I’m tired of being relevant

The other day during a company meeting, one of our VPs said: I ask myself every day how I can stay relevant, and all of you should do the same.

Now, this is sound advice in a world of colonial capitalism. Understand the powers that be. Make yourself as relevant as possible to them. Get rewarded. Continue that pattern. Try not to burn out, get sick, or have a personal crisis of any sort.

It’s extremely logical. It’s how the world works.

But God, aren’t you tired of always trying to be relevant?

This advice is meant to be empowering, I suppose, but it feels disempowering because it’s fear-based and reactive. It teaches you not to trust yourself because staying relevant means doing things the way everyone else is doing them (or doing them better than everyone else). And it ends up creating a situation that isn’t that helpful to the needs of real people.

Think about a brand you used to love that feels like it’s gone downhill. That brand started from a place of service, of trying to fix a specific need. Their success was due to their innovation and uniqueness. Then once they reached a certain amount of success, there was pressure to continue to grow. So they stopped trusting what brought them success in the first place and started pushing out products or services that didn’t feel that revolutionary because they were scared that if they didn’t, people wouldn’t find them relevant anymore. And then, ironically, people stopped finding them relevant. Because true innovation and meaningful problem solving take time.

Staying relevant forces you to speed up and always be looking around at the competition. It’s the opposite of innovative, genuine, service-based work.

I think a lot about what I would be doing if I hadn’t worked so hard to prove myself relevant in my younger years. For years after, even when I started to see that there was a more genuine path, it also felt like no matter how much I invested in that, I had to keep one foot in the camp of “staying relevant” for fear of getting too far from there and losing all sense of security. The fear of being too different is very real because the consequences in our society are very real. How many people have gone after their service-based dreams only to file for bankruptcy and lose their house?

So what if we changed society?

Okay, Amy. That’s a nice, fantastical idea. But let’s get back to reality.

Here’s the thing. It is important not to live in a fantasy world, as in completely denying how the world functions today. But it’s also important to dream about the change you’d like to see in the world. Because dreaming allows us to open ourselves up to creative solutions and look for opportunities to start bringing some of that change into the world in small, sustainable ways.

What if we could live in a world where people could focus on being of service to one another in the way they’re meant to rather than just staying relevant to those in power?

If that sounds nice to you, can you hold space for that question? Maybe dare yourself to imagine that world for a few minutes?

But of course, dreaming alone is about as helpful as pretending you’re in a fantasy world. So how do we get there?

Well, this is a group project so you might have your own ideas. But here are mine, which are focused more on individual power because that is what is in my control:

1. Learn to know myself and trust myself again.

In order to be of service in the way that only I can be, I have to get back in touch with who I am at my core and trust that person knows what she’s doing. When she tells me to do something, even something that seems really out there or scares me, I need to trust that she’s guiding me to do it for a reason. If I can’t to look inward for the answers and trust them, I can’t expect that there will ever be a world where that’s the default. I need to cut out the noise and focus my attention—even for just a few minutes a day—on connecting to myself so I can actually hear her and develop a sense of safety with her.

2. Find ways to do the ethical, human-centered, service-based thing in situations where you are being pressured to do the thing that keeps you relevant.

This one is scary because it can have consequences. This can be everything from work putting you on a performance watch to offending people in your life to people literally losing their lives, as we saw happen to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, but has also been happening to others whose deaths haven’t been caught on camera.

It is okay to start small here and go bigger later. And these steps are probably going to look different for everyone depending on what your life looks like. Different people will have different opportunities.

Here’s a simple one that happened recently for me: I told my boss I thought our company was not being accountable for its decisions.

In a world of relevancy, your job is to protect the company and their interests at all costs. That includes making sure the choices you make are optimizing their profit, and it includes making sure the company looks good while doing it. And that means that when a company makes a business decision to optimize profit, many of them also pretend like they didn't make the decision (essentially gaslighting people) or blame someone else for their decision (see: companies who lay off people for “performance issues” when their performance was just fine). And employees are expected to just play along.

There is a situation where my company has been allergic to taking accountability for a decision they made, and when they finally attempted to take accountability, they downplayed it. I wasn’t in the room when the decision to downplay things happened so I can’t say why they chose to do that, but to me it feels like they just want to have their cake and eat it too. It’s not ethical, and so I called this out to my manager.

Will that have any impact on this specific situation? Probably not. But the point isn’t to necessarily change this immediate situation. It’s to challenge the notion that it’s okay for the company to do something unethical to save face. To challenge that individuals can’t push back when this happens and fight for the ethical thing. If I’m brave enough to say it with annual reviews just around the corner, maybe next time my boss will start to question if he needs to say something. Or maybe others will start to question whether there is something they can do at their companies in similar situations after hearing this story. Or maybe nothing will happen except that I will gain a little more courage to push back on something a little bigger next time. It’s still a step toward a better world, either way.

3. Recognize the world is changing anyways, so you have power to shape it.

When AI first became a super hot topic in 2023 after ChatGPT became super popular, I was terrified. I felt totally powerless, like there was no way I would keep myself relevant enough to keep a steady job for even the next 5-10 years. This article from Douglass Rushkoff and this article from Carmen Van Kerckhove (she has a few that talk about things like this) really changed how I see the future.

There is always going to be a lot of fear around change when we insert that change into our present circumstances. If AI took over most jobs today in our highly capitalistic and punishment-happy society, most of us would be totally screwed. There would be little work, we’d be battling it out for the few jobs that did exist, and we would totally destroy ourselves and our neighbors over scarce resources while the rich laughed themselves to the bank.

But we have enough foresight to know change is coming and we have the power to influence its direction.

What if we changed our mindset now about what valuable work looks like and started building skills in areas we wouldn’t have considered before, as Van Kerckhove suggests above? What if no one works for big companies and everyone focuses instead on providing incredible service to real people, as Rushkoff suggests? What if we demand universal healthcare so no one is left without medical care? What if we demand higher pay for people who do service-based work (like teachers or firefighters)? What if there was real support for people who lose their jobs to AI so they don’t lose everything they have while trying to figure out what’s next? What if we stopped supporting large companies that don’t care about humanity and start supporting small, community-based businesses?

What if? What if? What if?

The world is going to change anyways. I think in these moments, our instinct is to cling to fear and make decisions from that perspective because it seems safer. But what if we put our energy instead into what we can do to influence things for the better for everyone? It doesn’t guarantee things will work out our way, but neither does doing everything in your power to stay relevant. And if there is no guarantee either way, I would much rather go out swinging from a place of empowerment than from a place of reactivity and fear.

Do you have ideas for how we can move from “staying relevant” to truly being of service? I would love to hear them. Feel free to share them in the comments below.