On my very first day of grad school, I met the 20-person cohort I’d spend the next two years with. As each person introduced themselves (name, background, fun fact), I was ruthlessly evaluating them in my head. That person sounds smart. I don’t know about that person. That person seems intimidating.
After class, I got in my car and felt deeply uncomfortable. I felt like maybe those people must have disliked me, afraid I’d made a bad impression. Then it hit me: I was assuming they judged me because I was judging them. What I was really doing, underneath all of it, was calculating: who here is useful? Who is going to help me climb, who is going to get in my way, and who am I going to have to step over?
We’re taught by the systems we’re in to be competitive with those around us, especially in work and school systems. Many of us internalized an identity that includes constant competition, maneuvering, stack ranking. We became people who know how to read a hierarchy and figure out how to climb it. The problem is, all this evaluation is in direct opposition to connection. Evaluation is isolating. It pits us against each other. And we are built for connection — it’s a deeply human quality, and unlike title or job level, a durable source of power.
The calculus in that parking lot wasn’t really about them. It was the same calculus I’d been running on myself: who am I relative to everyone else? Useful enough. Impressive enough. Far enough along.
When you measure the people around you by cog qualities — title, output, how close they are to power — you’re using cog qualities as your own measuring stick. The same instinct, pointed in two directions. The competitive framework you absorbed — the one that runs the ranking in your head — is the same one that makes your career feel like your identity. And if you feel misaligned with your career, that identity can become confusing and painful. Untangle one and you start to untangle the other.
I’ve written before about the forces restructuring the workforce right now: AI, RTO, political instability. I don’t think we’re facing an apocalypse. But your job is going to change, and possibly your economic reality. For most people, that’s uncomfortable. For the people whose identities are built on cog qualities (title, compensation, job level), it’s something closer to existential. The job is threatened. So is the self.
This is the moment for what I’ve started calling the Great Disentanglement.
A friend and I were talking recently about what you’d tell a college student today, in a world of large language models, when grades and placements can be gamed with AI. She asked what major I’d recommend to a kid to get the best job out of school. I said: college was never career training. It’s how you learn to think. I’d tell a student to pursue what engages them, collect experiences for the joy of it, trust that the education will help them tie it all together into a life.
I’d give the same advice to every working adult right now.
The Great Disentanglement isn’t just about protecting your own identity from a disrupted market. It also frees you to actually connect with people. It frees you to connect with yourself, to remember the parts of work that fuel you and discard the rest. And connection — real, human, attentive connection — AI can’t replicate.
Your job is going to change. Ground yourself in something that doesn’t. That means doing the actual work of identifying your values — not listing them, but examining where they’re showing up in your life and where they’re not. Understanding your best qualities independent of your job description. Stopping the habit of measuring your life by your employer’s metrics. You have to do the work of figuring out who you are inside and outside that system, even (especially) if you’re going to continue to work within it.
Most people end up misaligned not because something went wrong, but because they let some other part of them drive. The Great Disentanglement is how we take the wheel.
Want to start disentangling? Start here: What feelings come up for you when you imagine a world without a title or a prestigious resume?
Since that day in the parking lot, I've spent a lot of energy trying to deconstruct my judgment. Evaluation is also a defense - it makes sense that it would kick in in a room full of new colleagues embarking on a whole new enterprise. But the big, life-changing thing for me is the realization that I don’t need to be defended. When I feel myself starting to judge, I ask myself how I can connect, instead. I can notice what someone is good at and just admire it, without it having anything to do with me. Their excellence isn't a threat or a resource. It's just theirs. No one has to be useful to have value. I don’t have to distance myself from someone who seems like they might in some way impede my endless climb. I don’t have anywhere to climb to, because I just get to be myself.
The work I do is about 1:1 connection for a reason. You can start with the free values sort.
If this landed for you, I’d love to hear about it!