Today I’ll say goodbye to the agency I’ve been working with the past five years. Next week I start a new gig with a different company, one that’s woman-owned called Lions & Tigers. All C-level people are women and their workforce (contractors and consultants like me) is 87% women. Somehow I made the cut as a man.

It’s bittersweet to leave the agency I’ve worked with since Covid and before, when I was a manager there. They taught me everything I know about messaging (content marketing). AI is really beginning to cut away at that business. It is all about pattern recognition, elegant autocomplete, and marketing is all about patterns too.

Bittersweet because when you’re a subcontractor like me, not an actual employee but more staff augmentation (occasional help, no strings attached), then your leaving is no big deal. They don’t bring you cake or order a pizza, they just delete your name from a spreadsheet.

It’s another reminder of the transience of things. Already I’ve forgotten the names of clients I just worked with a month ago and surely they forgot mine much faster. You almost need to delude yourself that the work matters more than it does so you can tolerate it. To care about it I have to believe it matters but in my heart I know it’s a ruse.

What matters is providing for my family. Retiring sooner than later. Not letting the work ruin my health.

Part of the reason I’m so forgettable to my agency, and this is hard to stomach, is there are others who can do the work as well as I can or better, and they cost less. They’re younger, more tech-savvy, and hold fewer boundaries between work and life.

When I look at my “unique value proposition” (this is a term used in messaging and branding), what I have is my age and experience. Often times they’re not paying for that though. I can use it when there’s a thorny scenario requiring actual consultation—me recommending to the client what to do vs. just delivering an asset—and often times that stems from organizational conflict, ambiguity over decision rights, or some political scuffle. Sometimes one side plays the aggravator or defender, sometimes both. It can be like getting in the middle of kids fighting on the playground. They’re just more cunning about it, getting in their jabs and snips over some territorial dispute always anchored in ego.

As an outsider with experience though I’ve seen these patterns before and like the messaging formulas I’ve learned, there aren’t many variations. Humans can be remarkably simple. And that’s one of the reasons we’re easy to predict and imitate.

I agreed to lower my hourly rate for this new position but did that as a gamble that the guarantee of more hours for the rest of the year (and possibly beyond) will accrue to more pay in the long run. And this is to compete now in a tight labor market with a lot of talent like me recently displaced from layoffs, some of which correlates to a weird economy, made weirder by AI. The tech companies who would hire me are having me write about the technology they claim will either augment or automate the work they’re paying me to do. So it’s a weird Möbius strip of logic. At times it feels like training your replacement.

I will have been off work five weeks which has been a perfect opportunity to hike and garden at the most beautiful time of year here in the Pacific Northwest.

Lily is getting ready to move over to Strasbourg for a semester abroad, and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to visit her as I’d planned. Friday we’ll do a nearby hike, either Cougar or Tiger Mountain, and then go to her favorite local diner for lunch. Yesterday we listened to a record in the den when she got home from work and she said dad I really enjoy this time with you, these little moments.

Soon my mornings will be occupied by work thoughts as my thinking like that can be absolute. For now I’ll enjoy the last of the empty space as I sit in the dark with my candle and radio.

Categories: Diary, Memoir, Technology

Tags: identity, journal writing, work-life balance