I am technically unemployed — again.
It has happened to me numerous times throughout my career: the fit stops working — you can just feel it (this time I anticipated it by a whopping 72 hours!). This sense of where they’re going versus where you’re going is just diverging. And, when the time comes, you really don’t need to discuss it because both sides just know it’s the right thing and the right time to do it. Frankly, the primary feeling post-separation is relief. I imagine that’s how divorce feels when it makes sense, and this is a decidedly conscious uncoupling.
The trajectory for me is familiar: start as consultant (1099), migrate to full-time (W2), and then migrate back to 1099, and that’s what I’m doing with Throughline: backing out of the company proper and becoming a sort of senior adviser to its parent company (of sorts) Throughline Ventures. The fit with Throughline made sense during the book’s creation (all those data visualizations and illustrations) and launch, but now I find myself operating at a different level (no matter what I propose otherwise)— very Founder-focused. Throughline’s founder (Scott Williams) now spends a lot of his mental time at this, “higher” ventures level and so I have followed him into that environment of higher risk and higher reward — the price being no more W2 with Throughline.
The strange thing is, for me, rebalancing my work portfolio in this way simultaneously feels more and less risky on a personal level. W2 status is nice, particularly when it comes to healthcare. I still have five healthcare dependents, so I am deeply incentivized to socialize that risk with a FT position, balancing all the 1099 stuff on the side.
You may think, Wait a minute! Isn’t a full-time W2 supposed to be enough?
For some people in certain professions, it is. But I have never lived in those professions (and I naturally work about 70 hours/week no matter what I’m doing). Instead, I learned long ago that it’s better and safer to spread my employment/engagement risk across multiple counterparties, and 2025 DEFINITELY feels like one of those risk periods.
Duh!
That approach allowed me to survive getting fired, furloughed, moved to part-time, contract terminated, and salary-reduced all at the same time (!) when the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 hit. Frankly, having all those work streams was how I survived, and it’s pretty much been my model ever since.
That is the essence of the risk shift in modern society: it used to sit with the firm more and with the government more, but, for a long time now both of those enterprises have been shedding that risk as much as they can and putting it off on individual workers and citizens — hence the scary populism of today (that feeling that we’re all one lost paycheck away from disaster!).
Great bit of NYT analysis today on this very subject/conundrum:
NYT: Wealthy and unhappy
America the economy is doing great relative to every other advanced economy out there. Sure, we have huge challenges and old, out-of-date models and structures and government to deal with these “new realities,” as my buddy (and founder) Steve DeAngelis likes to call them, but, in relative terms, we’re coming out ahead and should be entirely confident about our future as a result.
But we’re not, notes the NYT. Instead, we’re wealthier and better off than we’ve ever been and we’re not happy. That progress and that enjoyment have diverged.
Of course, there’s all that change coming at us: globalization rules our nation now more than our nation rules globalization (a lesson Trump 2.0 is learning); AI is barreling down the tracks at us, along with climate change and demographic collapse and Whites lapsing in to majority-minority status. Whether or not you’re directly impacted by these developments, they are shaping your world in profound ways.
It can’t get much crazier and discombobulating than this, so no wonder so much of society and the establishment is in turmoil.
Characterizing all this tension, however, is that underlying risk shift from the collective to the individual. I learn that EVERY TIME I suddenly lack a W2: nobody owes you anything in this world and that is a fucking brutal reality to bump into.
I ran into that last decade for a stretch and ended up driving cab for 80 hours a week to make rent and food and education happen for my brood. Very humbling, entirely infuriating, but I was taught to show up (my dad’s example) and so I showed up until things got fixed.
Throughline was a big part of that fix, so I remain entirely grateful they and Scott came along, helped me birth America’s New Map, and I will treat our shared custody of that legacy as the wonderful and valuable achievement it is. I expect to keep making things happen for Throughline Ventures and I expect Throughline Ventures to keep making things happen for me. I have deep affection for everyone I’ve worked with there.
Still, I love that W2. I want that day job separate from my thought leadership stuff (everything else). I enjoy that core challenge and identity. I am one loyal dog who, like my mini-poodle, is happier than hell every time I toss that ball into the distance because this is what I’m made for!
[This is why I cry every time I hear that Billie Eilish Barbie song. There is something profoundly good about knowing the real answer to that question.]
I love solving problems — particularly business strategy challenges, and Throughline just doesn’t need that from me even as we’ll stay together (Throughline Ventures) and maintain joint custody of the “kids” (book, speeches, writings, Broad Framing Initiative). This is why, in terms of my Substack identity, nothing will change — really nothing.
But I can’t live on just the thought leadership and deal-sourcing. I’ve tried that in the past and I quickly find myself running on empty (indeed, the long run I had globally with The Pentagon’s New Map led to an intellectual mid-life crisis for me — when I was convinced I was done writing forever! — that I barely survived). I am my own AI and I need Big Data and Machine Learning to feed my “I,” otherwise I start feeling like your average pundit, desperate to come up with another idea for yet another column (been there, done that, may go back to that [who knows?], but it ain’t enough). I simply stagnate intellectually without the real-world challenge — whatever it is. And that level of connectivity requires a W2, I have found
So, I am looking for a new one-on-one relationship, so to speak. I could just go 1099s all the time, but I have found that similarly disorienting and unproductive to my thinking. Instead of new thinking, I just end up regurgitating and repurposing and arbitraging and none of that feels — in aggregate — creative enough. I also succumb to the conventional wisdom of the crowd, and that is as close as I want to come to death in this world.
I know this about myself: I am happiest being creative. Nothing comes close to that feeling — not the public profile or even the money.
I exist to be creative or I don’t exist.
So, yeah, I am psyched right now — just as I have been in past such iterations, and I am open to ideas, which I am presently collecting in abundance from my network.
Technically unemployed, as my Mom would DEFINTELY call it: Thomas, you need to stop fooling around with this ideas and get yourself a regular paycheck!
And Mom was usually right.
I’m never going to get divorced. I love my spouse way too much — 43 years in. So this moment is as close as I will ever come to that sort of liberating disruption.
Thus I say, Why not enjoy it?
I mean, it’s gotta beat government work right now, right?