future-proofing our careers: a resilience strategy
- Lana S. Price
- May 8
- 10 min read
lana price, la gamba, 2024, polaroid 600, 4.25" x 3.5"
There’s a lot of talk out there about the AI job apocalypse; that is, will AI advancement lead to mass unemployment? There’s no shortage of speculation as to the scale and speed (e.g., 50% of entry-level white collar jobs are at threat within five years, said the CEO of Anthropic a year ago) and a range of talking heads out there.
There’s definitely a camp throwing fuel on the fire of doom, saying we need to stop AI now lest AGI wipes out not only our jobs but our entire species… And on the other end of the spectrum, those tamping down the flames with reassurances that we’ve lived through technological advances before, and in the promised land of economy-wide AI adoption, everything will be cheap, we’ll have loads of free time, and new jobs will rise like glorious phoenixes from the ashes.
I am re-quoting William Gibson, who said: “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
I know so many people who have lost their jobs in the last year and are struggling. These folks are amazing. Incredibly smart, talented, and ambitious. Sometimes I’ll hear through the grapevine of another friend-of-a-friend who has been out of work and I’m still shocked. Them too?
Economists generally see the US labor market as broadly solid, and posit that current unemployment data doesn’t show a clear economy-wide AI shock. But even if it’s not economy-wide, some areas are being hit harder than others. A recent Goldman Sachs report confirms what we can see with our own eyes: the early displacement is evident in the tech, knowledge, and creative sectors. And they expect that to intensify.
my hot take on future-proofing careers
Big picture, I think the coming jobs landscape is going to continue to be messy and painful. I believe the pendulum of AI adoption and exuberance is going to swing wildly back and forth. There will be first-order and downstream consequences. And it's hard to predict to what degree or when one will get hit.
But I tend to generally agree with Andrew Yang who says: if you spend much of your day sitting at a desk and looking at a computer, you need to take this seriously.
And you don’t even need to sit in front of a computer to be affected! See this 2-minute video of this cafe in Sweden being entirely run by AI, and the human employee who claims to enjoy having the AI as his boss. (This is an example of a signal: something that seems completely fringe today, but could point towards a future reality.)
Can we “future-proof” our careers? Instead of trying to anticipate which jobs will fall away and which ones will emerge, I see future-proofing as a resilience strategy. We can't control the pace of AI adoption or know when disruption (for any reason) will hit, but we can control how well we know ourselves when it does. This approach is both deeply internal, yet responsive to what the world is showing us.
drawing from my own experience
I’ve been in an intentional career transition for the past four+ years. It’s a wholesale shift: industry, function, and location.
The key thing I want to share is that making a major career change takes way longer than you might imagine. It’s wayfinding. It isn’t linear, and there’s a lot of fumbling around. Sometimes it’s straddling multiple identities at once, but a lot of it is staring into the void of identity-lessness. It can be maddening and disorienting and isolating and panic-inducing. But there’s also discovery and excitement and serendipity and aliveness. And given everything else we are navigating at the same time as a society … It requires a lot of self-compassion and grace.
When I look out at the landscape, I see many people that might need to start this process, whether they want to or not. Folks who may not have the option to continue on the path they are on. Especially full-time salaried employees. The artists, freelancers, and entrepreneurs are not immune, but perhaps better equipped by the nature of their work and mindset.
My hope is that sharing my professional experience (as a strategist, futurist, and financial consultant), combined with my personal experience, can be helpful.
the resilience strategy
This strategy is built from the inside out. Often our first instinct is action. Tamping down the discomfort with an attack plan, a to-do list to check-off, a flurry of research, and just activity.
I propose starting with the big picture first. Taking a step back to really examine: what does work mean to me? What am I solving for? From there to see ourselves with a broader lens: who am I beyond this title/ industry/ path? The third step is about buying time and options. And THEN the action (exploring and experimentation) is grounded in who we actually are and what we’re actually solving for. And we don’t do it alone.
The steps are:
reframe what work represents
expand how you see yourself
build a financial runway
dream → experiment
reframe what work represents
Over the long term, I think there is a reckoning for all of the things that a job or career represents to us individually AND as a society. And one of the things that we can do to future-proof is question our relationship to work and start to untangle what it means to us and why, piece by piece. This seems meta, but it’s a deep, internal unraveling. And more practical than it might sound.
One of the reasons why losing one’s job is so devastating is that many of us have organized our entire sense of self around it. Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic, called this “workism”: the transformation of work from a means of income into a means of identity, meaning, and even transcendence, especially for the college-educated elite.
So when the job falls, it’s like a domino effect that takes a bunch of things down with it:
It isn’t just a source of income, it’s also tied to our survival infrastructure (healthcare, parental leave, retirement), which is a uniquely twisted American system.
It’s often core to our identity: the soul-searching “who am I?” answer to ourselves, to the world, and to our families, where we play the role of provider, breadwinner, or caretaker.
Our jobs can be bound up with meaning and purpose, a sense of contribution and belonging, status and proof of existence. Yes, I am here and I matter.
Work provides structure, a place to be, and challenges to engage with.
The career itself represents progression, a narrative that we’re headed towards something, maybe even self-actualization.
Threats to the job become a crisis that quickly moves from transactional (I need a new source of income) to existential (my ability and my reason to stay alive is at stake.)
If we start to really take this apart for ourselves … to look at each of these things separately, instead of as a combined behemoth package, we can have more creative solutions and possibilities.
The purpose of this exercise is to figure out: for this chapter of my life, what exactly am I solving for? If we can consciously unhook, or find other sources to meet these needs (especially some of the big ticket ones like identity, purpose, contribution, mattering), then we can stop seeing our jobs as the end-all-be-all and see them as one source of many in a meaningful life.
For example, I realized that my narrative about what should come next in my career was keeping me stuck. I told myself I needed to move forward into something new. So my next project had to, on top of everything else, fulfill the expectations of novelty and expansion. Naming those needs and realizing that I can find novelty and expansion elsewhere (in writing this newsletter, for example), helped me untangle that knot and evaluate opportunities more clearly.
The big catch is that this kind of inner work isn’t easy, and almost impossible if you’re already at the fallen dominos stage. That’s why I would argue: if you’re worried about an uncertain future where your all-encompassing Work is at stake, this is a productive and proactive way to start preparing.
expand how you see yourself
Something that’s been helpful in my transition is to broaden and deepen the ways I see myself. I’d say this process has been pragmagical. It’s been a 3-D look at transferable skills, my nature and interests, and how I show up for others.
On the recommendation from my friend who is a career coach, I took some strengths-based assessments. I did the Clifton StrengthsFinder, and this helped me see beyond a narrow purview defined by my field of expertise and industry into a broader base of core transferable strengths. For example, I can articulate that some of my top strengths include Strategy, Analysis, and Ideation. It was also a confidence booster, which can come few and far between when in transition.
On the magical end, I also got an astrological birth chart reading to see what other insights I could get about how I’m wired, what is in my nature, and how to continue to cultivate that. One of the things they said in the reading was that my interests include: “other people’s money, collaborations, entrepreneurship, death work, and therapy.” I laughed at how spot on that was.
Finally, I asked friends and former colleagues to mirror back to me things that I’m good at, and give me ideas to explore. It’s hard to be objective about yourself. We’re the worst judges of our own strengths because they feel so ordinary to us.
Over brunch a group of friends expressed appreciation for my ability to hold space, which led to an idea that maybe I should pursue being a therapist. (Note this also came up in my astrological reading.) I asked my therapist, and she agreed, adding that she noticed I approach therapeutic concepts very instinctively. So now this is a thread I am following; not therapy exactly, but adjacent.
All of these things are giving me a picture of myself that is more expansive and in-depth than a job title.
build a financial runway
As a financial consultant, I’ve helped organizations that were running out of money make plans to turnaround quickly before becoming insolvent.
Ideally, organizations, and individuals, have a healthy amount of cash-on-hand to help weather unexpected storms. Traditional personal finance advice is to have an emergency fund that can cover 3-to-6 months of essential living expenses to protect against job loss or surprise expenses, kept in a separate high-yield savings account. If possible, a longer runway, like 9-to-12 months of expenses would allow for more flexibility.
I’ve been working on my personal finance for many years, and having an emergency fund is a big part of what enabled me to take some time off while I explored my career options.
But let’s say building an emergency fund isn’t realistic under current circumstances. Another approach is to make a turnaround plan.
A turnaround plan basically means doing an honest assessment on four financial levers: assets (what you own), liabilities (what you owe/ debts), expenses, and income. Then pair this with a tripwire plan: a set of predetermined actions to take depending on the severity of the situation, roughly decided in advance.
Low-severity triggers are small adjustments; higher-severity triggers are more significant moves. These tactics can be mixed and matched across the four different levers at different times to extend the runway. Depending on the circumstances, one can uncover a lot of options and creativity really helps.
For example, a low severity tactic might be going through your house and selling all unused items of value (assets), or shifting credit card balances to a zero-interest card (liability). A medium move might require having hard conversations, e.g., cancelling travel plans you’ve already committed to (expenses). High severity examples might include subletting your place and moving in with someone temporarily or withdrawing from retirement accounts early and incurring penalties.*
*Disclaimer that this isn’t financial advice or recommendations; each of these ideas has different consequences. This list is meant to be illustrative.
Financial clarity lets us calculate how much time we’re buying with each decision, and creates some breathing room to figure out what comes next.
dream → experiment
The book Designing Your Life, written by two Stanford professors, uses design thinking to help individuals build a fulfilling life. One of the core exercises is called the Odyssey Plan, which asks the reader to imagine three different five-year futures. The idea is to break out of the idea that there is just one path (the one we’re already on) and to start testing alternatives through small experiments.
A friend asked me whether this exercise, basically dreaming, is worth it if the scenarios are “unrealistic.” I had to think about this.
Dreams are unrealistic, by definition. That’s what makes them dreams. I also wonder, who gets to define what is realistic for whom? The current reality was once someone’s unrealistic dream.
The filmmaker Tourmaline tells a beautiful story about how transgender activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera would, in the 1960s, rent hourly hotel rooms in Times Square for “freedom dreaming.”
“They were imagining a world filled with conditions that they wanted. They were using what wasn’t wanted, the harshness that would happen immediately when they left the hotel, as a jumping off point to dream the world that they deserved… “
This informed Tourmaline’s own practice:
“If I’m having an experience that I don’t like, I’m immediately knowing, whether I’m clear on it or not, a dream for what I do want. Dreams are a central part of my practice, and I’m also the beneficiary of all of the dreams of people who came before.”
Can we be the dreamers for all the beneficiaries who come after us?
In fact, I say we can’t afford NOT to dream. As a society, we need the dreamers and the builders now more than ever. Ultimately, we need to design alternatives for ourselves and each other.
If our dreams are pointing towards things that center our values and interests, then those are sparks worth following. The task is then to design small experiments around them: low-cost, low-commitment ways to test whether a direction fits before fully committing to it.
experiments realized
Experiments are where the rubber meets the road between the internal and the external. It is the bridge between the dream world and reality. This is where we engage with real people, ask a lot of questions, and see where it leads. It’s where the internal unraveling starts taking shape into something new. Active co-creation.
Pragmagical is my personal home of experiments. This newsletter is an experiment in articulating my thoughts and practicing being seen. This piece is an attempt to combine my purview and lived experience to see if it resonates. So I’m curious for your feedback:
How are you navigating this uncertainty?
Which of these steps feels most relevant to you?
Is there anything you’d add?
Is there something here you'd like to explore further?
I’d love to hear your perspective. If you feel called, please reach out and let me know.
i'm lana price and this is my biweekly-ish newsletter. i write about navigating life transitions, bridging practicality and possibility. you can find other writing here. subscribe to get these straight to your inbox.
