Everything is fine.

My LinkedIn feed this morning is disturbing.

Sure there’s the typical flood of AI-created swill, all trying to make us feel like we’re going to be left behind if we don’t jump on the bandwagon. But quietly tucked between every 10 of these robotic hurry-up-and-work-harder-before-it’s-too-late posts, there’s a bit of heartbreak.

A middle-aged mother who hasn’t had work in over a year and is about to lose the family home. A father of young children who just lost his wife and their mom to cancer. A study that proves what we all have known for a couple of years now — that AI HR tools are illegally blacklisting our resumes.

But there’s more. There’s another post about Zuckerberg’s newest yacht, which he purchased right after laying off thousands of employees. One about a great jobs report that most certainly does not match reality. A (male) colleague’s posts with almost the exact same content as mine that gets all sorts of impressions while my post receives crickets.

It sort of feels like we’ve lost the script, somehow, no?

Like we’re all out here pretending everything’s fine, moving the papers around on our metaphorical desks while the whole office park is ablaze around us. I don’t just mean LinkedIn or our jobs, though, although certainly those places are dumpster fires. I mean everything — our households and workplaces, our schools and communities, basically society as a whole.

How did we get to this place where no one cares about anyone but themselves and the majority of us are doomed to a life of scraping together just enough pennies to cover our barest necessities? And more importantly, when are we all going to stop supporting such a broken system?

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of pretending everything is fine. That my neighbors and colleagues aren’t suffering, that big business and a handful of the world’s richest men haven’t sold us all out for another couple of bucks. I’m ready to do something different, something real, something that fills me and my community with pride and generational wealth.

Because the current strategy might be working for Elon and Zuck, but it’s not working so well for the rest of us.

I think the answer lies in trusting ourselves again. In stepping away from the corporate hellscape that tries to tell us we’re not smart/rich/savvy/connected enough to do it ourselves. In opening up shop in our local towns and communities. In using our knowledge, skills, and talents to provide a service that our neighbors need and will appreciate. In knowing our customers by name and treating them with the same respect and dignity we all deserve. In building a life that sustains us in monetary, but also physical and psychological, ways.

If you’re ready to try something new, or you already have, I want to know you. Please share your story. Let’s learn from each other as we walk this new (but actually old) path of (re)building our communities, our families, and our own sense of self.

I know I deserve better. Do you?

P.S. There are still a few openings in the next cohort of my Career Nirvana program. Let’s “refactor your job.”