Life After Ego Death
Ego Death is inevitable; acceptance is not. It could be the graceful surrender to it that ultimately defines our careers.
I spent an inordinate amount of time during my holiday break watching the TV series Suits with my teenage daughter. She's become fascinated with the USA Networks legal drama that ran from 2011 to 2019, for reasons not dissimilar to my own in the 1980s, when I consumed weekly episodes of LA Law for glimpses of glamorized high-pay, high-stress, high-profile careers. I had no interest in a law career so much as I liked the thought of arguing for a living, wearing nice suits and the presumed importance of working somewhere with all-beige interior.
My daughter, on the other hand, seemed less enamored with the high-rise real-estate, high corporate fashion, and high drama (she fast-forwarded through all the romance scenes), and was more intrigued by the ascetic work ethic and legal jiujitsu performed by the more celebrated attorneys.
In one scene, when a character won a case through a Machiavellian, morally questionable master stroke, I commented that even though the attorney won the case, he wasn’t “right.”
My daughter responded, “He won, so he was right.”
After another episode featuring an associate who was hospitalized after pulling all-nighters and collapsing, my daughter said with bravado, “I could totally be a corporate lawyer."
On hearing this I felt both proud of her work ethic and worried for her: Could her preternatural craving for hard, even physically punishing, work cause her to never feel like she’s enough, no matter how much money, challenge, or prestige it offered? Would she end up like one of the characters she both mocked and valorized, whose intensity made them forces to be reckoned with, but not the greatest humans to be around? Would she burn through moments, days, years only to wonder, 20-plus years in: Wait, why am I doing this?
Would she end up like so many of us Gen X and Millennial career women who followed the "Ambitious Girls’ Guide to a Successful Career” to the letter and worked tirelessly to chalk-up wins for others without knowing how to move the needle toward our own self-acceptance?
I have found myself nostalgic, not for the headier professional times, but for my entry-level days, when, so long as I showed up for work on time and got my work done, I was free to pursue nothing even remotely related to my career, without feeling like I was being frivolous and without FOMO. So many of my “accomplishments” never made it to my resume: taking a wine tasting class, painting the cracked bathroom walls of my rented Brooklyn walkup, seeing every indie film that played at the Angelika Theater.
There was nothing career-boosting about these pursuits, but I cherish them because they are proof I did something other than work in my relative youth. I had aspirations that were entirely my own.
Elisa and I wrapped up our first year of Optionality meeting with our friend Jen Marples, who helped us think through what we wanted to accomplish in 2025, and for whom.
"That’s an easy one," I thought. “We want to develop community and resources for people like us.”
But still defining for whom was deceptively difficult. Who are we? Professional women? Transitioning professionals? Fractional executives? Experienced, perimenopausal, AI-curious, knowledge workers?
Not exclusively.
But Jen said something that resonated with me:
Whether members work in companies or outside of them, transitioning into a new career or decades into one, they are all experiencing an ego death.
And no, she wasn’t talking about a mass acid-trip. She was talking about a moment in our careers when we start questioning our work purpose. When we ask: Is the end-game becoming Senior Vice President, or leaving the planet in better shape? Making seven figures, or enabling our children to find their purpose?
That is our shared milestone.
Like death itself, ego death is inevitable; acceptance is not. It could be the graceful surrender to it that ultimately defines our careers.
Acceptance isn’t easy. Like moths to a flame, the light of a brightly burning ego attracts others of a similar nature. And when it flickers it confuses them. They are not certain how to treat someone approaching career ego death — like a respected mentor? Like an employee? Like someone who will be managed out in six months? With disappointment? With awe? With fear?
But with a proper ego death comes an acceptance, of all of it.
Of the strivers and connivers.
Of being promoted and passed over.
Of being blamed and praised.
Of folks being in awe and unimpressed.
Of every twist and turn on the road to You Now.
On this road there is no wrong choice; there are choices that are simply not right for You Now.
And with this realization I breathe a little bit easier about my daughter’s career future, global warming notwithstanding. There is simply the path she will pursue pre- and post-ego death.
Let’s all commit to meeting up on the other side.
I remember exactly what happened when I decided to go all in on ambition and career accomplishment. One major result was that I stopped participating in what had once been my vocation and had already become an avocation, but the one I most passionately pursued: Theatre.
I reasoned that I couldn't afford to have a commitment requiring me to be out of the office by a particular time or that would forestall me taking on travel. I may not have been working 24/7 all the time, but I had to be unencumbered and ready to do so to achieve what I wanted.
And I did achieve most of the things I wanted.
But now, I guess I am post-ego death, and it does run across my mind now and then...could I ever go back and do theatre again? Or is there some other way I should be scratching that creative itch? Not because I have ambitious goals for it, but because I simply loved it.
Oof.