future-proof your life

the more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself

I went on a date last night¹. He was not my type, but the conversation was interesting enough. At one point, while explaining his startup, he leaned forward and said:

“It’s 2031. Imagine a woman. She’s thirty five. She’s a lawyer who worked her way up to junior partner at a top firm. She has a beautiful house in Sydney, a second holiday property somewhere else, a life that looks exactly like what people say it’s supposed to look like. She did everything right. And then AI becomes so good that it can do her job better than she can.”

He paused.

“She loses the job. The income. The partnership. The status. She spends six months trying to find something equivalent but nothing exists anymore. She gets two thousand dollars a month in universal basic income, has to sell the house, give up the second property, downsize her life. But more than that, she loses her identity. She doesn’t know who she is without any of it. She becomes angry. Aggressive. Unstable. She needs help.”

Then he smiled.

“That’s where my startup comes in.”

I took a sip of wine.

“What a beautiful opportunity to create a more meaningful life.”

He looked at me like I hadn’t understood.

“She’s suffering,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Obviously.”

I told him he was making her sound one dimensional.

“She is not her job. Her career might be an expression of her, for a season, but it is not the entirety of who she is. She’s a human being. She has instincts, contradictions, private curiosities, old dreams, unfinished parts of herself, talents that never made it onto a résumé, desires she may not even have admitted to herself yet. She is an ecosystem. Not a title.”

He looked at me for a moment and said, completely seriously:

“So… she has hobbies?”

I stared at him.

“No,” I said. “Don’t belittle her.”

And suddenly I could feel myself getting fired up.

“I mean that she is a living ecosystem. A psyche. A body. A nervous system. A soul. A woman with instincts and contradictions and unfinished parts of herself. A woman with ideas she hasn’t followed yet, gifts she hasn’t fully developed, parts of her that have never had the chance to come all the way alive because she’s been too busy being useful, successful, productive, good.”

He stayed quiet.

“Her career might have been one expression of who she is for a season. But it was never all of her. It was never supposed to be.”

I thought about how many women I know who have already lived some version of this.

Women who became mothers and realised the identity they had built no longer fit.
Women who left marriages.
Women who moved countries.
Women who got sick.
Women who burned out.
Women who fell in and out of love.

This isn’t new.

Human beings have been dying into new identities for as long as human beings have existed. The difference now is that many people have built almost their entire sense of self around institutions that may not exist in the same way ten years from now.

If the structures most people have built their identities around start disappearing, whether that’s because of AI, redundancy, motherhood, illness, divorce, burnout, heartbreak, relocation, grief, or simply waking up one morning and realising you can’t keep pretending your life fits when it clearly doesn’t... then the people who will suffer the most won’t necessarily be the least intelligent, or the least educated, or even the least prepared.

It will be the people who got very good at becoming who the world rewarded, but never got particularly curious about who they actually were. The people who built careers, networks, reputations, maybe even entire lifestyles, without ever developing the self-awareness, individuality, or courage required to discover what was genuinely theirs.

The more uncertain the world becomes, the more essential it becomes to become unmistakably yourself.

Let’s say, for a moment, that his version of the future is real. Let’s say that in the next five or ten years entire industries begin disappearing. Fewer people sitting in offices pretending to work while answering emails that no one really needed to send in the first place. Let’s say that the careers our parents and grandparents once built entire identities around become increasingly unstable, increasingly automated, increasingly… optional. Let’s say that the pace of change really is that fast.

Then there are, as far as I can tell, two things you can do now to prepare.

One, as you already know if you’ve been walking through this 8-part series on how to change your life with me for a while, is to become intimate with uncertainty.

To stop treating the unknown like a threat, or a punishment, or evidence that you’ve made a wrong turn, and begin relating to it for what it so often is: the place where your next identity is quietly forming. The people who are going to navigate the next decade with the most grace will not necessarily be the smartest, the richest, or the most technically skilled. They will be the ones who have already spent enough time in the void to know that losing one version of yourself does not mean losing yourself altogether. The ones who have sat in enough silence, enough heartbreak, enough reinvention, enough endings, enough in-between spaces, to know that identity is not something fixed, but something living.

The other is that you become more than the bare minimum.

You stop building a life around being employable.
And you start building a body of work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because maybe you’re not actually meant to build a “business.” Maybe that word is too small, too transactional, too loaded with internet bro energy and passive income fantasies and funnels and logos and launch strategies and all the other things that have made so many deeply intelligent, creative, sensitive people decide that entrepreneurship isn’t for them.

Maybe what you’re actually here to build is a body of work. Something that doesn’t begin with market research or niche positioning or “what problem do I solve?” but with curiosity. With obsession. With the kinds of questions that keep following you from city to city, relationship to relationship, season to season. The kinds of ideas that wake you up at three in the morning, not because they are commercially viable, but because they feel alive. Because they feel like yours.

A body of work, as I’ve come to understand it, is the accumulated evidence of what happens when you take your curiosity seriously for long enough.

It is what begins to emerge when you stop asking what people want from you and start paying much closer attention to what life keeps trying to draw out of you. It is the trail of essays, conversations, experiments, offerings, questions, photographs, frameworks, teachings, retreats, communities, products, philosophies, and perspectives that begin to form when you stop trying to fit yourself into existing categories and start allowing your own way of seeing the world to become visible.

And from what I can tell, after more than a decade of writing online, building businesses, burning out, reinventing myself, moving countries, changing identities, falling apart, starting over, and paying very close attention to the women who seem most alive… a body of work tends to grow from three things.

1. Depth.

And by depth, I don’t mean expertise in the traditional sense. I don’t mean certificates or credentials or another weekend course you can add to your website. I mean the depth that comes from paying attention to your own life with enough honesty to notice the patterns that keep repeating. The conversations people always seem to have with you. The themes that have followed you since childhood. The books you can’t stop buying. The problems you’ve had to solve the hard way. The pain you survived that, over time, became wisdom. The questions that won’t leave you alone no matter how practical you try to be. Depth begins the moment you stop consuming other people’s ideas compulsively and start observing your own life as if it might actually contain the raw material for something important.

2. Difference.

Which sounds obvious, until you realise how much of adult life is spent trying not to stand out. Trying to sound more professional, more polished, more digestible, more hireable, more marketable, more… normal. And yet the irony is that the very things most people spend years trying to tone down are often the exact things that make them unforgettable. Your intensity. Your sensitivity. Your strange combinations of interests. Your contradictory opinions. Your way of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. Your obsession with human behaviour, or design, or healing, or language, or food, or systems, or beauty, or whatever it is that lights up your particular nervous system. The parts of yourself you’ve been trying to smooth out are not the problem, but the point. Your weirdness is not something to overcome, but something to study.

3. Devotion.

Because a body of work is rarely built in public at first. It’s built introspectively. In notebooks. In half-finished drafts. In long walks. In voice notes to yourself. In years where, from the outside, it looks like nothing much is happening. It’s built while other people are waiting for permission, waiting to feel ready, waiting to know exactly how it all turns out before they begin. It’s built when nobody is clapping, nobody is paying, nobody fully understands what you’re doing yet, and you keep showing up anyway, not because it makes sense on paper, but because something in you knows that this… whatever this is… matters.

I suspect that in a future that becomes increasingly automated, increasingly optimised, increasingly efficient, the people who thrive will not necessarily be the people who can do what everyone else can do, only faster.

They will be the people who took the time to become themselves unmistakably.

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practical dreamer: a three month mentorship for women ready to build their body of work

~ using Stanford’s Life Design framework,
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If you’re serious about building a body of work, not just a career, not just a personal brand, but something living, something that could hold your identity through seasons of reinvention, loss, growth, motherhood, relocation, heartbreak, abundance, obscurity, success, and all the versions of you still waiting to emerge… then this is where I would begin.

Not with a business plan. Not with a niche. Not with a logo, a website, a strategy, or an Instagram bio.

I would begin by getting radically honest about who you actually are beneath all the roles, all the conditioning, all the places you learned how to belong by becoming more convenient, more agreeable, more impressive, more useful.

Take a notebook. Go for a long walk. Sit somewhere quiet. Pour a wine / kombucha / cacao. Light a candle. Turn your phone off for an hour. And sit with these.

— your relationship to belonging.

How much of your identity has been built around a group, a community, an industry, a friendship circle, a family system, a culture, a profession, a political ideology, a version of womanhood, a place?

And more importantly… does it still fit?

Does the life you’ve built around belonging actually reflect who you are now, or who you had to become in order to be accepted there?

— your belief systems.

What do you actually believe about how the world works?

About money.

About love.

About ambition.

About beauty.

About freedom.

About what a good life looks like.

About how people should treat each other.

About what success is.

About what is worth your precious life force.

And how much of that did you arrive at through lived experience, hard-won wisdom, and deep reflection… versus quietly absorbing it because it helped you fit somewhere?

— your relationship to being different.

Not performatively different. Not “quirky.” Not aesthetically unconventional.

Actually different.

Outgrowing people.

Being misunderstood.

Being underestimated.

Being judged.

Being ahead of your time.

Being too much for some people and exactly enough for the right ones.

How have you learned to exist as an individual within the collective?

Have you been paying the cost of being fully yourself…

Or finding increasingly sophisticated ways around it?

Because, in my experience, your body of work begins the moment you start becoming unmistakably yourself.

1. I find dating to be a bit of a social experiment these days. It’s fun! I’m enjoying it. I also notice how much sharper my senses have become, how quickly my body tells me what my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. After everything that happened last year, I trust that intelligence more than ever. We meet at my favourite sunset spot. This man was perfectly nice, interesting even, but he touched me too often, too casually, assumed intimacy rather than earning it, and when I subtly moved my body away, leaned back, created space, he didn’t notice. Or perhaps he noticed and didn’t know what to do with the information. And when he asked me if I was a physical touch person, and I said I am, once I feel comfortable with someone, he replied: “How long does that take?” I looked at him incredulously. Some men live almost entirely from the neck up. The conversation we had tracks because the mistake that these kinds of men often make is that they believe they can predict and control the future by outsmarting it. Really, they’re just very afraid.