The Career That Ate My Personality

In Dublin, where I grew up, there is a question that people ask within the first five minutes of meeting someone at a party and that I had always found slightly reductive: what do you do? I had always internally objected to the implied equivalence between profession and identity.

Then I spent four years making exactly that equivalence in my own life without noticing. I joined a fast-growing fintech startup at 25 as one of the early employees, and in the way of fast-growing startups it consumed everything - time, attention, identity, social life.

The company was the context for most of my relationships, most of my interests, most of my sense of what mattered and how I was doing. I defined myself by the company's trajectory. Its successes felt like my successes in a way that went well beyond normal professional pride.

Its setbacks landed personally in a way that, in retrospect, should have told me something about the degree to which I had located my self-concept inside something external.

When I was made redundant at 29 - a restructure, genuinely nothing personal - the period that followed was more destabilising than the financial difficulty, which was manageable. The destabilising thing was the absence of an answer to that party question. Without the startup, I did not quite know what I was.

Not in a temporary, transitional sense but in a deeper sense: I had been so thoroughly occupied by the role for four years that the things that had previously constituted my personality outside of work had atrophied from disuse. I had not read seriously in two years.

I had let friendships outside the company thin to near-nothing. I had not pursued any interest that was not somehow also a professional development. The redundancy forced a reckoning that in another version of events might have taken much longer.

Over the following year, unemployed for longer than I expected, I rebuilt deliberately - reconnecting with interests I had abandoned, investing in friendships outside the sector, developing opinions about things that had nothing to do with financial technology.

When I re-entered the workforce I did so as a person who had a job rather than a person who was a job. The distinction is significant and I intend to maintain it.