Stop Climbing. Start Building.

The system didn't break me. It woke me up.

Go to school. Get the degree. Then the Masters. Land in a big-name company. Climb. Move. Climb again.

Nobody told you and then what.

After 15+ years in Big Tech, I can tell you the “and then what” hits differently than they promised.

---

I had my first child in peak pandemic, peak lockdown. Redundancies everywhere. Hiring everywhere. House prices dropping, then spiking. Markets falling, then climbing. The world doing its best impression of a fever dream, and I walked back into work not just as a new mother, but into a workplace I didn’t recognise anymore.

The threat of losing your job doesn’t just sit in the background. It gets under your skin. It compounds. And when you’ve got kids depending on you not just for money, but for your actual presence, your calm, your happiness, the stakes change completely.

You can tell me to fly by the seat of my pants when I’m young and unattached. You can’t tell me that when I have two kids at home.

---

What keeps me up at night now? Did we invest in the right things? Did I study the right things? Did I actually teach my son something useful tonight, or was homework just ticking a box? Did everyone eat at least one decent meal today because three times is aspirational.

This is the mental load nobody puts in the job description.

And now, on top of all of it, AI is sawing off the end of the ladder. The one we were told to keep climbing.

I’m not interested in pretending that’s not terrifying. But I’m also not interested in pretending it’s not interesting.

---

Here’s what took me a long time to understand.

Curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy.

The people who will thrive in the next decade aren’t the most credentialed. They’re not the ones who followed the script perfectly. They’re the ones who stayed curious when the script stopped making sense. Curious enough to question what they were taught. Curious enough to rebuild when the ladder disappeared. Curious enough to ask what comes next, instead of grieving what’s gone.

I can’t afford to let a broken system steal the things that matter most. So I stopped waiting for the system to change and I got curious about what I could build instead.

Writing Draft Mode has helped bring clarity to all of this for me. It’s where I process the mess, figure out what’s real, and share it with people who are living the same contradiction.

---

The career ladder is disappearing. You can grieve it, or you can get curious about what replaces it.

For me, curiosity wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the only way through.

Are you still climbing? Or have you started building?

Subscribe to Draft Mode. I share something new every week for the ones navigating this in real time.