As someone who works at a large corporation - Google - and someone who always thought working at Google would be really cool, I put a lot of my self-worth into my job. When things go well at work - I’m doing well. When they’re going awry - my well-being follows.

Yeah, that’s not a very healthy take, and I know it, but as someone who’s been in the tech industry for the past 14 years, it’s a difficult worldview to escape. At this point it’s probably a deep seated core belief.

A close friend of mine is leaving Google this week. She’s taking a voluntary exit program, which is effectively a more humane way for a large company to organize workforce reductions. It’s better than the layoffs we’ve also seen quite a few of lately. After being a model employee for the past decade, she’s leaving the company (and tech in general) to focus her passions elsewhere. She’s excited for the future ahead, and she’s lost too, and I think I would be too.

It’s understandable - humans are wired to want to provide some social value. You want to be working for the good of the tribe, and you want the tribe to see and recognize that. Moochers will be shunned, and in the olden days being shunned would spell certain death. People usually can only survive together, in a group.

But in a modern world, it’s remarkably hard to connect the value of the work you do to a greater whole, to the goodness of your tribe.

I had a short opportunity to not be in the workforce for 3 months as I took my paternity leave. I didn’t experience a sense of decreased self-worth, but many other factors were in play. Naturally, my daughter was born and it was exciting, and so many things were happening. Figuring out how to parent a newborn isn’t easy and doesn’t leave much room for existential crises. But there’s also a lot of social value to being a dad and raising a child, which felt extremely gratifying. I imagine if I were to just take extended time off without a purpose like that one - I wouldn’t be as satisfied, and I’d begin to question my own self-worth.

I’ve been an aspirational FIRE practitioner for over a decade. FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early - a terrible acronym, but the idea behind it is solid: reduce expenses, increase income, invest the difference. Many FIRE practitioners retire in their 30s or 40s, but I’m not quite there, and I enjoy aspects of work (and paycheck doesn’t hurt, either). What I like about FIRE as a philosophy is that it forces me to confront what it’s like to not have to work. That’s the end goal after all, but hearing from my retired friends, it always sounds like you just replace old problems with new ones.

In the end, I feel like it all comes down to finding things to value about myself that are outside of the job. I’m learning that it’s all about moderation. I’m trying to find a way to balance the different parts of my life, so that no single aspect, like my career, outweighs all the others. Because I feel like when I put all my self-worth eggs in one basket, it’s not a question of if things will break, but when.