communist.
Unfortunately, too many people now, including President Trump, think the university is about job training, and the big beautiful bill enshrines that way of thinking. What will happen in the next decade or so will be public/state universities accelerating their training of “workers”, by starving off the liberal arts, while the elite private institutions, where the offspring of the elite go, will continue whole person training. (Harvard and Yale aren’t doing job training y’all, while X State University certainly is) What will happen is the elite private institution folks will be the world/country leaders, who will pay peanut wages to the “workers” trained by state/vocational universities.
The university is not supposed to be about jobs. That is what the community college is supposed to do. Most people, including President Trump, do not seem to remember this.
School was intended to make a better “you”, not provide a career.
Education has been replaced with Indoctrination. Instead of learning how to think, they teach you what to think.
It used to be the engineers and people who actually started out doing the core business tasks, that ran the companies.
Now it’s the bean counters that run things.
Exactly right.
“Large corporations are the very worst. I avoided those entirely.”
I did the opposite. I worked for or consulted to these. They paid big bucks which I promptly invested. They sent me on assignments abroad while paying me my bare salary which increased my investment. Nothing flashy, but by 40 my portfolio returns rivalled my income.
Covid reduced that, but I am close to FIRE’s end game.
The key for me was not to succumb to lifestyle inflation and to be content
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