You Are Not Your Job

April, 2026

"You are not your job" is indisputably true...but we're all living in a system under which money is a measure of worth not just of businesses but of people too. "What do you do for work" is the default question for boring adult conversations, and sometimes you can see your answer being judged in real time.

So it's no surprise that our sense of self-worth can get tangled up with our jobs. That's a dangerous position to be in, because for most of us, our job is not something we directly control. Jobs come and go at the whim of your boss, or their boss, or, sometimes, the invisible middle finger of the market.

One day you're crafting buggy whips, the next day you're having to found Kodak to keep yourself going. Whole categories of employment disappear throughout economic history, but the people who did the actual work continued on.

Some of those now-obsolete jobs are quite extraordinary, and that's why I'm launching a podcast to talk about them. It's called Redundant!, and you can subscribe now in your podcast player of choice.

Each episode I'll be joined by a different friend to learn and chat about a new job together. The trailer is live right now, and the first real episode is coming soon.

I've called it a More Human podcast, because part of the More Human Content ethos, for me, is separating the person from the job. I create content not for a business or a computer to extract value from, but for people to read and choose to use. Content needs to be accessible to computers, but it does not need to be written for computers. (And large language models are just computers that can make a convincing show of talking like us.)

We are not our jobs, but our jobs can still be interesting and funny and sometimes dreadful. As episodes launch, I'll include a small mention in this newsletter. Let me know what you think!

This article first appeared in the April 29th, 2026 edition of the More Human newsletter.

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