The Unseen Grief of Career Death
I was recently on the Dialogues With Jagero podcast, as part of my Kenyan book tour for Strength and Sorrow and he posed the question, ‘What was leaving the column like….was it like death?” That period of my life ended dramatically and it is the subject of a whole chapter in my book.
What happens when your cherished career dies, badly. For a decade and some change, I used to be known as the Mantalk guy, a noted relationship columnist, with a national following who seemingly disappeared and went off to die in some nondescript village. Fifteen years later, in the various public appearances I have made to promote my new book, the Mantalk chapter keeps returning, like a restless ghost.
My exit from this position of status was in hindsight a choice between hanging on despite the exhaustion or letting go so that I could breathe. The decision to move away from a frantic city career to the quiet mundane village rhythms, was grief in action. I did not have the language then to describe what I was going through but now I see it clearly. I was grieving my loss of career status and a particular professional identity that was held in high esteem.
My reinvention strategy were simply attempts to milk the Mantalk brand, and it would take the rudimentary pace of village life for my grieving to find its place and over the years I would discover that my writing profession was merely one facet of a bigger life path.
In reflection, I count myself as lucky that life in a way forced me to surrender, as I had faced a near-death experience after a motorcycle accident that put the fleeting nature of career status into sharp focus. I was forced to really contend with what counts in the end, when the lights are turned off and the actor exits the stage.
I look back now and I see that my generation had no language to contend with a career death.
I hail from a time when the lack of a long standing career history would mean a thin eulogy. There would be nothing to place in the work history category which constituted the most important chapter of a man’s life. What did he do for living and was he a success at it? Everything else, the family, the contribution to the community came after this. So I grew up in a society where the men we looked up to were completely defined by their careers and they spent inordinate amounts of time building their names. The profession label obscured all other identities. The remnants of that thinking are still in existence today. We speak of Engineer, Daktari, Prof, Wakili the title leads as the only recognisable mask that shields the vulnerability of the self and turns into a permanent identity.
This scenario is tougher in a corporate environment, in the realm of bullshit jobs, a phenomenon that was well articulated by the late anthropologist David Graeber, where roles are designed to project an illusion of corporate relevance while adding zero actual value to society. In a word, management. In the corporate culture, only two states are recognised, what is termed as rising utility, perpetual growth, high performance and on the other extreme, failure to meet this expectation that leads to redundancy. No middle ground, so the consequence of success is burn out and the top prize is for those who hang on through exhaustion by any means necessary. It is not an accident that success is described as a cut throat industry. The corporate man is grieving not just the loss of salary, but the loss of the elaborate fiction that his work mattered. This validates the shame, as he is mourning a life spent on something ultimately meaningless.
I have watched a generation fall through the cracks after giving their best years to a company before eventually hitting a career ceiling and realizing that they are faced with crazy odds. There is no room for growth, no prospects outside the current station that offer the same security and the increasing pressure of maintaining relevance as a new generation of workers moves up the ranks. What is rarely broached is just the sheer exhaustion of just holding on to the career because life outside this singular idea of self is too grave to contemplate.
Inevitably, one is yanked out of that position by circumstance, sometimes one’s own hubris, a case of plain injustice or just bad luck. Company fortunes change, people are made redundant and you are out of work. The classic case for most men, especially in their 40s, is atrophy. Jackson Biko paints a clear picture of this guy in his novel, Let me call you back. Those men who dwell in a state of suspended disbelief and non acceptance. The prestige that was bought by time and youth was transactional, and the end realisation, is that you were just a cog, not the wheel.
As Biko narrates, men are capable of sustaining an elaborate charade, living in denial, keeping up appearances, fooling even the wife until it is no longer sustainable and when things go bust and ugly, the deluge affects everyone around you who was roped into the lie.
I look at this loss of status as a space of grief work that needs to be explored. That singular, corporately-enforced identity and the brutal, unacknowledged grief that follows its loss. We are generally not encouraged to grieve material losses fully because they appear insignificant in the scheme of things. You have not died. You are still alive. Go out and find new opportunities. But the grieving patterns are the same. The body has internalised loss and it remembers. If you skip or suppress it, what follows is performance as a coping mechanism, the pretense that all is well while it is not. It is the hiding, the fear of shame that drives this denial.
This is the natural reaction for a man grappling with control over life circumstances and attempting to remain on top of things. In a marriage, not even the wife is seen as a safety net because that implies dependence, which he cannot afford. The last thing the broken man needs is pity that it is likely to turn into contempt. Then there are the invisible eyes of society. Better to dwell in the denial stage because admitting failure would mean, it’s done. You might as well be dead. The home becomes the final stage of the lie. Eventually the deluge of accumulated shame, broken promises, reality checks, overwhelm the man, who can no longer keep up appearances. By this stage he is typically broken.
The corporate man doesn’t just lose his career; the loss extends beyond a paycheck. It is a combination of so many other things. Relationships, access, the activity, the busyness that gave our lives a sense of importance and loss of a secure future. The physical death in comparison seems to be a kinder prospect.
We are not taught how to deal with bad endings. We are supposed to toughen it up and move on to the next better thing. That’s how resilience is advertised, upwards and onwards. That is usually a short term remedy and so what naturally follows is the acting out, the addictive patterns that manifest in the wake of career death are stages of grief that are not exactly linear. The resume that we hold so dear becomes the eulogy of the walking dead. It is our historical record of competence, a badge of validation. It is proof to the world, we were once someone of importance, formerly a respected columnist who graced our newspapers. Now, nothing. Silence and in that void, our monsters resurrect and beckon us towards self destruction.
The younger generations handle career failure a lot better in my books. For the millennials and Gen Zs where the majority experience chronic unemployment or underemployment, they suffer no illusion of career security and their lives are defined by constant shifting, in the game of hustle and survival. Their approach to dead end career prospects is to prioritise their well being and advocate for work-life balance which resulted in stereotypes about them in the workplace. Millennials were painted as entitled job-hoppers seeking a sense of mission in their work while the Gen Z are characterized as unreliable and easy quitters who swear by technology and parrot on about mental health. Both generations are still criticized for lacking company loyalty in contrast to older generations.
The older generations view the younger one’s expectation as moral weakness because for many of us, our entire identity was built on the moral strength of self sacrifice to the corporation. The corporation consumed our identities; all else is just conjecture. When that gets stripped unceremoniously, what we witness is the atrophy of a once vibrant individual who must face his raw self. A self that is no longer recognisable and one that we lost touch with so long ago. The younger generation, by contrast, is grieving the death of guaranteed stability and advancement onced promised by the corporation.
We have no rituals to mediate career death. We have funerals for death, weddings for marriage, graduations for career transitions but when the professional identity is lost, we are met with silence at best, pity or contempt. Societal programming demands that we toughen up. You haven’t died. You are not encouraged to process the emotional pain of that loss and the man who has lost his job remains trapped in the stages of grief, denial, anger, and bargaining. The pressure is on. You have to construct a new professional identity before the mourning of the old one is completed. Grieving is a luxury.
What we are mourning is the death of the person we had successfully marketed ourselves to be. The corporate language of strategy, metrics and efficiency is utterly useless for the emotional task of processing loss. We have to allow the grieving of careers that end because the inability to acknowledge this loss could keep us trapped in a vortex of grief.