I Wasn’t Freed From Work: I Was Freed From Pretending

And Possibly Also From Meetings About Meetings

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

The call lasted less than thirty minutes.

Eight years of corporate life reduced to a carefully choreographed conversation involving phrases like “organisational restructuring,” “future direction,” and my personal favourite, “difficult decisions,” which is corporate language for “we’ve already made the decision, and it’s about to become your problem.”

Corporate redundancy calls are extraordinary performances. Everyone speaks in the tone normally reserved for delivering bad medical news or explaining to a child that their goldfish has moved to “a better place.” Voices soften. Sentences slow down. There is a great deal of empathy, all of which feels like it has been professionally installed by a cross-functional task force involving HR, Legal, Communications, and at least one person whose sole job is to ensure nobody accidentally says anything honest.

Everyone acts as though your life is about to collapse in on itself.

The strange thing was that while they were talking, I found myself trying not to smile.

Not because I was angry. Not because I was bitter.

Because, rather inconveniently for the narrative, I was relieved.

Profoundly relieved.

At nearly sixty years old, after eight years of trying, and mostly failing, to fit into corporate life, somebody had finally given me permission to stop pretending to be a man who enjoyed phrases like “strategic alignment” and “operational cadence.”

The call ended. I closed my laptop. I made a cup of tea, because I am British and there are protocols for these things. Then I picked up the phone and called a friend who runs one of the businesses I’d been quietly building on the side.

“Well,” I said, “you’ve got me full-time now.”

There was a pause. A long one.

“When?”

I looked at my watch.

“About an hour ago.”

That probably tells you everything you need to know about my relationship with corporate life.

The Double Life of a Respectable Adult

The truth is that I had spent eight years living in two parallel universes.

One was visible. The other was real.

The visible version of me attended leadership meetings, contributed to strategy discussions, sat through presentations, and perfected the subtle art of looking engaged while someone explained a slide titled “Synergistic Value Creation Framework” for the third time.

The invisible version was building things.

Launching ideas. Working with founders. Solving real problems. Occasionally remembering why work existed in the first place.

The invisible version was always the more interesting one.

The corporate version was simply the one that paid reliably and provided access to email signatures long enough to require formatting decisions.

For years, I convinced myself these two worlds could coexist. And, to be fair, they did if by “coexist” you mean “politely ignore each other like strangers in a lift.”

Corporate life taught me many things, most of which I will spend the rest of my life trying to unlearn. Chief among them was the belief that activity and progress are the same thing.

They are not.

One produces PowerPoint, the other produces outcomes.

Meetings, Or The Slow Erosion Of The Human Spirit

One of the more fascinating differences between corporate life and startup life is how each treats problems.

In a startup, the process tends to go something like this:

“The website is down.” “Can you fix it?” “Yes.” “Great.”

In a corporation, the same issue triggers an experience.

There will be a pre-meeting to discuss the meeting about the issue. Then the meeting. Then a follow-up meeting to clarify what was decided in the meeting. Then a steering committee to ensure the meetings align with broader strategic objectives. Then a summary document, which will be longer than the time it would have taken to fix the problem.

By the end of this process, the startup has fixed the issue, launched two new features, and possibly pivoted into an entirely different market.

The corporation, meanwhile, has achieved alignment.

Nobody is entirely sure what they are aligned on, but the alignment itself is considered a success.

The Aristocracy of Job Titles

Then there are job titles.

I remain convinced there is a hidden department in every large organisation dedicated entirely to making job titles longer over time. Nobody is ever promoted to something simpler.

You start as a Manager. Then you become a Senior Manager. Then a Regional Senior Manager. Then a Strategic Regional Senior Manager.

Eventually, your title becomes something like Executive Vice President of Global Strategic Customer-Centric Revenue Transformation Operations, at which point your email signature develops its own gravitational field.

Inside the organisation, this matters enormously. Titles determine where you sit, who listens to you, and how important your opinions are allowed to sound.

Outside the organisation, nobody knows what any of it means.

You could introduce yourself as the Supreme Chancellor of Synergy and most customers would still ask, “Yes, but can you help us?”

It turns out the only people truly impressed by job titles are other people with job titles.

It is a closed ecosystem. Like aristocracy, but with more spreadsheets.

Politics: The World’s Least Useful Superpower

Corporate politics is another marvel of human ingenuity.

I have seen extraordinarily intelligent people devote astonishing amounts of effort to positioning themselves slightly closer to an imaginary centre of influence. Entire strategies built not around outcomes, but around optics. Careers constructed not from achievements, but from navigation.

There are meetings before meetings. Conversations about conversations. Carefully phrased contributions designed to align with whichever senior leader spoke last.

It is a highly sophisticated system, provided your objective is to avoid doing anything that might create risk.

What it is not particularly good at is solving problems.

I observed all of this with a kind of detached fascination, like an anthropologist studying a tribe whose customs I could understand intellectually but never fully participate in.

Mostly because I couldn’t convince myself it mattered as much as everyone else seemed to believe it did.

This may explain why I always had side businesses.

My Slightly Disappointing Secret Identity

Some people collect stamps, some people run marathons. I apparently start companies.

Not because of some grand entrepreneurial vision. Because I enjoy building things. I enjoy solving problems. I enjoy the moment when an idea stops being theoretical and starts being real.

At one point, my corporate employer unknowingly became a customer of one of my side businesses. To this day, this remains one of the highlights of my professional career.

Imagine sitting in a meeting discussing suppliers while quietly knowing one of the suppliers is… you. It felt like having a secret identity, but without any of the glamour.

No cape. No dramatic music. No rooftop scenes at sunset. Just invoices.

I was, quite possibly, the least impressive superhero in history.

The Relationship Audit Nobody Asked For

Redundancy, it turns out, is also an excellent way to discover who actually cares about you.

Corporate life creates what might generously be called proximity-based friendships. You see the same people every day. You travel together. You sit through presentations together that feel long enough to require hydration strategies.

Over time, familiarity begins to feel like connection.

Then you leave and something slightly awkward happens.

Some of the people you expected to hear from disappear completely. Quietly. Efficiently. Like a well-executed cost reduction initiative.

It is not personal. It is structural. The relationship existed because the organisation existed.

Remove the organisation, and the relationship quietly follows it out of the building.

But then something else happens.

People you had not expected reach out. Former colleagues. Old contacts. Actual friends. The ones who were never particularly impressed by your job title in the first place.

Redundancy performs a ruthless audit of your relationships.

It is uncomfortable, but efficient.

The Slightly Inconvenient Truth

Looking back, I realise that what I felt after that call was not relief from work.

It was relief from misalignment.

For years, I had been trying to fit myself into something that was almost, but not quite, right. Not because the organisation was bad. Not because the people were bad.

But because it wasn’t where I belonged.

Some people thrive in corporate environments. Genuinely thrive. They enjoy the scale, the structure, the complexity, and the ability to influence large systems.

I admire those people, but I am not one of them.

I am a builder. I always was.

I just spent several years pretending to be something that looked much more impressive on LinkedIn.

The Unexpected Punchline

The remarkable thing about redundancy is how quickly it resolves long-standing internal debates.

The decision I had been postponing for years was made for me in under thirty minutes, supported by a script and a slightly sympathetic tone.

Within an hour, I was already talking about customers, ideas, projects, and plans.

Not because I suddenly had clarity because I didn’t.

Not because I had a carefully constructed strategy, because I definitely didn’t.

But because, for the first time in years, I had alignment.

My employer thought they were ending a chapter of my career. What they actually did was remove the part that wasn’t true.

And that is the real punchline.

I wasn’t made redundant from the life I wanted, I was made redundant from the life I had been pretending to want.

Which, at nearly sixty years old, is either deeply unsettling or incredibly liberating or possibly both.

Final Thought (Before Someone Schedules A Meeting About It)

For years, I thought I was changing jobs but what I was really doing was trying to become somebody else.

It turns out I was much better suited to being me.

The irony, of course, is that it took a redundancy call, carefully structured, professionally delivered, and no doubt discussed in several preparatory meetings, to finally make that obvious.

Corporate life gave me many things. Experience. Perspective. A mild allergy to PowerPoint.

But the most valuable thing it gave me was this:

An ending I probably would never have chosen and the freedom to stop pretending.

Which, as it happens, is far more useful than any job title I’ve ever had.