Notes on Feeling Lost
When does it make sense to stop pointing your camera at the clouds?
I am writing this from a rock. Behind me my truck is pointed at a silo with a camera sticking out the window. Every few seconds it takes a photo. The hope is that after a few hours I will have a timelapse that shows the clouds sailing over an industrial section of Loveland, Colorado.
I lost my job Tuesday. Corporate layoffs, blah, blah, blah. I wouldn’t mention it except for the surprising response I’ve gotten from my obligatory “Hey, I got laid off, too, can you refer me for jobs?” status update on LinkedIn. Of course I didn’t say it the standard way, you know me, I never miss an opportunity to shake the box.
My rebellious post struck a nerve. I’m going to share it here because I suspect there is something happening that you might be able to use in your mission to change the world. Or at least it might help you survive these crazy times. I said,
“F the BS. Yesterday I lost my job. I’m supposed to add that green outline to my headshot and post a humble brag about how I’m energized about pivoting to my next adventure. Gross.
This time around I want to abandon the robotic protocol where we twist our professional lives into yawn-inducing bullet points. That’s what AI is for. Yay?! Instead, I’m just going to tell stories. Real, true stories that prove I’m a flawed human. That’s what you’ll get when you hire me, I’m just putting it on the box so you see the ingredients before you make the purchase.
I’m going to call this series, “Things you should never say on resumes.” It’s going to be fun. You should follow me because what’s better than watching somebody struggle to be human in public? Wish me luck.”
At first I just thought people were being nice. But now that this post has over 35,000 impressions, I think my unorthodox approach might have stumbled onto a bigger trend.
Until recently the standard advice is to model ideal professional qualities and show how you deliver value. Find a pain point, deliver a solution, and don’t burden people with your personality. The more you conform, the better. Unexpected ideas scare people. Nobody really cares about you, they only really care about themselves. Faster, cheaper, predictable… to win you find a pattern that works and stick to it until you’ve squeezed every drop of profit from it that you can. It’s hard to argue with the results but…
What if the standard advice just stopped working? And what if the AI revolution isn’t a slop apocalypse after all? What if we look back and realize we weren’t entering an age of synthetic domination, instead it was the jolt humanity needed to re-discover what actually matters. Perhaps it’s the start of a new appreciation for the daring humans who refuse to let their lives be digitized, homogenized, and converted into data metrics.
Could it be that people are sick of the emptiness of our pristine digital lives? I’m starting to believe that humanity has flipped some sort of collective switch. The age of personal optimization could be over and now we are collectively rooting for the folks who reject the standard advice and defy expectations. Now is the time to be different. It’s a perfect time to try things that might fail. Point your camera at the clouds and see what happens.
Of course I might be imagining the whole thing. I hope not.
But that’s why I’m sitting on a rock waiting for my timelapse to complete. It’s the kind of activity that doesn’t make any sense in 2026. And yet there’s a chance that pointing a camera at the clouds might be the start of something different, something nobody could see coming. Thanks for rooting for me.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade