Jon's Job Blog

The Penguins were playing the Bruins at PPG Paints Arena. The national anthem was sung by the PPG choir. The chicken tenders at the concession stand were PPG-branded. I was there for a work event, alone in the crowd, eating a company-branded chicken tender in an arena named for the company that had fired me two years earlier. There is a version of that evening in which the layering of logos feels like pride. This was not that version.

By the end of the first period the Penguins were down three to nothing and I needed to take a shit. The men's room had been obliterated by a Penguins fan base that had apparently decided to metabolize the deficit in real time. I have been in stadium bathrooms in bad moments before. This one was a different category. I did the math. I was an hour and fifteen minutes from my own bathroom, which was still the better option. I walked out between periods, got in the car, and drove home. I did not listen to the game on the way. I did not check the score. I used my bathroom, let the dog out, and went to bed. The next day I found out the Penguins had come back from three down and won it 5–4 in overtime. I had left. The team had won. The two facts were not related, but they felt like they were.

This is an essay about purpose after burnout, and it begins with a hockey game because the game kept working after I left it. The score moved. The team won. The strangers in the seats I had walked away from, the kids two rows up with the homemade sign — they all got to see it. I did not. I made the call to leave, and in making the call I accepted that whatever happened in the period I would not be there for happened without me. I did not even watch the comeback on my phone. I went home, took care of the bodily situation the stadium had not accommodated, and slept. The acceptance was not, at the time, a metaphor for anything. It is a metaphor now because I have spent the last two years learning the acceptance the game demonstrated in twenty minutes.

Two Years Before

I had been at PPG Industries four and a half years when they eliminated my position. The meeting was short. The severance was quiet. The HR representative said what HR representatives say — that this was a business decision, that my performance was not the reason, that the company appreciated my service. I thanked her, because that is what I am wired to do in rooms where someone is reading from a script. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes.

About a month before the meeting, I had been invited to participate in a mental health speaker series at the company. I had accepted and put it on my calendar. A month is a short window. Whatever the speaker series was designed to accomplish, it did not accomplish it for me, because a month after I accepted I was in a different kind of meeting entirely. The same company that had scheduled the speaker series had scheduled the severance. The two schedules coexisted. I mention this not to make a point about hypocrisy but to note the structure. A company can do both things at once. Most of them do. Wellness programming and workforce reduction are run out of different offices on different timelines responding to different pressures, and the fact that they occasionally collide in a single employee's calendar is not evidence of bad faith. It is evidence of how the architecture is built.

The role had been primarily remote for most of the tenure. Earlier that year there had been a return-to-office push, with people on remote arrangements asked to reconfirm their circumstances and expectations. I asked, through the channels I was supposed to ask through, whether the remote arrangement would continue. The question had an answer. The answer was that it would not need to, because shortly after the question was asked, the position was eliminated. A role on a different continent opened for the same function. Job reference JR2411404. Wrocław. The position wasn't eliminated. I was.

The first morning after the meeting, I slept in. I stayed in bed with the dog. I did not make coffee, did not open a laptop, did not check email. I was in shock, and the shock was not only about the job. The previous year I had been going through a contentious divorce, which is the word people use when they mean a legal process that has stopped being about the end of a marriage and started being about whatever is left after the end of a marriage. Losing the job landed on top of that. The body does what the body does when it is asked to metabolize two losses at once, which is mostly nothing. The dog, who had spent three years watching me leave the room at 8:00 sharp for a standup, was delighted. It was the first of many sessions he and I would go on to spend mastering the skill of hurkle durkle — a nineteenth-century Scots word for the deliberate practice of lingering in bed past the time you are supposed to get up. I did not have the word for it that morning. I only had the practice. It turned out the practice had a name, and it turned out the name was older than the alarm clock. No Teams notification in the peripheral vision. No calendar alert. No low-grade monitoring of the phone for the signal that something had gone wrong in a system I was responsible for. The structure that had organized my days had been removed, and what was in the room instead was a dog and quiet.

Americans in particular fuse identity with employment. What do you do is the second question at every professional event, every dinner party, every introduction. It is asked in lieu of who are you because the person asking assumes the answers are substantially the same. The label is shorthand. Remove the label and the known quantity becomes unknown — first to other people, and then, more surprisingly, to yourself.

My label had taken a while to arrive. I started mowing lawns for family as a kid, which is how most working kids start. I was a lifeguard. I bussed tables. I worked summers where summers were available. I did plant inventory at the Chadwick Arboretum at Ohio State while I was earning a forestry degree, which is how I learned that plants, like balance sheets, have more categories than you would think and that the categories matter in ways nobody explains until you have to count something. I made sandwiches at Jimmy John's. I interned at a conservancy. I worked as a procurement forester for a sawmill — the person who buys the standing timber the mill turns into lumber — which is where I learned that a stand of timber and a balance sheet are two views of the same thing, and that forestry is a study in trade-offs conducted at geological speed. I moved into procurement analysis at an industrial gas company, then into RPA and automation at PPG, and, after the interval this essay is about, into a pricing analyst role at my current employer. By the time the PPG position was eliminated, the official label read something like Business Analysis Specialist II — the precise wording of the job title matters less than the fact that corporate job titles are their own category of fiction, generated by HR taxonomies that correspond loosely, if at all, to what a person actually does. What I actually did was lead the business-analysis work on my team. I was the most senior business analyst on it. A significant portion of what I did was not business analysis in the strict sense at all — it was data analysis, specifically the Power BI reporting work that at most companies sits under a different title, on a different team, with a different pay band. The title and the role were related in the way a map is related to a country. The title was a smaller, simpler, flatter version of the work, produced by a process that had other priorities. Four and a half years had trained me, without my having chosen it, to be a specific kind of person. Analytical. Process-oriented. Responsive. Available. The company had not set out to do this. The company had set out to extract value. The person I became was the byproduct. What the label obscured was everything that came before it — the long inventory of small jobs, done for small money, by a person who was interested in things and worked at them. The label is the last item in that list. It is not the list.

Viktor Frankl, writing from a context I will not presume to compare to mine, used the phrase existential vacuum to describe the state of a person whose life has been organized around external demands and who has suddenly been released from them. The first weeks after termination are not relief. They are a form of grief, and the grief is not for the job. The grief is for the self that the job made possible. You know, intellectually, that you are more than your job. You can list the other things that make up a life. You cannot, in the first weeks, feel the list as true. There is a distance between the inventory of the self and the experience of the self, and termination exposes that distance.

Sabbath

The structural reason the collapse is total — and worth naming — is that American corporate employment does not leave space for other identities to develop. It is not malicious about this; it is just built that way. The forty-plus-hour week, the evening email, the weekend Teams ping, the expectation of availability, the language of investing in your career — all of it is calibrated to make the job the primary container of the self. Work does not stay in its container. It seeps. It colonizes. Every hour becomes a potential work hour, held in reserve, interruptible. The boundary between working and not working erodes until not working becomes a performance of readiness to work.

The concept of sabbath — whatever tradition it comes from — is an argument against this. Rest is not recovery from labor. Rest is a design principle. Time that is structurally protected from productive demand is not a reward for productivity; it is the architecture that makes productivity meaningful. You do not earn sabbath. You build your week around it. Modern corporate work has largely abolished sabbath, because sabbath is a claim on time that the employer cannot make. Any hour that cannot be converted into work is a competitive disadvantage. Any day that cannot be encroached upon is a liability.

I did not discover sabbath during unemployment. The twenty months did not teach me any ritual I had not already been practicing. What the twenty months did was strip away the work that had been competing with the rituals for time, which let me see the rituals for what they were — not recovery tools, not stress-reduction interventions, not productivity hacks, but the actual architecture of a life. The morning walks, the time with the dog, the meals that were not scheduled around a calendar, the weekends that were not spent half-watching the phone for the escalation that was going to arrive on Monday — these were not things I had to build when the job disappeared. They were things I had been defending against the job for years. When the job disappeared, they stopped needing to be defended and simply existed, which was the first time in a long time I could tell how much of my daily attention had gone into the defense.

Twenty Months

The job search began the week after the meeting. The shape of it was not what most job-search advice describes. I did not apply to five hundred positions. I did not apply to three hundred. Over the full twenty months I applied to somewhere between one and two hundred — my best honest estimate, since I did not keep a tracker and am not the kind of person who does. That confession is itself a small argument against the career-services framing of job search as a measurement problem. Most people looking for work are not running a spreadsheet on themselves. They have a rough count, a worse count of the responses, and no count at all of the energy spent between them. The reason the number I applied to was low is worth saying plainly. I had decided, early on, that the point of the search was not to get a job. The point of the search was to get a job at a place I wanted to be employed by. Those are different problems. The first is solved by volume. The second is solved by attention, and attention does not scale.

What I did instead, in the span of a single afternoon — an unbroken stretch of the kind of attention an ADHD brain produces when it locks onto something it has decided is the right problem — was read the mission statements of every company on the Fortune 500. I pulled them into a spreadsheet. I read them one at a time. Most of them were unreadable — the corporate-values dialect of abstract nouns and verb-less aspirations that the series has had occasion to discuss. A few were specific. A few named a real problem they were trying to solve for a real set of people. Of the five hundred, about twenty-five felt like places I could stand to work for, by which I meant places whose stated reason for existing I did not find embarrassing to repeat out loud. I added a handful of smaller companies and nonprofits that seemed to be doing something useful in the world. That became the target list. Everything else I did during the active search went toward that list.

There is a way to frame this that I did not invent but did not exactly borrow, either. "Take a rifle approach, not a shotgun." That phrase is in the ambient bloodstream of job-search advice — repeated in career-services workshops, LinkedIn posts, conversations with well-meaning friends, the kind of aphorism that gets passed along because it sounds decisive without requiring the speaker to define it. I heard it enough times to start thinking about it, which, for a mind wired the way mine is, is a different thing than hearing it. A platitude will sit in most people's heads as a mood. It sits in mine as a question. The question went somewhere unexpected, because the literal version of the metaphor was something I had actual experience with. Most of my early exposure to a rifle came through hunting trips with my grandfather and my uncle and through 4-H shooting sports, and the part of the practice that stayed with me from those years is not the part the career-advice version of the phrase invokes. The majority of the activity, in the form I learned it, was good posture, controlled breathing, and a careful follow-through. The shot itself is a small fraction of the work. The work is everything that prepares for it, and the discipline of not flinching at the moment of contact. Translated back to the job search, the version that made sense to me was: pick the opportunities I was actually willing to invest in, prepare for them with the kind of attention the few real ones deserve, and then, when the moment of contact arrives, do the part the preparation has already done most of the work for. The discipline is what does the work. The decisiveness, without the discipline, is just bluster.

There is a structural irony here that I will not belabor, though it would be dishonest not to note. The "rifle versus shotgun" vocabulary is not only career-services advice. It is of a piece with a larger corporate appetite for borrowing the language of the battlefield — focus, discipline, performing under pressure, leadership lessons from combat. PPG, like most Fortune 500 companies, brought in decorated veterans to speak to employees, including, at one point, a veteran of the Battle of Mogadishu. His message was not the generic motivational line about leadership. It was more specific. When somebody else's helicopter goes down, you set your own mission aside and go. You do not finish what you were doing. You do not stay the course. You stop, and you help the people whose bird is in the street. The presentation was well delivered. It was also well received. I am still chewing on the gap between the vocabulary the organization was comfortable importing and the vocabulary the organization was willing to apply to itself. The speaker talked about setting yourself aside when the people to your left and right were in trouble. The organization's decisions, when its own pressure moment arrived, were studies in the opposite — of staying the course, of finishing the mission, of letting the helicopters keep falling and calling the falling a restructuring. This is not a scandal. It is the architecture. Companies are comfortable importing the vocabulary of valor without the obligations of valor, because the obligations are expensive and the vocabulary is free.

The rest of the twenty months was a mix of things. Some of it was certification — five of them, in industrial robotics and machine control, which was the natural extension of the RPA work I had been doing at PPG into the territory where the software side of automation meets the physical machinery. Five certifications is not a career. It is a structured way of using time that would otherwise have been unstructured, and a way of producing credentials for a resume that needed them. Some of it was smaller and less structured — a handful of little automated workflows for personal tasks, built with the help of AI, which at this point does most of the heavy lifting for a person in my position who wants something small to work and does not want to write every line themselves. I mention the AI plainly because the series has earned the right to be honest about the tools in the room. It would be dishonest to describe the tinkering as something craftsmanlike when what it actually was is a person describing a problem to a model and accepting code that mostly did what was asked. None of the workflows served any purpose larger than making my own day a little easier, which was the whole point. Some of it was volunteering, which has its own essay coming and which I will not collapse into this one. Some of it was the administrative labor of being unemployed in a country that has built very little infrastructure for knowledge workers between jobs: the health insurance calculations, the severance paperwork, the small and repetitive decisions about what to spend on what. A few months in, I set up a consulting entity, Double Tree Industries. I want to be honest about why. Part of it was the reason people give out loud — a credible vehicle for project work if any came along. Most of it, though, was something quieter and less flattering. Twenty months without a job had made the absence of a work identity a daily presence, and the LLC was partly a container to put one back in. Something to say when asked what I was doing. Something to sign an email from that wasn't "unemployed guy in Pittsburgh." The entity mattered more than the revenue, because the entity was filling a hole the revenue could not yet fill.

There is a forestry term — high-grading — for a harvest practice where loggers take the most valuable trees and leave the damaged or lower-value ones. The stand looks forested after the harvest. It is not. The genetic stock of the best species has been removed, the remaining trees are in poor condition, and the forest that regenerates is a degraded version of the one that stood before. High-grading produces a short-term return at the cost of long-term ecosystem capacity. Any forester can tell you what it does to a stand. The practice is banned on most public lands. It is still widely practiced on private ones because it is profitable on a quarterly basis and the damage accrues to future decades.

American corporate employment is structured as high-grading applied to people. Companies recruit the professionals whose productive years represent the most valuable timber. They extract those years. When the margin on those years is no longer attractive — because the employee has aged, or developed an expensive health condition, or failed to modulate their communication style in the expected ways, or because the role can be moved to a cheaper geography — they are discarded. What remains is an institutional ecosystem that looks functional and is, in fact, degraded. The knowledge is gone. The relationships are gone. The tacit understanding of how the place actually works is gone. The stand is still there. The forest is not. Any employee who has watched their company restructure more than once has seen this happen. Companies call it optimization. The appropriate word is high-grading.

The rifle approach to the job search was a smaller version of the same principle, applied in reverse. High-grading is what happens when a harvester treats attention as if the supply is infinite — take everything that looks valuable, leave the rest to collapse. The rifle approach treats attention as the finite resource it actually is. It does not scale. It does not apply to everything. It picks the small number of things worth preparing for and prepares for them with the patience the actual sport requires. The career-services industry treats attention as abundant and reach as scarce, which is why most of its advice reduces to: apply to more things. The actual scarcity is the other way around. Reach is cheap. A hundred applications can go out in an afternoon, and almost none of them will have had anything resembling the kind of preparation the few that mattered would have benefited from. Attention is what you run out of, and it is the only input the process actually rewards.

Twenty months is a long stretch. It is long enough to stop expecting the search to end any particular week. It is long enough to develop routines that have nothing to do with the search. It is long enough for the identity panic of the first month to ease into something quieter and stranger — a provisional self that is not defined by employment, because employment has been unavailable long enough that the definition has had to come from somewhere else. It is also long enough for the savings to become a subject one thinks about constantly, and for the distance between the person applying for jobs and the person the resume describes to become an accepted feature of life.

Recalibration

Eventually a role opened that fit. I took it. I have been in it a few months. I will not say more about it in this essay, because this essay is not about the current role; it is about the stretch that preceded it, and about the thing that stretch made possible, which I want to name precisely.

The recovery-arc version of this story would oversell what comes next. I do not want to oversell it. I did not become a different person. I did not find a calling. I did not discover, after some period of soul-searching, that my true vocation was somewhere other than analytics. The skills the corporate world had spent a decade training me in turned out to be the skills I was going to keep using. What changed was not the skills. What changed was the relationship between the person doing the work and the work itself — the proportion of the self that the work was allowed to occupy, the kinds of claims the work was allowed to make on the hours around it, the scale of meaning I was willing to ask a job to provide.

This is a recalibration. It is not a transformation. Recalibration adjusts the reference points of an instrument so that its measurements align more accurately with what it is measuring. Transformation turns the instrument into something else. I did not become something else. I became better calibrated. The lens was the same lens. The ground it was pointed at was different. More importantly, the assumptions about what the lens could measure were different. I went into the twenty months believing a job was the primary container of my life and came out believing it was one container among several, which is not a radical realization but is the kind of realization that takes twenty months to arrive at honestly.

The hockey game is the metaphor because the hockey game kept happening. I left. The team won. The things I thought required my presence did not. The identity I thought was indispensable was dispensable, which was a grief and then, eventually, a fact. I want to be careful, though, not to let the metaphor do more work than it can carry. The Penguins won that game. They came back from three down to win 5–4 in overtime. They earned the outcome. PPG did not win anything comparable. PPG kept going, which is different. From what I can gather — partly from conversations with people still there, partly from the company's own rankings and public indicators — the team I worked on has the same problems it had when I was on it. The work is moving along. It is moving along with more friction. The value I was bringing to that team, which went largely unacknowledged while I was there, was not replaced when I left; it was absorbed as a cost and distributed in ways that made the remaining work harder for the people doing it. That is not a claim of indispensability. It is a claim about what happens when an organization high-grades a role: the stand is still there, the forest is not, and the people in the remaining stand are working harder to hold the ecosystem together. None of this is an indictment of the work I did. It is the mechanical reality that organizations outlast the individuals who staff them — but outlasting is not the same as thriving, and the difference is where the honest accounting lives. Organizations persist. Ecosystems degrade. Both things can be true about the same company at the same time.

Purpose after burnout is not something you find. It is what is left when you stop performing a version of yourself that was never sustainable. Burnout did not clear space for purpose. It cleared away the noise that was drowning it. The Penguins won the game. They won it without me. The lesson was not that I was not needed. The lesson was that I did not have to be.

Sometimes you lead from the exit.