My history matters to you because you weren’t there. You’re arriving late, into a crowded platform where the rules are already set, and most of the advice floating around was written for a friendlier, pre-AI version of it. So this is for three people: the one building a personal brand before a layoff forces it, the job seeker who wants work faster, and the marketer who wants to keep the job and quit running tactics that died two years ago.

The thing you have to understand is that LinkedIn is having an identity crisis, and everything in your feed is the outcome. The platform needs engagement, which rewards fast, personal, cringe content. It needs big numbers for advertisers, which rewards more of the same. And it needs to keep calling itself a serious professional network to attract those B2B advertisers, which is the boring part that undercuts the first two. No other platform is wired this deeply into work, so no other platform is stuck in this trap. When Meta tried to build a work product, it flopped. LinkedIn will never become Slack, because LinkedIn is also where you go to find your next job.

You can see the crisis in the feed itself. It’s one narrow landing page and a flood of photos, carousels, text posts, articles, newsletters, ads, and political rants in the same scroll. Facebook looks like a hot mess too, but Meta at least gave people filtering tools, kept investing in Groups, and built separate experiences on Threads, WhatsApp, and Instagram so you could step away from the slop — and get a different variation of slop — without leaving its universe.

LinkedIn did none of that, and being a professional user with a recruiting or sales license doesn’t save you from the volume.

So what’s happening on LinkedIn right now? Here are my thoughts.

Cringe is content

You can’t fight city hall. People are pulled toward personal, awkward, inflammatory content, and they pick it over useful insight almost every time. I watch this in my own testing, and I’ve pulled down posts that went viral too fast because the comments were more than I wanted to manage.

Meanwhile my Learning courses, which are good and which make LinkedIn money every time someone watches, get very little algorithmic push at all because someone with a news background in an editorial division, which still exists if you can believe it, wants the algorithm to be fair and impartial. As if that’s even possible.

My own most recent example was personal. When I wrote about my husband Ken retiring, no angle, just the moment, it traveled widely the way personal posts do. You can see the post here.

But when I push out my LinkedIn Learning courses, I get 843 views. Not likes. Total views.

So the algorithm is actually reinforcing me to push non-business and non-money-making content out there.

The algorithm punishes anyone making money but LinkedIn

Here’s the rule nobody states plainly: The algorithm is sensitive to anyone making money except LinkedIn, Microsoft, GitHub, and the advertisers who pay directly. On LinkedIn you’re competing with an algorithm built to return value to Microsoft shareholders, and it isn’t on your side when you’re the one trying to get paid.

Self-promotion gets throttled, and the algorithm is wired so that even self-promotion of a LinkedIn product becomes suspect. (Make it make sense!) Hiding your link in the comments fools no one, so put it wherever you want. But do the self-promotion too often, and even your friendly cringe content gets shadow banned.

Good-looking people win, and you’re the reason

A friend used to joke that being LinkedIn Famous was a consolation prize for smart, ugly people. I don’t think that’s true anymore. There’s a new equation: looking good buys reach, and looking good while saying something worth hearing buys more.

Nobody on the business side decided to create a site where hot people do well. The algorithm gives you more of what grabs your attention. So when you stop for the beach photo and the dressed-up headshot, it reads that as a signal. You built the beauty bias with your own thumb.

That’s why you see the tech bro with gym photos and the AI expert in a gorgeous outfit sipping lemonade in Italy. Don’t like it? Don’t lie to me. I see your work-related updates when you’re dressed up in conference attire and your thoughts about tariffs posted right after you get fresh blonde highlights.

It’s worth considering if you are the kind of person who would post that same photo while doing yard work, after watching your kid’s little league game in the hot sun, or in the moments after scrubbing out litter boxes and rinsing them in your driveway.

We created this monster, and we are beholden to it until someone goes first and starts doing things differently.

So why am I telling you to feed the LinkedIn beast?

I’ve spent this whole piece calling LinkedIn an extractive machine that rewards cringe, throttles the people trying to earn a living, and runs on a beauty bias you helped build. And now I’m about to hand you a plan to feed it five days a week. All of those things can be true at once.

If you’re in, the formula is simple. Post one personal or cringe post for every three professional ones. Write about your industry, react to the news, publish your newsletter, then show us the cute dog or tell us something true with no lesson attached.

Skip hashtags. Skip video for now, because all indications are that your direct-to-camera updates on LinkedIn are under-performing text posts. Stop hiding your links in comments. Hold yourself to one post a day, and when it goes up, answer every comment in the first hour and come back twice more that day.

None of that advice is new, and plenty of people have said it. What they leave out is the cost. Done right, this is a part-time job, five posts a week that are babysat three times a day. It’s real labor on top of the work you already do. If you can’t commit to the cadence, don’t start.

Give it a month and you’ll see engagement, growth, and new followers finding you for the first time. What you won’t see is money, unless this connects to an actual business strategy, and that takes more than following the advice on a free post like this one. It takes marketing professionals and a real investment in your business.

If you want a referral to people who can make a difference, hit me up. I’ve got good ones in my network.

The Punk Rock HR Podcast

Tameka Vasquez grew up in tech, absorbed the ethos of moving fast and breaking things, and assumed that was just how work operated. It took years of consulting outside the industry, with leaders in finance, real estate, and manufacturing, to show her how rare that tolerance actually was. Most leaders, she found, can handle “change” they have already seen. Everything else beyond that lands as a threat.

That gap is what her practice is built around. Tameka is a strategist and speaker whose SHIFT™ framework approaches the future as a verb: something leaders actively do rather than a destination they are trying to reach. The through line across all five elements is the same. You cannot lead into unknown territory if your entire toolkit is designed for familiar ground.

Listen here!

People have stupid ideas about the future of work and education. They’ll say, “Not everyone should go to college. More kids should go to trade school.”

Sure, when elite families send their kids to the local community college to be plumbers, I’m in.

They’ll also tell you, “We should teach entrepreneurship to high schoolers.”

I’m like, okay, but have you met most kids? Maybe we should also teach reading.

They tell me, “We told kids to go to school to code. Now they graduate and can’t find work. And when they do get a job, they get laid off.”

The truth is we do need more plumbers, not everyone needs to go to college and read “Wuthering Heights,” and some people who went to college can’t find work or are unemployed.

But this is a stupid discussion rooted in a broken system, and we keep trying to plant flowers in a pile of dog shit instead of scooping it up and throwing it out.

First, college doesn’t exist to train kids for white collar jobs. College exists to sharpen the critical thinking skills required to solve big problems in adulthood. Those problems can be a software architecture problem at some B2B tech company, or they can be problems in the healthcare industry, or they can be problems within our local cities that affect many people but don’t get the same attention or funding. You need college to lead corporations, and you need college to lead in your community.

Next, not all kids are educated and raised the same way. Zip code is destiny. Depending on property taxes, your kid might eat breakfast and be exposed to art and math and science and have lots of options. They’ll get ACT prep courses and play soccer.

Other kids are exposed to radon, pollution, and other challenges, including food insecurity, that affect their ability to learn. They might go to school in buildings without basic heat and air conditioning, with families dealing with addiction, housing insecurity, or violence against their mothers. Even under the best circumstances, with voucher programs and other resources, they might turn 18 on graduation day without the systemic mentorship that other kids had in different systems.

So telling people that college isn’t worthwhile and that more kids should “go to trade school” is a blatantly stupid statement to make.

If you want to be helpful, don’t have an opinion without realizing that sending more kids to trade school also requires teaching them critical thinking skills, just like a traditional four-year college does, so they can identify problems and come up with solutions. And while college is rooted in teaching through reading and trade schools are rooted in teaching through doing, it’s all teaching. And it requires patience, grace, and money.

When Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos start sending their kids to community college and donating to trade schools the way rich and powerful people have donated to four-year universities, I’m in. Until then, it’s an elitist and stupid thing to say.

And it’s not even as good as cake!

Other Resources:

This week’s Punk Rock HR Podcast features Andrew Norcross.

Andrew Norcross didn’t get pushed out of tech because he wasn’t good enough. He got pushed out because he refused to pretend that a pattern-recognition machine is a replacement for an experienced engineer.

LISTEN HERE

For 20 years, Norcross was the person companies called when the stakes were too high to get it wrong: NASA, the New York Times, GitHub, Disney. He wasn’t just writing code. He was designing the underlying architecture that made those systems work at scale. He did it without AI. He did it well. And somewhere in the last 18 months, the market stopped caring.

What makes this conversation worth sitting with is that Norcross isn’t bitter. He’s clear-eyed. He spent 10 years in finance before software, managed $2 billion in assets, and watched subprime happen from the inside before walking away from that industry after the 2008 crash. When he looks at the current AI economy, massively subsidized and propped up by VC leverage with no realistic path to profitability, he sees the same movie. “Quadruple your AI costs,” he says, “and tell me it’s saving money.”

He won’t use AI to build things, not because he’s stubborn, but because he believes you can’t ship software you don’t understand. When something breaks in production, and something always breaks in production, you have to be able to answer for it. AI-generated code can’t tell you why it did what it did. An engineer who only reviewed it can’t either.

In the meantime, he’s building fences and painting houses in Florida, doing referral-only handyman work while he waits for the correction he’s certain is coming. He goes to sleep sore. He’s not putting money in the wrong pockets. For now, that’s enough.

I spent last week in London and Scotland with my phone mostly in my pocket during business hours, and I kept waiting for the anxiety to kick in. It didn’t. I ran a marathon, walked until my legs gave out, and ate food that was genuinely good because real people cooked it in small kitchens. We found restaurants through friends, avoided anywhere with a queue of people photographing their plates, and had conversations that didn’t require a caption.

Coming home, I had to reckon with the fact that I chose to be chronically online, for years, in exchange for an online presence that pays inconsistently and follows me into every dark corner of the internet.

People use my name to send out emails, reach out to LinkedIn members about fake jobs, and scam ordinary people into believing that I’m speaking at far-flung conferences.

Sure, people are inspired. But when you lose your name, you lose everything. It’s all a bit too much. I’m tired.

Influencer Dorks

I wrote about AI Dorks a few weeks ago, and since then Reese Witherspoon and Mel Robbins have added themselves to the list. Neither surprised me. Reese does what her Blackrock-connected backers need, and Mel does what her podcast advertisers and keynote checkwriters pay her to do. I don’t even blame them. The influencer economy runs on incentives, and theirs are just more visible than most.

What I’ve been sitting with, though, is my own position in this thing.

I used to tell myself that the best version of influence was the “ironic kind,” the kind where you’re in on the joke, where you hold the whole enterprise at arm’s length and the audience can feel that. I thought that was what I was doing.

What I actually watched, as my own reach grew and I got closer to people with bigger audiences and more money, is that the ones who kept climbing weren’t ironic at all. They believed everything they said, or, at the very least, they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. They posted with the full confidence of someone who has never doubted that their opinion is a public good, and the algorithm rewarded them for it every single time.

The tongue-in-cheek crowd, my crowd, topped out. We chased small stages and reasonable budgets and told ourselves it was a choice. But I simply chose to be mediocre at influence.

It’s A Choice I No Longer Want to Make

I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully made peace with my previous identity on the internet, because there’s a part of this career where I leaned in harder, yelled louder, and sold things I wasn’t sure about to people who trusted me. Now, when I talk about ethics, people get confused, because I’ve always been a micro-version of Reese Witherspoon. Some wonder why I didn’t just go harder, earn more money, and get out sooner.

But with all of that experience behind me, here’s what I’d tell you: be skeptical of anyone telling you what to do online, and that includes me. The influencer economy runs from people selling cancer cures to people selling color analysis to people in my own industry pushing B2B software they’ve never touched. Most of us are mediocre at it. The common thread isn’t malice. We’re just trying to figure out how to be complicit with capitalism without violating our core ethics.

I’ve spent a lot of money on therapy working through the fact that I was never actually able to do both at the same time. I hope it’s different, this time, and I’m glad you are here to hold me accountable.

Maybe that’s what I needed all along.

Other Resources

While I was away, you may have missed two wonderful conversations on Punk Rock HR, my podcast sponsored by my legit friends and colleagues at RepCap.

I’m not compromising my values. Mary Ellen Slayter is the founder and CEO, and her team are my IRL friends. Look at us in 2010 before the whole influencer thing blew up!

Okay, back to the podcast.

The first conversation is with Amari Leigh, an entrepreneur from London who founded a virtual assistant firm that helps small businesses get organized and grow. Her customer base? Non-traditional to say the least. This episode got a ton of buzz!

You know how I always say that we fix work by fixing ourselves first? The next conversation is with Scott Eblin, an industry-defining executive coach who was early to the idea that leadership starts with self-management. His work set the foundation for what I believe to be true: all adults are leaders, and we can’t lead at work if we’re not leading ourselves.

That’s it for this week.

Stay safe out there, and don’t sell out.

No shoes were allowed, so I brought two pairs of hotel slippers I swiped from the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue to use as shoe booties.

As soon as I logged into Instagram after the tour, I started seeing interior design ads and suggestions to improve my home. Proof that the internet is always watching and playing on your hypothetical fears of being homeless, ugly, unloved, and poor.

(Oh wait, those are actually my fears!)

The worst videos were the ones where dorks like these two guys below gave me advice on using Claude to update my space.

They didn’t just tell me to upload a photo and say, “Make this better.” Instead, I had to go to Google Gemini, create a script, link Claude to my Nano Banana account, and then give Claude a bunch of prompts to break the Figma chokehold, or something equally weird and dorky like that.

I was like, “How is this AI if I’m doing all the work?”

If I’m doing the work, it’s not AI. It’s HI™®, human intelligence. I will die on this hill.

If you give me a consumer product that’s allegedly intelligent, but I have to work harder to make it work than I would to get the final result myself, that’s not artificial intelligence. That’s an ineffective application of human intelligence wrapped in a marketing campaign.

I see this everywhere. From friends writing about the future of work to dorks who want me to prompt-engineer my way to better spreadsheets. I just need to know: if AI is so great, how about I just stop doing spreadsheets?

Because if I’m in the golden age of artificial intelligence, computers can and should do spreadsheets. I’ll do art. I’ll focus on caregiving. I’ll wear whatever clothes I like, upcycle and thrift, hang out with my cats, read books, and exercise.

But we’re nowhere near that golden age. We’re in an age where dorks are on the verge of ruining the world as we know it, and people like you and me are doomscrolling and fighting with one another online about 20th-century social issues while playing “technologists” on our slow-ass machines with keyboards.

We need a different AI conversation.

To prove my point about how much work goes into using AI, I decided to get an exact transcript of what these “blow up interior design” dorks were telling me to do with Claude.

I wanted to show you something simple: that everyone going all in on AI, from HR influencers to Reese Witherspoon, are just corporate dorks pretending to be on the bleeding edge of technology while still collecting US greenbacks, not even crypto, in a banking system dating back to 1863 with the National Banking Acts.

I used an app called Video Saver, downloaded these Instagram clips to my phone, and uploaded one to Claude. I asked for a transcript.

It said no and told me to download MacWhisper instead.

The world’s top AI company has a model called Mythos Preview that some experts say could destroy humanity, but their $20/month consumer version can’t even transcribe audio.

GTFO.

Every day, we hear that AI is a game-changing weapon, a bigger security threat than Y2K, and can break most encryption faster than expected. It’s even terrorizing us on American streets, thanks to Palantir. Yet the app on my phone and computer can’t make a simple transcript without me jumping through hoops?

We need a reckoning with these tech companies and the people in charge of them. We’re not “honored” to receive this code as if it were handed down from above. We created it just by living our lives. What we’re getting now is like the Model T of cars: it’s not impressive, and it’s not much better than a horse and buggy. Our work, actions, and even our data are being used to improve it, and yet you and I are still paying for access to these mediocre platforms.

We should be shareholders in the vast wealth built on our contributions and those of our ancestors. Instead, we’re just part of the tool itself. I can’t say this clearly enough: if I’m being spied on by tech companies and then being asked to be a prompt engineer, I’m a worker. Meta, Nano Banana, Anthropic, and all those other dork companies should be paying me to use their products right now.

I’m out. Either give me a universal basic income or get the fuck out of my face, you AI dorks. I’m done with this hype cycle.

Other Dorks (aka Resources):

• My buddy Mike Wood relaunched his legitimately fun and terrific HR tech newsletter The Wrap on its own domain like it’s 2008. You can still get it on LinkedIn, too, but let’s make his GoDaddy investment worth it.

• is definitely a dork an industry stalwart and writes about the future of HR and work technology in a way that doesn’t make me puke in my mouth. I love that guy a lot and respect how he’s been early and correct on a lot of topics. Hope he’s right about the AI, otherwise all of this is a waste of time.

• In a week where Reese Witherspoon has been telling ladies to get on board with AI, my pal has been here since day one. If you want to follow someone with credibility who knows what she’s talking about when it comes to “the computers,” it’s Jess!

Last week, I hosted Yolanda Fraction on my podcast. She’s an organizational development consultant, doctoral student in IO psychology, and author of Joyful Workplaces.

Yolanda has spent her career translating the soft stuff into hard outcomes, and I found myself agreeing with one of her core arguments: joy is an orientation. It’s deeper and more stable than happiness, and it doesn’t depend on circumstances being favorable. It’s less about what’s happening and more about a sense of meaning, connection, or being grounded in something larger than the moment.

Yes, you can experience joy during hard or painful periods. You can feel joy while experiencing job loss, managing difficult relationships, or even while going through a difficult mental or physical challenge.

How is that possible? Well, people confuse joy and happiness.

When someone is happy, it’s reactive. Something good happens, you feel it, it fades when the situation changes. It’s tied to external conditions: outcomes, events, other people’s behavior, things going right.

Joy lives somewhere deeper, which is why I think happiness is actually harder to attain than joy.

What I want to achieve, personally and professionally, is something my friend Simon Bailey is talking a lot about these days: hope.

What’s hope?

Hope is future-facing. It’s the belief that what matters to you has a real chance of coming true. It’s oriented toward something that hasn’t happened yet and isn’t guaranteed.

Which means hope carries risk in a way joy doesn’t. You can only hope for something uncertain. There’s always the possibility of disappointment embedded in it. Joy doesn’t require that vulnerability. It can exist right now regardless of what comes next.

All of this is interrelated, but not necessarily interchangeable. Happiness is how you feel in the moment. Hope says “things will get better.” Joy says “I can be grounded even if they don’t.”

I think all of that is possible at work and life. What’s your take? Let me know!

MORE GOOD PEOPLE TO MEET:

• is my longtime BFF and the founder of Beacon Turn, a new practice focused on research, media, and advisory work for B2B companies. He works with marketing leaders, editorial teams, and researchers who need a partner who understands the market, knows how buyers actually think, and can produce work that holds up with experienced audiences. Check out his site here.

• How will humanity survive AI? Here’s how. has been researching and advocating for the concept of unconditional universal basic income (or UBI) since 2013. He is the founder and CEO of the Income To Support All (ITSA) Foundation, the host of The Basic Income Show, and serves on the board of directors of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity and as the editor of Basic Income Today.

• Ms. Tiffany Toussaint launched a new firm focused on strategic talent acquisition, but she also provides job seeking advice for people who need to get back to work ASAP. With over 25 years experience in recruiting and HR, including work in an executive search firm, she can help get you prepared for your job search from resume writing, to launching your search, and interview preparation. Visit her site here.

There’s no such thing as career reinvention.

People come to me for career coaching more than I’d like to admit, and I decline most of it.

There’s no such thing as career reinvention, and I can’t help you with it. I’m sorry.

I’ve had new jobs, so that’s a thing. I’ve been a corporate HR professional, a writer, a podcaster, a LinkedIn Learning instructor, and a founder. During my life, I worked at an ice cream store, Chinese restaurants, hot dog stands, and a Blockbuster Video. I was a temporary receptionist at a fake flower factory, an art museum docent, a clerk at a clothing donation store, and a food delivery driver. I’ve also been a babysitter, a housesitter, and a petsitter.

I’ve had enough career and job iterations that people assume I have a map. They want to know how I got from there to here and, more importantly, how they can do something similar. Especially if they’ve been laid off, are deep into their forties and bored, or are watching AI eat their industry and want to know what’s next.

But career reinvention is a fiction. There’s no such thing.

What people mean by reinvention is usually this: I want a new job that makes me feel like a different person. That’s not a career problem. That’s an identity problem, and no job title is going to fix it.

Your Job Isn’t You

Here’s my actual belief, and it’s not popular: a good career is the outcome of a good life. Not the other way around. A career on its own doesn’t generate a meaningful life or a legacy. Your job is more like a meal, ideally nutritious, sometimes mediocre, occasionally the thing that takes you out. You know how romaine lettuce can be good for you, but it can also have E. coli? That’s a job. It should sustain you. It should help you pursue goals. You can change it, lose it, or put it down without losing yourself in the process. And, hopefully, it doesn’t kill you.

Being a career reinvention coach is a thing, but not for me. It’s hard to tell someone who has spent 20 years building their identity around a title and a compensation band that the job was never the point, and it’s even harder to charge someone for that conversation. Most people want permission to blow things up, a roadmap for a new role, or validation that the next thing will be more meaningful than the last. I am not going to give anyone advice like that because I don’t believe it.

A Job That Makes Sense For You

Geoffrey Owens, who played Theo Huxtable’s friend on The Cosby Show, was photographed working as a cashier at Trader Joe’s in 2018 and became the subject of a job-shaming news cycle. Instead of being ashamed, he said he was grateful for the work. What struck me about his story was the maturity. Stability under those circumstances is the whole skill, and it has nothing to do with reinvention.

Athletes navigate this, too. Those who figure out life after sports are the ones who understood their athletic careers were fulfilling but finite, and they were willing to do other things.

Looking for a Career Transition Coach?

I am not here to help anyone specifically transition from HR executive to yoga studio owner, or marketing director to operations VP. Those coaches exist, and some people need them. But that’s not me.

What I try to do is sit with people in who they are, where they are, and what they’re doing, and work on improving all three, without a narrative arc attached. Values, relationships, time, anger, fear. That’s the conversation I want to have with anyone. Most of the time, I do it for a one-time fee. If you need more than one session, I’ve done something wrong.

If you’re looking for a structured career transition, a new industry, or a reinvention plan, I know coaches who do that work well and care about it. Reach out, and I’ll connect you with the right person. But before you do that, try this Life Values Inventory and see if it’s helpful. You probably already have the answers to your questions about reinvention, and it won’t cost you a thing.

Other LFR Resources:

1. My most popular blog post in 2025: Year-End Unsolicited Advice: Stop Using GIFs

2. Most downloaded post: How To Run A Premortem

3. New for 2026: Be The Manager People Won’t Leave LinkedIn Learning Course

Back then, they were bad. Post-9/11, everybody was on edge, checked out, hypervigilant, and incredibly selfish. The infrastructure was a joke. Most US airports didn’t have a Dunkin’ Donuts, let alone a Starbucks. You had vending alcoves, coffee carts, dark bars, and smoking rooms. For entertainment, there were magazines or yelling at your kids. It was grim.

In some ways, traveling in 2026 is better. There are lounges, better food options, and free wifi so families can stay busy on their phones. But now, more people fly on budget airlines, and the system has less room for error. Delays pile up, customer service is harder to find, and lines are longer. People still worry about terrorism and remember recent crashes in DC and accidents at LaGuardia. There’s no real comfort at the gates, food and water are expensive, and planes are smaller with tighter seats.

But the bigger issue starts before we even get to the airport. Many Americans live with a constant sense of scarcity, always stressed and bracing for the next problem before the last one is over. Most people at the airport don’t have emergency savings or good health insurance, and a lot is riding on that one trip to Disney or to see Grandma.

Ken Stern’s research helped me make sense of what I’d been noticing all quarter.

It’s Always a Design Problem

Ken Stern, who studies longevity, came on Punk Rock HR to talk about what really helps people live longer. It turns out, it’s not just about diet and exercise like we might think. In his book, Healthy to 100, he uses research from Japan, Singapore, Italy, Spain, and South Korea to show that things like social connection, community, and public policy have a bigger impact on how long we live than our personal habits.

One fact from our conversation really stayed with me: loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Ken also questions the way we structure our lives—school, work, retirement—where most of us only spend time with people our own age and rarely connect with those who are older or younger.

It turns out this way of organizing our lives is actually pretty new, and some countries are already changing it.

Ken’s research shows that community, connection, and policy are what really help us live longer and better. That’s not what anyone wants to hear while waiting at Gate C14, especially if you just bought new AirPods or a fancy suitcase, but maybe it’s worth thinking about before your next trip.

Do We Want Change?

We fix airport experiences, and almost everything about life, when we fix ourselves first. The real question is whether we want to build a more integrated kind of life that promotes longevity, or if we’d rather just complain about the world while in line at Cinnabon at the Charlotte airport. I don’t think most of us know how to answer that honestly, including me.

I won’t be flying again until the London Marathon in late April. Until then, I’ll be thinking about what Ken said. I really do believe that Americans are ready more. I see the untapped potential for life to improve. I just wonder how bad things have to get at the airports and in our personal lives to move the needle and improve.

Nobody who worked there would admit it was good.

If you celebrated a win, you were suspect. Praising the work being accomplished was a “cultural firing offense.” If external recognition came in from the press or a foundation, you kept your head down.

One former employee described leaving the organization and not being able to shake the feeling of unworthiness. She called it “the stink of high-performance culture.” She went to a new job and couldn’t accept a compliment for years.

I thought that was messed up when she told me. Then I realized I have a similar problem.

I’ve worked in HR for thirty years.

I still flinch when someone calls me an HR lady. Why?

HR has a complicated history rooted in enslavement here in America. Not enough people in positions of power know this, but it’s a disturbing fact that was touched on by my recent guest, Karen Fleshman, on the Punk Rock HR Podcast.

Karen argues that in order for white women like me in HR to truly transform work, we need to know our history.

I thought I was focused on transforming the workplace throughout my whole career. I held real HR jobs at companies like Hershey, Unilever, Pfizer, Monsanto, Zurich, and Kemper Insurance before rebooting my career in the late 2000s. I wrote a book published by Macmillan. I have over two million views on LinkedIn Learning talking about HR and leadership topics. CNN called me a top career advisor in America back in 2009.

But I didn’t even think about the history of HR and how we might benefit from defunding it, and rebuilding something entirely new, until 2020.

History is Today

Modern HR professionals don’t need to look back to 1865 to see how we’ve made mistakes. As recently as the pandemic, human resources leaders helped companies make good progress toward treating people like human beings. Then, on January 20, 2025, we were complicit with terrible business decisions and pulled it all back.

Oftentimes, we can be as self-serving as Finance or Legal. It makes sense because we’re employees, too.

And yet.

We’re better than that.

The CFO who lays off people on the promise of AI and tells you HR doesn’t understand the business has never stopped to consider that the business of people is what makes the business so successful. And in that way, those departments are far behind HR and still operating as if it’s the 1800s.

So, we need leaders like you (and maybe even me) in human resources departments all over the world to be the change we wish to see in the world.

But it’s messy.

I’ve spent a lot of years trying to position myself away from Human Resources.

Workplace critic. Career advisor. Podcaster. Speaker on the future of work. A corporate drinker. All true, but that’s also HR. Especially the drinking part.

The more I strained toward something else, the more I couldn’t shake “the stink of HR.”

It’s the only framework I have for understanding what’s broken about work and what it would take to fix it. I’m stuck with pattern recognition across 30 years of organizations, cultures, industries, and geopolitical shifts, and that’s not a small thing.

So here’s where I’ve landed, imperfectly: I’m HR. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably in HR, too. And it’s not that stinky.

I’m not always proud of the history, and I’m not going to pretend the profession has earned uncomplicated loyalty. But I defer to nobody in this space, and I’m done performing ambivalence about it as a form of self-protection.

Alan Morinis writes in Everyday Holiness: “No more than my space, no less than my place.”

I’m here so that HR sees beyond datasets and spreadsheets. I’ll strive to be proud of my work, amplify others, and continue to clear a path for the next generation of leaders who should strive to do better than defunding HR.

That’s what this newsletter is actually about. Thanks for being here.

After nineteen years of running my own business, I finally took my own advice and checked what I was really spending.

It’s not pretty.

Each month, I paid for platforms I hardly used and supported companies I don’t agree with. I was just another source of monthly revenue for them, losing money so they could make more.

That ends now. Here’s what I cancelled and my reasons for each.

Gone

I cancelled Zoom. I’m forced to pay for Microsoft Teams, which should be investigated under RICO, so I stopped paying for a second video platform.

I cancelled Rev.com because now, in 2026, AI transcription is free and just as good.

I cancelled Grammarly because it is currently facing a lawsuit.

I stopped using HubSpot for my newsletter, which is why you’re reading this here instead.

I cancelled ChatGPT. That was a deliberate decision.

I tried to cancel Adobe Creative Cloud, but they kept offering free extensions to keep me as a customer. I still need to finish cancelling it for good.

I cancelled ZCal, but only after I forgot to do it before the renewal. It’s a common tactic to catch people off guard. I wish there were better protections against these kinds of schemes. Hopefully, President Buttigieg will fix this.

I cancelled WiseStamp and Libsyn. Done.

Moving

I’m switching my business account from Bank of America to AMEX Blueprint, and moving my personal banking to a credit union. I want my money to support local efforts, not just any project that makes a profit. This change saves me $28 a month and fits my values.

I’m moving away from Google products where possible. I’ll keep Google Analytics and Google Fiber, since they’re still the best options for me in Raleigh, and some sites still need Chrome. But I’m letting go of Gmail, especially since my personal email of 24 years is too cluttered. I’ll use Proton instead, a Geneva-based company with a strong privacy policy and no interest in selling user data. That’s important to me right now.

Dropbox is next on my list. I plan to switch to Proton Drive by the end of the year.

I’ll switch from Verizon to Invisible after I return from running the London Marathon.

And I never paid for Slack because I’m not a sucker.

What I’m keeping and why

I kept WordPress because it’s the only blogging platform I know. I also kept Claude and paid for it. I kept Canva because the people I work with need it. I kept Riverside.fm for my podcast, and QuickBooks because the IRS requires it. I’m still using Teams and other Microsoft products, even though I’d rather not. We need a RICO investigation.

The honest number

Altogether, I’m saving about $3,000 a year. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough that I can avoid saying yes to things that don’t feel right.

Overhead costs can really add up. Every extra subscription gives someone else a bit of control. By cutting back, I feel more in charge of my decisions. After 19 years, I’m done supporting companies that take my money but don’t value me.

Why Substack

Substack invited me to join and move over my podcast in September 2023. They promised free promotion and said that being early would help my career. They were probably right, but I didn’t feel comfortable then because of its Nazi problem.

I’m still not completely comfortable now, even though Substack has removed some people from the platform. But if I avoided every place where I face antisemitism, I’d never go anywhere. So here we are.

Oh, and then my Substack account rep quit her job and went to law school, and I forgot all about it.

You’re here because you either followed me from another platform or someone shared this with you. Either way, welcome. I promise to always be honest about work, only mention the Punk Rock HR podcast occasionally, and help you plan ahead so you can manage your career more wisely.

If things get worse, we can all leave. You know where else to find me.

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