Something to be when we lose our work identity

Who are you without your title?

Since the beginning of 2025, nearly a million Americans have had to step in front of the bathroom mirror and confront that question following sweeping layoffs across the nation. This number represents the largest job loss for this country since the onset of COVID-19 forced lockdowns in 2020. For many newly unemployed, the days and weeks that follow are a kind of grieving period. There are the logistical losses like income, insurance, and the morning routine — but the quieter loss is the overnight displacement of identity. For some, the following period of unemployment lasts so long that it reshapes life entirely as mortgages, groceries, and car payments become unsustainable.

At just about every networking event, cocktail party, and rec league soccer game we answer the same introductory question. What do you do? For many of us, work isn’t just what we do- it’s who we are. “I’m an analyst.” “I’m a project manager.” We form social bonds with our colleagues and teammates, we receive accolades and promotions for achievements in our field, we are handed plastic slipcover badges with our name and title in bold print for industry conferences. The sudden absence of that label can feel like erasure. In a culture where self-worth is often tied to productivity, unemployment feels like moral failure, even when it’s the inevitable byproduct of economic shifts far beyond any individual’s control.

Lately, our economy has done quite a bit of shifting. Roles and industries that once offered stability are disappearing or evolving beyond recognition. Automation, artificial intelligence, and remote restructuring have blurred the boundaries between work and identity even further — you can lose your job without ever leaving your house. The anticipated impact of tariffs has led many corporations to make preemptive staffing adjustments. Even the once-coveted “safe” pursuit (the good government job) no longer holds the same promise of security, with the current administration’s Human Resources chief anticipating the elimination of 300,000 workers by the end of 2025.

For generations, we have been sold a story about how to live a successful life: get good grades, land a stable job, pay off the mortgage, retire, and overfeed the grandkids on the weekends. We built value systems around this hero — the Hardworking American™ who keeps the grass cut and the shirts ironed and gets the big project done on time and just under budget. What does it look like when huge swaths of what was once the middle class no longer punch a clock? As technology advances, the use of inefficient human labor won’t make much business sense anymore. Roles we never anticipated losing are vanishing.

What we are facing is not just an employment crisis, it’s a collapse of the narrative. There is a growing sense that the story we were told about success no longer fits the world we’re living in, if it ever really fit at all. How does the American identity change when millions can no longer call on the title handed to them by an employer to self describe? We’ve become so committed to the concept of work that to lose these jobs is to risk a collective identity crisis: Who are we without our middle class?

Andrew Yang’s campaign for the presidency in 2020 hinged upon a central theme that seemed far-fetched to many, and communist to some: the Universal Basic Income. Work wouldn’t look the same in the future, Yang insisted. Frankly, it wouldn’t make sense to have all of these people trudging off to shopping malls and factories each day when most of what we do could be accomplished far more cheaply and more accurately by robots that don’t catch the common cold. We would have to reckon with this reality sooner than we realized.

Mmm-hmm. People nodded and smiled, and laughed about the idea of handing out a thousand dollars a month to every citizen so they could lie idly about, leeching from the public coffers.

So, now that we see the tides shifting, what’s next? When the jobs evaporate, the will to build, to learn, to create, to contribute doesn’t vanish with them. People with well-worn productivity habits will continue to seek outlets. The question becomes, what avenues exist to support people seeking purpose when employment no longer guarantees it? And what new opportunities await?

Maybe this is our next great experiment: to discover who we are when we’re no longer defined by our job titles, but by our capacity to create, connect, and contribute in ways machines never will. The question now isn’t “who are you without your title,” it’s “what will you build when your identity is your own.” We can use this moment to design what comes next. The future will belong to the people bold enough to create it.

Sofia DeMartino is a Gazette editorial fellow. sofia.demartino@thegazette.com