An acquaintance of mine who has just landed a two-days-per-week job on minimum wage after twenty-three months out of work told me last week that whilst her career coach was doing the customary online victory lap, her heart was firmly around her ankles. The minimum wage job represents an 88% collapse in annual earnings for her, whilst her career coach has used her experience as yet another example of how effective the intervention has been. All of this raises a profoundly uncomfortable question: what exactly are we measuring when we say that career coaching works?

Catherine Zeta-Jones is hardly alone in defending the children of famous performers from the “nepo baby” label. Kate Winslet, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gwyneth Paltrow and others have reeled off versions of the same argument: these children did not choose the families into which they were born; talent still matters; nobody can sustain a career purely because of a famous parent. All true, and all beside the point. Nobody sensible is arguing that Dakota Johnson, Maya Hawke or Sean Lennon personally engineered the circumstances of their birth. The question is what those circumstances supplied. Are we really supposed to believe that Sean Lennon’s ability to pursue a career in music bears no relationship whatsoever to growing up as the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and to the musicians, studios, knowledge, introductions, expectations and sheer imaginative possibility surrounding him from childhood? Acknowledging that advantage does not require us to declare him talentless but it does very much require a willingness to stop pretending talent develops and reaches the marketplace in a vacuum.

The other day, I commented on a post about the reported 8,000 Meta layoffs. I said the cruelty was institutional by design, and that management by uncertainty has become one of the defining tropes of modern working life. Someone replied by asking what time I would have chosen to send the email.

This made me smile and raise an eyebrow at the same time, in that special way only whataboutism entering the chat can achieve. The question was not really about timing. It was a diversion into etiquette, as though the scandal were the hour of delivery rather than the machinery of disposability behind it.

I’ve just read a BBC News article about Karyna Lohvynenko, 21, who is completing a master’s degree in governance and has a CV that includes work at the United Nations and councils in the UK and US. Karyna has applied for more than 400 jobs, from politics to pulling coffee in cafés, and secured just three interviews. At the time of writing, she is, of course, still jobless.

Two and a half years after redundancy, a LinkedIn post admitted what few people say plainly: a return to a LinkedIn-worthy corporate job may simply never happen. Yes. Many people are not transitioning. They are not pivoting. They are living inside a rupture that has outlasted every socially acceptable script for what job loss is supposed to look like.

If you have lost jobs a few times over a couple of decades, you will have realised that it is no longer enough simply to lose a job. You must now lose it well. Not too angrily. Not too truthfully. Not too messily. Not too sadly, and certainly not for too long.

It is possible to leave an interview knowing two things are true at once:

[1] that it went well; AND

[2] that you did not get the job.

The contradiction resolves quickly once you understand that competence is not rejected only when it is absent, that would be easy, but when it cannot be interpreted by the person assessing it. The problem is not that people are unable to recognise competence in the abstract. It is that, in practice, they can only recognise what falls within their own frame of reference. Experience that exceeds it (as is often the case if you work in technology, where less experienced individuals are often lumbered with a first assessment of those whose experience far exceeds their own), is not evaluated on its merits but translated into something else: uncertainty, overreach, or risk.

It arrived via WhatsApp at 7:30 on a Monday morning, as I was walking to the office. My CEO referenced our friendship, a “strong package”, and my “early contributions”. I rolled my eyes. It informed me that my role was one of roughly thirty being cut that day. That was 20% of us at the time. I stopped walking so that I could type a laconic response, then turned on my heels and went back home.