Your Job Is a Rental, Your Trade Is an Asset
The screen didn’t so much as turn off as it just… went blank. A flat, indifferent black. The little green light on the laptop winked out. Access revoked. Fourteen years of navigating internal budget codes, of knowing exactly which vice president, Dale or Sarah, to email for an expedited PO, of mastering the labyrinthine project management software we called ‘Kraken’-all of it, gone. The accumulated knowledge didn’t gently fade; it was unplugged. Instantly and totally worthless outside the four walls I was no longer welcome in.
The severance PDF, sitting on my personal tablet, listed a final payment of $44,474. It felt less like a cushion and more like a final transaction for the asset I had just surrendered: my specialized utility to that specific company. They weren’t paying for my future. They were closing the books on my past. I had a decade and a half of experience, but I walked out of that digital office realizing I didn’t have a single skill I could sell to my neighbor.
This is the silent crisis of the modern professional.
We’ve been pushed, cajoled, and incentivized to become the world’s leading experts on the inner workings of a machine that we do not own and cannot take with us. A job is not a trade. We’ve confused the two, and that confusion is the source of the deep, gnawing precarity so many of us feel. A job is tied to
