Professional Identity Purgatory

The version where you keep your job and lose the meaning anyway

The image was a few families on a city sidewalk in late afternoon. Kids holding the hands of grandparents, parents with strollers, the wear of an actual day on all of them. The frame had been put together by somebody who had thought hard about it: enough different faces, enough different ages, enough different shapes of family that the picture meant something specific about who the brand’s products were actually for. Real faces, real grain. We had licensed the photo for the client’s upcoming expo booth. I dropped it into the AI tool along with a product rendering, gave the tool three sentences of direction, and watched it return a composite in about eight seconds. Shadows correct. Color temperature matched. The product was shown in context at a believable angle, like it just happened to be there.

I spent enough of the late nineties and early two-thousands in Photoshop to know what that work used to cost. Compositing of that quality was a half-day at minimum and a senior retoucher’s calendar. The output on my screen was indistinguishable from what a person like that would have delivered, and it had taken less time than reheating a coffee.

Then the client’s CEO came back with a note that got forwarded on to me. People attending the conference like golf, right? They’re the ones who are going to buy the service, so we should adjust the imagery to match them. Let’s change the setting to a golf course. Swap the families out for a couple of guys playing a round.

We were already a few days behind on getting the materials to the printer, so I just changed it. The new image was on the screen in another ten seconds. The families were gone. In their place: two men in pastel polos on a fairway, the product in the foreground, the light still matched, the work still acceptable. No half-day. No retoucher. No phone call to ask whether the swap was a good idea. Nobody on the team paused to consider what the image now said about who the product was for and who it wasn’t. The tool did not need to be talked into it. I did not need to be talked into it. It happened the way you take a sip of water.

I sat with the file open in front of me. I had done thirty years of work to be the person who would have asked the question. The question did not need to be asked, because the tool did not need to be persuaded. The thirty years was still sitting in the chair. The room did not need it.

Geoff Curtis, until recently Executive Vice President at Horizon Therapeutics, wrote a piece in Fortune in April. He had lost his role of nearly thirty years in an acquisition. The new owners did not need a Chief Communications Officer with the kind of long-form judgment Curtis had built. They needed less of him, and then none of him.

He gave the feeling a name: professional identity purgatory. Borrowed from the Catholic frame his readers might recognize: not heaven, not hell, a passage of purification. The space between losing what your career had made of you and not yet knowing what the next version of you is going to be.

I read it carefully. Curtis was describing the version of the condition where the door closes behind you and the badge gets deactivated. There is another version of it, harder to see because the person experiencing it is still going to work. Still on the calendar. Still getting paid. Still, by every metric anyone is measuring, doing the job. And quietly, behind their own ribs, no longer feeling like the job is theirs. That is the room this essay is trying to name. Not a quick moment, but a slow but steady weather system that settles in over time, and the people inside it cannot always tell when it arrived or how long it has been there.

It builds in the proposal that goes out on a Friday afternoon and gets the work without any pushback, when ten years ago the same proposal would have been a fistfight you sharpened your case for, and you cannot quite tell whether the room got easier or you got better or the bar got lower or something else entirely.

It builds in the client who praises a deliverable and means it, and the praise lands on the desk like an envelope of correct paperwork. You sign for it. You file it. You cannot feel the part of you that earned it.

It builds in the younger colleague who learned, in eighteen months, the thing that took you ten years to learn. They are not a fraud. They are good. The eighteen months is real. You watch them and you cannot decide whether the years of grinding through bad work were necessary or whether they were the price of being born early.

It builds in the meeting where someone asks how the deck got produced and you have to think about what to say. The honest answer is not that AI wrote it. The honest answer is that you used AI for the parts where you used to use junior people, and you would not have caught the difference yourself. You can describe the calibration you brought. You can describe the choices you made. You can describe the parts where your judgment ran the room. But the calibration moved fast enough that even you have stopped noticing it, and the moment it ran has already closed.

It builds in the client who does not know whether a tool drafted the language and increasingly does not seem to care. They are not being cynical. They are being efficient. They were always paying for the outcome. You believed you were being hired for the person who produced it. The math was never quite that, and the math is even less that now.

It builds at the end of the day. You used to leave the office with a particular kind of tiredness, the kind that comes from carrying something difficult and putting it down. Now you leave with a different kind of tiredness. It does not have a clear shape. You cannot tell whether it is the work or the absence of friction in the work or something underneath both, and you cannot tell whether you are supposed to be relieved about it or worried about it, and after a while you stop trying to name it and just go home.

None of this is grief about losing the job. The job is fine. The bookings are good. The reviews are warm. The slack is full of compliments. Curtis’s purgatory is a moment. The one I am trying to name is a weather system, and the people inside it cannot always tell whether the sky has changed or whether they have gotten worse at looking at it.

I have been in this weather before, in a different decade and a different city.

I lived in Istanbul in the middle of the twenty-tens, and on my evening commute I used to watch the city pull the day’s color out of itself, going from blue to pink to amber over the minarets. Orhan Pamuk has a word for the mood that settles into a city like that one: hüzün. Pamuk borrowed it. It describes a melancholy that is not private. It belongs to a place rather than a person. It comes from living among the remnants of something that used to be more than it is now, and from the fact that everyone around you can feel it too, and nobody quite talks about it.

I learned hüzün as a tourist’s word for Istanbul. It turned out to be portable.

The mood I felt on that commute had nothing, structurally, to do with what I am feeling now in a different chair in a different country. The decade is different. The trigger is different. The city is not even the same continent. The shape, though, is the same. A communal awareness, mostly unspoken, that the connective tissue between the people doing the work and the meaning that used to come back to them has gone slack. You can feel it in the room. You can hear it in the way people start sentences when they are talking honestly. You can see it in the way they stop.

Hüzün has come home. It is sitting on a thousand desks in a thousand offices on a Tuesday morning, and the people sitting at those desks have learned not to bring it up.

I do not think the feeling is grief that the work is going away. The work is going to be fine. There is going to be more of it, faster, and the people who can use the new tools well are going to do well.

I think the feeling is grief about the line between the work and the person who does it. For most of my career, the line was thick enough to lean on. A piece of work that came out of my hands had a particular grain to it. Clients knew it. I knew it. My team could spot the parts I had pushed against. The output came from a specific person, sitting at a specific desk, who had thought about the room and the client and the year of doing similar work that informed this one. The thinking was visible inside the output because the output was slow enough to carry it.

The tools have moved the work fast enough that the grain no longer travels with it. The thinking still happens. I can feel it, in the moment, when I am calibrating a prompt or rejecting a draft or making the small directional call that turns the next ninety seconds of generation into something usable. But the thinking happens at a speed that does not leave a mark, and the output that arrives does not show its work. By the time I have shipped, even I cannot quite find where I was in the thing.

That is the purgatory. It is not about losing the job. It is about losing the visible link between yourself and the job, while still doing the job, every day, on time.

What I built across thirty years was not, it turns out, the ability to produce the output. The output is increasingly available to people without the thirty years. What I built was the ability to feel my way through a room and bring back something that fit it specifically. That ability is still there. It is still being used. I might be the only person in the room who can see it being used. And on the days when I cannot feel it being used either, the chair I am sitting in starts to feel like it has nothing to do with me.

What is happening inside one person is a smaller version of what is happening across a whole field. The career is what becomes a person over time. The work is the receipt for the years. When the receipts stop carrying the weight, even though the work is still happening, the person and the career start to come apart, and you sit at your desk wondering which one is still you.

If you have been feeling some version of this, the name for it is professional identity purgatory. Curtis named it for the people whose door closed. I am borrowing it for the people whose door is still open, who are still walking through it on Monday morning, who are still, by every reasonable measure, fine.

The recognition is the whole point. There is nothing wrong with you for feeling this. The room you are in has a name now. It is not just yours, and it is not new, and it is not, in the end, a problem about AI.

It is a problem about what becomes visible when the speed of the work outruns the time it takes to be a person doing it. Sit in it.

The room is more crowded than it looks.