What happens to your sense of self when the job title disappears?
- Christina - Spark Back Coaching
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
There’s a moment in a Simone Stolzoff talk that gets me every time. He’s at a hostel. He asks a Chilean man, "What do you do?" The man responds, "You mean for work?", genuinely puzzled, as if the question could obviously be about dozens of other things.
Across sectors, organizations have been shedding layers, and the middle management tier has taken some of the heaviest cuts. These are not people who lost a #job and will find the same one elsewhere next quarter. Many of them lost the structure that organized how they thought about themselves: the title they had been building toward for years, the role that gave them authority in the room, the answer they reached for at every dinner party introduction.
Research on #role centrality tells us that identity fragility after job loss grows with seniority. The higher someone has climbed, the more the role tends to absorb the self. A junior professional loses a job. A senior professional loses a narrative.
However, there is also a strong element of #culture here. In American and British work culture especially, work has taken over the function once held by community, religion and neighborhood. Derek Thompson named it "workism", the belief that #work is where we find meaning, belonging and identity. Nearly half the global workforce now reports some form of #burnout. This is what happens when a single area of your life carries the full weight of who you are.
Nevertheless, another part of the explanation can be found in where you are in your life’s journey. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks has written extensively about what he calls "career identity addiction", the way high achievers tie their entire sense of self to professional achievement, influence, and title. His research points to a global phenomenon: people approaching their 40s and 50s are significantly more likely to begin questioning this equation, often for the first time. They have succeeded enough to start feeling how hollow the formula has become.
Interestingly, this is the demographic where most senior-level professionals sit. A layoff only accelerates the confrontation around identity and its connection to work. The question arrives before most people feel ready for it. And the hardest part is rarely the logistics of finding the next #role. It is being forced to answer something they had been avoiding for years.
👉 How connected is your sense of identity to your job title? Where do you position your job when you’re introducing yourself to strangers? If you are struggling with finding your identity outside of work, reach out and we can figure it out together.
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