Making meaning

Most of the content leaders I know joined the field because the work felt meaningful. But what happens when we our desire for meaning turns the job into an identity?

This essay is adapted from my opening talk at the 2024 Lead With Tempo conference. I wrote it for and about people working in content design and strategy, but I suspect people from many fields will find it relatable.

I remember what it felt like to discover content work for the first time. It was 2007, and I was working at an advertising agency in Arizona writing copy for real estate ads. I was 23, and I was so, so bored. Turns out there are only so many ways to describe a suburban home with three bathrooms, granite countertops, and a deeply unsustainable water supply.

So when I saw a posting for a web writer at a different agency, I thought, what the hell? I’d worked on a couple web projects. I liked them well enough. Most importantly, the office was really close to my house.

I got the job. But when I showed up to my first day, I learned that I wasn’t on the creative team with the other writers. And I wasn’t on the UX team, either — because there wasn’t one. To be honest, I don’t think I even knew what UX was.

I was on the SEO team.

Pretty soon, I found myself writing lots and lots of articles designed to garner search traffic. I didn’t love it, but I did my best to make what I wrote actually helpful and informative—not just more stuff.

But ultimately, that’s what I was writing: stuff. Pages and pages of stuff, duplicative and unnecessary, tacked up all over the edges of our clients’ websites.

After a while, I wasn’t just bored. I was disappointed. Frustrated. Resentful. I loved writing, but I wanted my work to be meaningful — to me, to a user, to someone other than a search engine.

So I started asking questions: Why are we designing and launching sites with whatever crappy content our clients give us, then showing up after the fact to add even more crap for SEO? Why aren’t we planning these projects to include user-centered content from the start?

Most of all, why am I not in the meetings where all this is being decided?

So I made it my mission to worm my way in. I asked if I could take over sitemapping and navigation design. I started collaborating on wireframes. Eventually, I became a central part of the process.

There was just one problem: no one quite knew what my job was anymore. I wasn’t considered a designer — not at that agency, at least. Back then, the design team all came from print. They worked in Photoshop all day. And I wasn’t really a copywriter, either. I wasn’t creating campaigns. I was writing, sure—but I was also asking clients hard questions, collaborating with designers and devs, and modeling existing content to be more useful within a new design system.

So no one really knew what to call my work, or how to scope it. They just knew that website projects were less likely to go off the rails when I was there.

Then one day, my boss sent me this post by Rachel Lovinger: “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data.” Something clicked. I saw myself in that article. Even more powerful, I think I found myself in that article. Because before that point, I didn’t really have a professional plan. I just knew that I wanted to write, and that I needed to pay the bills while my partner was in grad school. But when I found content strategy and UX, I found so much more than a job title. I found a community, and a career path I was passionate about.

I went all in: I followed everyone who was using the hashtag #contentstrategy. I read all the blog posts. I started a local meetup. I felt like I was part of a movement.

I may have even physically fist-pumped when I read Kristina Halvorson’s A List Apart article from 2008:

“Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.”

Hell yeah. I was hooked. I took up that torch. I was a content strategist. And you know, it felt somehow noble. I wasn’t “just” writing. I wasn’t “just” doing marketing. My work was meaningful. I was making people’s experiences online better — more inclusive, more usable, more accessible, more relevant.

How could anyone not care about this?

So for the next few years, I worked very, very hard to convince people to see content work the way I did: Important. Valuable. Necessary. I advocated and evangelized and went to pitches and closed projects. I grew a team. In 2011, I left that agency to go solo. I spoke at conferences and consulted and ran workshops all over the world. And while my career took off, so did content disciplines more broadly: content design, UX writing, content ops, content architecture — these specialties and more blossomed, and what used to be seen as one field transformed into a whole bunch of related specialties.

Now, 15 years later, when I look at all the content disciplines that exist today, when I look at the sheer number of people who hold these kinds of titles today, I am floored. We did it! We’re everywhere.

So…why do things feel so gloomy in contentland?

I’ve been asking myself this question for a while. Because, in 2020, I stopped doing product and project work, and I started focusing on people — running leadership coaching and professional development programs for people in and around design.

That has included a lot of content leaders — somewhere north of 100 at this point. Managers, directors, senior ICs. People at big-name companies and tiny startups, federal governments and boutique agencies. And while their stories are all a little different, so many of them tell me the same thing: they are struggling.

They feel overworked, yet undervalued. Underleveled. Under-resourced.

At best, they’re stretched thin and forcing a smile while being asked to “do more with less.” At worst, they’re cynical and burnt out — all that passion and optimism they used to hold slipping away.

If that’s you, I want you to know something: you don’t have to choose between advocating and convincing and fighting till you’re blue in the face, or giving up and collapsing in a pit of despair. You don’t have to carry the weight of this discipline on your back to be a leader.

But we’re going to have to change some things to make that possible.

This isn’t about changing your company.

Most of you have already tried that. You’ve done the decks and roadshows, the people-pleasing and convincing and advocating. And I won’t tell you that doesn’t work at all — again, this field has grown dramatically in the past 15 years, even considering the more recent layoffs and the threats of AI and all the rest.

But that approach hasn’t given content folks the power or agency they crave. It’s just given them more of the same: more decks, more roadshows, more people-pleasing. More expectations that you keep all the bases covered, no matter how few content people there are.

So I don’t want to talk about changing your organization anymore.

What I want to talk about is changing the only thing any of us can really change, anyway. Ourselves.

Now you might be thinking, ourselves? But what about the layoffs decimating practices? What about the reorgs, the return to office mandates sprung on people who were hired to be fully remote, the way execs are looking at AI as the solution to all their content needs?

And to that I say, yeah. You’re not wrong. Those things are real, and they are absolutely causing pain. Be mad.

But I also know that the pain we’re collectively feeling didn’t start with the layoffs, or the launch of Chat GPT. It’s much deeper in our DNA as a field.

It’s right there in my own story: I cared deeply about content work. I believed it was important and meaningful, and I saw it as my duty to convince more people to see what I saw. I identified so strongly with the work that it became a huge part of my life, my friendships, my personality.

And there were high points! I wrote books and got invited to speak all over the world. I met a koala after a conference in Sydney and pet a cheetah at a conference in Cape Town. On the same trip. I mean, WHAT!?

No seriously, what!?

But then there were the lows: Projects that felt pointless. Draining, ill-considered slogs. Products I wasn’t sure anyone needed. And then there was one particular project that broke me. I think the lowest moment was when our project sponsor actually cut me off suddenly during a large meeting demanding to know why I was presenting a different deck than we’d discussed. Only, I was presenting that deck. There was only one deck!

How do you answer that question with 25 stakeholders watching? How do you move on from there? I’m still not sure—but I know that my attempts to pull the train back on the tracks failed. Because afterward, my colleague — someone I’d trusted as a mentor and considered a close friend, and who’d quietly watched as all this went down—told me it was all my fault. That I was failing at my job.

I was crushed. I was supposed to be a content leader. That was, like, my whole thing.

If I wasn’t good at that, who was I even?

I was stuck in vocational awe.

Fobazi Ettarh coined the term vocational awe in 2017, in an essay for and about librarians. And she opens with a news story from my city, Philadelphia — the home of a heartbreaking opioid and fentanyl crisis. Back in 2017, as overdoses started happening in and around a local library branch, some librarians decided they needed to intervene. So they got trained to administer narcan, and they developed new procedures and protocols: Who goes to get help? Who stays with the person overdosing? How do we safely move kids out of the building?

The public loved these librarians — these kind booklovers jumping up from their desks to save people’s lives! The story went viral, and it kicked off a wave of librarians across the country training to intervene during an overdose — and a wave of media depicting these librarians as selfless heroes. Saints.

But of course, they’re not saints. They’re workers — workers who aren’t paid particularly well. Workers who regularly skip their lunchbreaks and stay late.

And while it’s a powerful story of commitment to the community, what Ettarh argues is that we do librarians a disservice when we talk about the profession as a vocation. Not a job, but a sacred calling. Something librarians feel responsible for — regardless of how hard the work can be, regardless of the pay, regardless of how far their actual job duties have strayed from what they signed up for. She writes:

“Tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful. Awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint.”

This is the problem with vocational awe: it teaches workers that because their work matters — because it is meaningful in some way — that they have to do whatever it takes to deliver. Even if it’s harming them, even if it’s making them sick, even if it’s leaving them sleepless and numb and traumatized.

And if they don’t — if they want to take breaks and have hobbies and quit work in time to actually cook dinner — then that means they just do not care enough about the cause.

Content work is a job, not a duty.

Are you starting to see some parallels? Because I sure do. I’ve seen content people treat it as their duty to ensure nothing goes live without their eyes on it — even though it was their company’s decision to only have two content designers spread out across a 100-person design org.

I’ve seen heads of practices feel so responsible for “changing hearts and minds” that they’ve burnt out spectacularly, crashed into a wall, made themselves so sick they had to take a year off to recover.

I’ve also met content leaders who couldn’t take time off, or who told themselves they couldn’t. And so they kept on grinding, coping however they could: taking their stress out on their teams. Sneering at cross-functional partners. Burying themselves in wine and Netflix. But still telling themselves they’re all in.

In 2022, I noticed something else happening, though: We were emerging from the worst of the pandemic, and the layoffs were just getting going. And I started noticing content leaders rejecting vocational awe — rejecting the idea that the most important thing about them was their job title.

At first, it felt exhilarating. But…then I noticed how many of them were replacing it with cynicism. “I’m only here for the paycheck,” they’d say. Why should I unmute in a meeting? Try to collaborate? Set goals? Why bother with any of it? It’s all BS. It’s all just capitalism.

They’re not wrong, exactly. There’s nothing pure about this work. Especially in tech — an industry where so many business models are extractive, unsustainable, relying on underpaid and invisible labor, selling our data, stealing our creative work, surveilling our movements. Short-term, investor-centered capitalism has a lot to answer for.

Again: Be mad.

But as much as I want to see a different world, with different kinds of businesses and different kinds of incentives, I gotta say: those cynical, none-of-this-matters types? They’re miserable, too. They’re spending their days marinating in despair — lonely, angry, numb. And to be honest, they’re often terrible colleagues: judgmental, quick to blame, always on defense. Because that’s where cynicism leads. It’s corrosive.

I don’t want that life for any of us.

So I want to go back to libraries for a moment. And I want you to consider this: what would happen if librarians all traded out their vocational awe for this sort of cynicism? Do we want a world where librarians don’t give a shit about their work? Where they’re just there to punch a clock, and don’t derive meaning from things like serving their communities? Upholding access to information and literacy? Creating safe spaces for people to pause, to think, to read — to dream?

I don’t think we do. Because that work is meaningful. It’s necessary. It creates hope — and god, do we need hope right now. And librarians deserve to feel joy and pride in doing the work needed to make that possible.

But they also deserve to set limits on that work, and to be people — joyful, loving, curious, happy people — outside of that work.

That’s what I want for content folks, too.

We deserve to feel joy and pride in the parts of content work that are meaningful.

The opportunities to make everyday tasks a little less draining for users. The efforts to reduce cognitive load, to improve accessibility, to include more people with more identities.

And not just in the content work itself. But also in our relationships at work: When we connect with a colleague, or show kindness to a struggling peer, or help a junior teammate grow and build self-trust. When we simply enjoy the small pleasures of solving thorny problems together.

But the meaning I’m talking about here isn’t found in your job title, or level, or company. It’s not even in the set of tasks you do — whether you’re a librarian helping a teen tackle their first real research paper or a content designer writing an error message a human can actually understand.

Real meaning is deeper. It’s a product of living in ways that affirm our values and our humanity — and not just our individual humanity, but everyone’s: our colleagues’, our users’, the world’s.

This form of meaning often isn’t splashy. It’s not curing cancer, it’s not stopping climate change. You might not even be stopping your company from releasing a poorly considered new feature.

It’s the meaning found in being present, generous, and kind. It’s the meaning found in the thousands of small moments and tiny interactions that add up to treating ourselves and the people around us like people: people with inherent value, people who are worthy of respect.

People who are beautiful and fragile and struggling.

But meaning isn’t in the job itself.

Because when we attempt to attach meaning to the job, it’s incredibly easy to start attaching our identity to it, too.

We start to see the job as not just how we’re valuable, but also: who we are.

Honestly this might be the biggest risk facing content leaders right now. Not AI, not layoffs, not even lack of organizational investment in our work. But the fact that so many of our identities are so tightly wrapped up in being a content designer, or a UX writer, or a content strategist.

Because this over-identification with the job — this belief that content work is the primary expression of who we are in the world — it might feel like it gives us purpose. But it really trains us to take things personally. It makes us self-righteous, easily wounded: How dare they disrespect content design? How dare they disrespect ME?

A few months ago, Lyft’s head of content design, Alicia Ostarello, wrote about her own experience with this — and how it broke her both mentally and physically. Left her unable to get out of bed, sleeping for 22 hours straight, subsisting on a diet of fig newtons and shame. Finally, after a leave of absence and a lot of healing, she realized something:

Self-worth was handcuffed to my title so completely that not actively working felt like a death of self.

She describes realizing there was an insatiable monster in her who sought approval and validation through her work — a monster that wanted her job to love her back. Was willing to do anything it took to get this love.

Except, a company can’t love you. No matter how hard you work, how much you perform, how much impact you show.

The desire to be wanted runs deep.

Some of this is human — it’s normal to want to be loved, or to fear being abandoned. But capitalism loves to exploit that desire — that’s why it teaches us that our labor is what makes us valuable. That our professional success is our worthiness. And that if we aren’t traditionally successful, there’s just one answer: grind harder.

Often, though, I see content folks advising one another to lean into this mentality: Say yes to everything. Be helpful. Never miss an opportunity to “demonstrate value.” Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. That’s how we’ll change hearts and minds. That’s how we’ll make them want us.

People-pleasing like this might seem nice on its face — who doesn’t want to be helpful? — but ultimately, it keeps us stuck. It keeps us reactive, constantly seeking external validation of our value. This creates a cycle that teaches content folks to do whatever it takes to be liked and wanted — even if that work holds no meaning for them. Even if that work drains them dry.

So, what helps people let go of that desire? What loosens the grip of external validation? What I’ve found in my coaching work is that it’s something simple to describe, but hard to accomplish: self-trust.

• What do you like about yourself?
• Where do you see your strengths?
• What do you value?
• What do you think good work looks like?
• What behaviors will you be proud of later?

The more concrete our sense of self, the more developed our taste and opinions, the less we need to rely on external validation to know how to feel. And the easier it is to see other people’s opinions and screwed-up organizational priorities for what they are: information. Information about what’s possible with this person, in this environment, in this moment. Not an indictment of our skills or our practice — but just the reality of the situation today.

Accepting reality is a lot harder than it sounds.

People often think that “accepting reality” means that you stop trying, that you give up. It doesn’t. It also doesn’t mean liking how things are, or agreeing with how things are, or no longer feeling pissed off about how things are. And it definitely doesn’t mean abandoning hope that things can be different.

Radical acceptance simply means having the courage to look at a situation directly, and then acknowledge what is true right now — even if it’s disappointing, or unfair, or ugly.

But humans will go to some pretty extreme lengths to avoid reality. We do it when we pretend fights in our relationships never happened. When we ignore the signs that a loved one has a substance abuse problem. When we can’t bear to look at our credit card bills, or our email accounts, or our own behavior.

And we definitely do it at work. We run in circles trying to convince the same VPs over and over — maybe this deck will do it! Or this one! — while ignoring the signals that this just isn’t their priority.

We do it when we tell ourselves that if we just work late one more night, on one more weekend, over one more vacation…everything will be fine. We’ll be caught up. And then we’ll stop.

We do it when we believe the PR campaigns corporations put out — when we repeat their mission statements about changing the world, and try not to think about who actually wins and who loses in their business models.

Radical acceptance is hard because it requires us to be honest with ourselves, over and over again, about what’s actually going on around us, and why. It requires us to admit uncomfortable truths — whether it’s that despite your pleas, your spouse has shown no interest in treating you differently, or that despite sending half a dozen spicy emails to your design partners, they’ve still never invited you to the kickoff.

And again, acceptance doesn’t mean liking these things, or no longer working to change the situation. But it does mean accepting that what’s happening is happening — and that what you’ve been doing hasn’t worked.

Ultimately, I think of radical acceptance as being about no longer wasting your precious time and energy trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your control — like other people’s behaviors and corporate business models — and then beating yourself up for failing.

It’s challenging to accept that things are not in your control, but it’s also freeing. Because when you stop spending your time trying over and over again to make something happen that, ultimately, is impossible, new space opens up. You stop ramming into the same wall over and over again, hoping that this time it won’t be there. You find a new direction to point your energy toward instead.

Like whether you choose to continue working there or not.

Like the boundaries you set around your work.

Like how you treat your colleagues.

Like whether you choose to carry the weight of your company’s content decisions on your personal shoulders.

Radical acceptance starts with becoming an observer.

Try this: Imagine your company, and all its shenanigans, playing out on a stage. But you’re sitting in a box seat, high above, gazing down: Ah yes, there they are — playing out their various power struggles. Jockeying for position. Saying one thing and doing another.

And again, acceptance doesn’t mean liking what you see. It only means seeing it clearly, and having the courage to be honest with yourself about what you see.

The problem is, our brains are wired to protect us, to avoid pain. And not just physical pain, but any kind of pain. So when faced with the discomfort of the truth, our brains can easily jump into overdrive, and make up all kinds of cognitive distortions to explain away the situation.

One I see all the time with content leaders is all-or-nothing thinking: either we’re winning or we’re losing. Either we’re gaining headcount or we’re about to disappear forever. I’ve seen it a lot during this season of layoffs — an organization cuts its content team, and my LinkedIn feed is full of people certain that the discipline is dying.

You know how to start noticing this distortion? Look for extreme language in your thoughts: words like “always” or “never.” “Win” or “lose.” Anytime we reduce the situation to a good/bad or all/nothing, we’re liable to be in a cognitive distortion.

Another one I often see is mind-reading: assuming others’ thoughts or beliefs without clear evidence. Like, “My product manager didn’t invite me to the meeting. They don’t think I’m important.”

And then there’s personalization: taking on responsibility for things that aren’t in your control. Like believing you’re a failure if your leadership continues to underinvest in content — when the real reason is: the organization isn’t prioritizing a good user experience right now, because they’re prioritizing quick releases that appease shareholders.

Then there’s fortune-telling and catastrophizing — and I think we’ve all seen a lot of those lately: AI is going to be the death of our field. No one should enter the field right now. No one should be excited about the future of content design.

And you know, I don’t think we should stick our heads in the sand. Things are changing in this field, in some troubling ways. But I also know that catastrophizing won’t help us. Because all catastrophizing does is shut us down: Why bother with anything? It’s hopeless.

The truth is, things are always changing — not just in this field, but everywhere. And the only way to deal with that change is to face it head-on — to learn to notice it, to adapt to it, and to shape it where we can.

But we can’t shape anything when we’re stuck in a cognitive distortion. Because distorted thinking isn’t there to help us make long-term, intentional decisions. It’s there to deal with threats. And that means it’s designed to be reactive, to take mental shortcuts that ultimately harm us.

Here’s one of those shortcuts: Do you know why so many people are quick to blame themselves after they’ve been victimized or abused? It’s because self-blame is the quickest path to regaining a sense of control. After all, if it’s all my fault, I might feel bad and ashamed. But I can also tell myself that I can prevent it from happening again. If I just work even harder.

But working harder won’t fix the problems we face in content. If it could, those problems would be fixed by now.

We can’t work our way out of this.

So who are you when you’re not working?

That’s the question I’ve started asking my clients instead. And you know what the most common answer is?

I don’t know.

This still isn’t the easiest question for me to answer, either — even though I think about it all the time. Because I do care about my work. I care about doing a good job for my clients. And as much as I don’t like to admit it, I also care about how I’m perceived. I’m anxious about becoming irrelevant as I age in an industry where youth is valorized and women over 40 are so often rendered invisible.

But I do know a few things about who I am now. I’m a thinker and a writer — whether it’s monetizable or not. My friend Vanessa once told me that I was the most nuanced person she’d ever met. That in every situation I was trying to home in on something, see all its angles.

I’m hopeful. Even though people don’t always see that in me, because I talk a lot about the problems we face in this world. But I don’t see hope as positivity. I see it as the belief that people can change. That circumstances can change. I believe that healing is possible — for ourselves, our relationships, and I hope someday our planet.

I love nature. I love watching kids discover something new. I love the feeling of sore muscles.

I am so many things when I’m not working. We all are.

But we have to give ourselves permission to go find those things. And maybe even more than that, permission to believe that they are valuable. Not because they give us fresh energy for our work — but just because they give us joy.

That’s what Alicia Ostarello, Lyft’s head of content design, went in search of. And she found it off Vancouver Island, in a surfing lesson. She wrote:

Splashing around in the ocean and feeling vaguely terrified for my life, I felt boundless joy for the first time in a year and a half. And in doing so, I could finally see a different life for myself. Maybe it wasn’t going to be my old, pre-illness life. But my body remembered something it had long forgotten: how to be in love with existence.

So what makes you fall in love with existence?

And if you don’t know: what would it look like to give yourself permission to find out?

You can call all this impractical if you want. Falling in love with existence won’t help you land a new role, or increase your salary, or navigate the never-ending politics at work.

But in the face of profound joy, will you really care?

Knowing who you are when you’re not working won’t make all your workplace stressors disappear — being underestimated or excluded will still sting. But it will make those stressors feel less like existential crises. It will make it easier to keep things in perspective, and hold those distorted thoughts at bay.

It will help you remember that your life means something, even if your job doesn’t always.

So as you go about your day, I hope you hang onto this knowledge: that true meaning is so much bigger than a job, a title, an industry. And I hope you start to ask yourselves some questions:

• Who am I, and what gives me meaning? What makes me feel alive? What connects me to my values and affirms my humanity?
• Where can my work support the things that give me meaning — and what are the ways that it can’t? Where do I need to let go — to stop seeking validation of my worth through my work?
• What space opens up — space to dream, to hope, to just be — once I do?

I can’t wait to hear your answers.