Consistency Won’t Save You

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.

But then came the pivot they all so often reach for. The lesson had yielded greater focus, grit and ingenuity, before ending in praise of consistency. Keep pushing, keep going: the terrain may have fractured beneath your feet, but you are still standing.

When consistency is procedural and bounded, it does yield. Improving your Chinese, for example, is unlikely to suffer if you apply yourself consistently. There is no serious world in which steady focus does not increase knowledge. But there is another kind of consistency: existential, market-facing, and far less helpful than people pretend. The post was applying the logic of the former to the reality of the latter.

This is one of the lies of professional culture: that persistence is not simply admirable, but redemptive. That effort will resolve into outcome. That if the market does not reward you, you have not yet been consistent enough. It is a cruel idea precisely because it borrows the language of discipline to disguise the reality of abandonment.

And if all of this sounds a touch too grim for a Sunday, that is because I do not feel obliged to convert injury into uplift, precarity into a charming entrepreneurial subplot, or exclusion into a lesson in grit. I let structural reality remain structural reality. The first task of integrity is not to produce a better ending. It is to refuse a false one.