When Your Job Title Vanishes
Introduction
Last month I wrote an article abot realising I’d been lied to all my life which melted Substack, 96,000 people have viewed it. This is the next chapter of that story.
The last time I stepped off a ship, I still had a name the world understood.
If you’d stopped me on the quay and asked, “So, what do you do?”, I could have answered in one neat sentence. A rank. A role. A label that made strangers nod and slot me into the right mental box.
A few months later, the company card stopped working.
The calls about cargo, weather and crew dried up.
My name quietly disappeared from the lists that mattered.
I was still here. My history was still here. But the label that told everyone what I was for had quietly died. That’s the part nobody mentions about retirement. It doesn’t just end your career. It erases your job title and leaves you standing in the kitchen wondering who, exactly, just put the kettle on.
From “In Command” to “On the Sidelines”
For decades, my work had been shorthand for my worth. Not in a dramatic way. In the ordinary way we all recognise. Someone asks, “What do you do?” You answer. They decide, in about three seconds, how seriously to take you.
Work gave me structure and money. It gave me stories, storms, crises, things to moan and laugh about. It gave me that feeling, on a Tuesday afternoon, that my time belonged somewhere and someone was counting on me.
Then the industry did what it always does: thanked me for my service and sailed on.
On paper, I was “retired”.
Retired from what, exactly? Responsibility? Usefulness? Being asked for an opinion that counts?
When I started answering, “Oh, I’m retired,” at gatherings, I watched people’s faces.
They didn’t mean any harm. But there was a subtle shift. I moved from “in command” to “on the sidelines”. From the person you’d trust in a crisis to the person you offer a comfortable chair and a top‑up of tea.
The implication is clear: you used to be something.
Now you’re done.
I didn’t feel done. I felt unlabelled.
Drift Is Not Rest
The official line is that you’ve “earned your rest”. What they don’t say is that the system has no further use for you and hopes you’ll spend the next twenty‑odd years staying busy, staying quiet, and staying out of hospital.
The trouble is, rest only feels like rest when there’s something meaningful to rest from. Turn “taking it easy” into a full‑time occupation and it stops being restful. It becomes drift.
Drift arrives dressed as freedom. No watches. No port calls. No schedules.
Then the days start to smear into each other.
You forget whether that conversation was yesterday or last week because nothing anchors it.
You half‑watch programmes you’d once have rolled your eyes at.
You check the news more than is good for any nervous system.
You catch yourself saying, “Oh, you know… keeping busy,” and you both know that’s code for “I’m not sure.”
You don’t miss every detail of the old life.
You miss feeling like your presence on the planet still makes a dent.
The Questions Under the Surface
Here’s the awkward truth I wish I’d seen sooner: my job was never just a job.
It was a watch bill. A chain of command. A way to explain myself in one line. It was somewhere to put my effort so I didn’t have to think too hard about what effort was actually for.
When all of that vanished, a deeper set of questions crept in. Not the sort you can fix with a new hobby. Questions like: who am I when nobody is paying me to be responsible? What are my days for now? If I disappeared quietly, whose life would actually get worse?
On the page, those questions sound dramatic. In real life they arrive as a low‑level unease. A sense that something important is unravelling underneath the surface of “Fine, thanks”.
Most retirement advice politely sidesteps this. It talks about hobbies, travel, volunteering, downsizing. All perfectly pleasant. None of it touches the core problem: the story you’ve told yourself about who you are has been pinned to a job title. When the title dies, the story loses its main character.
Skills Age Can’t Steal
There’s another line we swallow without chewing: “The world has moved on. Your skills are out of date.”
On the surface, it sounds sensible. The tools have changed. The systems are unrecognisable. You might need a younger relative to coax some gadget into life. It’s easy to believe that whatever made you valuable has quietly expired.
This is where the story gets lazy.
Underneath the tech and logins are skills that do not age out. Knowing how to stay calm when everyone else is losing their head. Knowing the difference between a genuine crisis and a very loud performance. Knowing how to listen properly instead of reloading your reply while the other person is still talking. Knowing what actually matters over ten years, not ten minutes.
The modern world is drowning in information and starving for judgement.
That is not a young person’s game.
That is experience work.
The problem isn’t that we have nothing to offer. The problem is that the old system has nowhere to put it once your job title disappears. So you’re quietly invited to step aside just when what you know is finally getting interesting.
Work That’s Actually Yours
When I started this newsletter, I thought I was building a project to keep myself occupied. It took me a while to see what I was really trying to do.
I wasn’t looking for a pastime. I was looking for a new way to work.
Not employment. That ship has sailed. Work. The daily act of taking what you’ve lived and making it useful to someone else.
I didn’t want another chain of command. I didn’t want another appraisal. I wanted to go to bed pleasantly tired, not numbed out. That meant building something that doesn’t live on anyone’s roster. It meant accepting a simple fact: I still need work that feels like mine.
Work that uses my best skills. Work that aims at people I actually care about. Work nobody can take away with a quiet decision in a room I’m no longer invited into.
When the Tools Catch Up With the Grey Matter
The good news is that the tools have finally caught up with the grey matter.
Ten or twenty years ago, if you wanted to share what you know beyond your immediate circle, you needed permission. A publisher. A manager. A studio. A budget. Some gatekeeper somewhere had to decide you were worth the risk.
Now, with a half‑decent internet connection and a bit of stubbornness, you can reach more people from your kitchen table than most institutions could dream of thirty years ago.
Then there’s AI. I know.
The word alone makes a lot of people my age fold their arms.
Here’s what I’ve learned, slowly and with a fair amount of swearing:
AI is not a replacement for your thinking.
It’s a wheelbarrow for it. You still have to decide what matters. You still have to bring the judgement, the stories, the lived experience.
The machine can carry your notes, help you organise the mess, nudge a rough draft into shape. It can’t live your life for you.
The real danger isn’t that AI will make older people redundant.
The real danger is that older people will quietly accept redundancy just when the tools finally make it easier to turn what they know into something useful.
We helped build this world.
It would be a strange choice to sit out the next phase because the login screen looks different.
Where This Leaves You (and Me)
So where does that leave you, standing in your own kitchen, with a dead job title and a lot of tide left?
Start smaller than your fear suggests.
Not “reinvent yourself”. Not “find your life purpose” by Sunday. Something more honest.
Who do you refuse to watch drift? What problem can you no longer un‑see? What is the smallest thing you could build in the next month that might help?
One group. One problem. One small act of work.
A weekly email. A regular conversation that becomes a standing thing. A simple guide you wish someone had handed you at fifty. Nothing fancy. No logo. No mission statement. Just one honest attempt to put your experience back into circulation.
If enough of us do that—not as a movement, just as a quiet refusal to disappear—something shifts.
Communities get wiser instead of just older. Younger people get mentors instead of platitudes. The story of ageing moves from “winding down” to “working differently”.
Retirement stops being the end of your work and becomes the end of permission‑based work. You’re finished waiting for somebody else to decide what you’re for.
My job title is dead.
I’m still here.
So are you.
The important question is no longer, “What were you?” It’s, “What are you for now?”
I’m still working that out in public, one imperfect piece at a time. If you are too, I’d rather we compared notes than pretended we’re fine.
P.S. If this felt uncomfortably close to home, the paid side of this newsletter is where I’m working through the practical bit: how to design work that suits your age, uses your experience, and doesn’t quietly turn into another full‑time grind.
That’s where I share real examples, experiments that fail, and the things I won’t put on the public side.
If you want more than one big essay and a place to think this through with me, you’ll find it there.