CAREER CUSHIONING ISN’T ABOUT CAREER.

Career cushioning isn’t a career strategy. It’s the symptom of an era when institutions stopped manufacturing identity — and humans had to learn to build themselves alone. The phenomenon the market named, domesticated — and still doesn’t understand. Today’s text is about the end of an era when institutions told you who you were — and about what comes next. by Marcello de Souza
There is something happening now that goes far beyond any HR trends research. Something that consultancies measure without understanding, that experts name without seeing, that professionals themselves practice without knowing what they’re really doing.
Career cushioning — the growing practice of building skills, projects, and parallel possibilities while still employed — is being read as a career strategy. As professional prudence. As an intelligent response to an unstable market.
It is none of that. Or rather: it is all of that — but underneath, in the underground, something much larger is happening. The contemporary professional isn’t just creating job alternatives. They are reconstructing their own identity outside the institutions that, for two centuries, were the only ones authorized to say who they were. And they’re doing this without a map, without guarantee, and — in most cases — without knowing they’re doing it.
This text is about that underground. About what is being gestated there — silently, at 10 PM on a Thursday, in open tabs no one saw — and about what this reveals not just about you, but about the historical time in which all of us, without exception, are living.
The identity factory no one realized existed
For most of modernity, there was an undeclared agreement between human beings and the great institutions — the company, the State, religion, the family as social structure. An agreement that was never written because it never needed to be. It worked even before any signature.
The agreement was this: you deliver your time, your energy, your loyalty — and in exchange receive something that goes far beyond salary. You receive location in the world. You receive a mirror that tells you who you are. You receive identity.
Think about how this worked. A worker in 1970 didn’t need to ask who they were. They were a metalworker at the factory, or a bank employee, or the neighborhood school teacher. They were a family man, a parish member, a resident of the same address for twenty years. Each of these institutions was a layer of their self — a ready answer to the most difficult question that exists: who am I?
And note: this was no one’s privilege. The bricklayer and the engineer, the domestic worker and the teacher — all received identity packaged by the structures in which they were inserted. The package varied in social prestige. But the function was the same: to situate the human being in a recognizable place, in a named role, in a collective plot that gave meaning to what they did every day.
Institutions manufactured identity with an efficiency that dispensed with any consciousness of the process. You didn’t choose your identity — you received it. And this, however limiting it may seem today, had a profound psychological function: it alleviated the unbearable weight of having to build yourself from scratch, without a map and without guarantee. The organization wasn’t just a workplace. It was a meaning factory.
Two sides of the same collapse: grief and liberation
No newspaper published the news. No decree signed the end. But at some point between the late 20th century and the beginning of this one, institutions stopped fulfilling their part of the agreement. Not all at once. Silently, with the bureaucratic elegance of someone changing contract terms in the fine print.
Companies began firing with surgical efficiency — not out of cruelty, but because the market rewarded whoever did it faster. The State lost its capacity to offer collective belonging. Religion ceased to be the common ground of a community and became an individual choice on a menu of spiritualities. The nuclear family became one among many possible configurations, increasingly incapable of offering what it always had: a fixed place in the world.
And suddenly, without anyone having prepared for it, the contemporary human being found themselves facing an unprecedented situation in history: having to manufacture their own identity without the factories that had always done this work for them.
Here, however, it is necessary to stop and say something that most texts on this theme ignore: this collapse isn’t experienced the same way by everyone — nor is it mourned by everyone.
For a significant portion of people, the bankruptcy of identity factories is, above all, liberation. The son of a conservative family who never had space to be who they are. The woman whom the family institution defined as an extension of her husband. The young person from the periphery whom the school institution saw as a dropout statistic, not as a subject in formation. The migrant who arrives in a new city and, for the first time in life, can reinvent themselves without the weight of a structure that had already decided who they are.
For these, the collapse of factories isn’t trauma — it’s oxygen. It isn’t an identity crisis — it’s the first real opportunity to build one. And career cushioning, for this group, isn’t born from fear of losing what they have. It’s born from hunger to build what they were never allowed to have.
The text that treats the end of institutional factories only as loss is telling half the story — and the half that interests the classes that had more to lose from this end. The other half, equally true, is that these same factories manufactured, along with identity, exclusion. And that their bankruptcy opened gaps that many people are using to exist in ways that were simply prohibited before.
The collapse is real. The grief is legitimate. And liberation is also real. And also legitimate. This text doesn’t resolve this tension — because it has no resolution. It needs to be sustained.
Who is doing cushioning — and who never had the luxury of naming it
There is a trap in texts about professional behavior that this one needs to name before falling into it: the tendency to portray as universal an experience that is, in fact, quite specific.
When we speak of career cushioning, the immediate imaginary is of a certain profile: mid-to-high level professional, with some stability, with enough free time to open tabs at 10 PM, with access to courses, networks, and parallel possibilities. The engineer who studies philosophy. The manager who builds a network of entrepreneurs. The director who learns carpentry.
But the machine operator who, after two shifts, studies at night for a public service exam — they are also doing cushioning. The domestic worker who learns to make cakes to sell on weekends, building a parallel income that one day may become a business — she is also doing cushioning. The delivery driver who learns mechanics in their free time to reduce dependence on their boss — he is also doing cushioning.
The difference isn’t in the gesture — it’s in the vocabulary available to name it, in the time available to practice it, and in the margin of error allowed for making mistakes in this process. Those who have social class and protection networks can make mistakes in cushioning and start over. Those who don’t, cannot make mistakes. And this changes everything about how the phenomenon is experienced — even when the internal movement is identical.
Naming this isn’t diminishing the phenomenon. It’s amplifying its truth. Because identity reconstruction outside institutions isn’t the privilege of those with an updated LinkedIn. It’s a human response to the same collapse — lived with different resources, different risks, different urgencies. And ignoring this is, once again, making a particular experience pass for universal.
What the market did by naming — and why this matters
There is an irony that needs to be named, because it reveals much about how the system digests what could subvert it.
Career cushioning, as a phenomenon of post-organizational identity reconstruction, is potentially subversive. It points to the exhaustion of the model in which the organization is the primary source of meaning and belonging in adult life. It suggests, even if silently, that this model failed — and that people are building alternatives.
But by naming this phenomenon as a “career strategy,” the market did something very skillful: it domesticated the rupture. It transformed an act of identity emancipation into one more item on the list of competencies to develop. It placed the questioning of the system within the vocabulary of the system itself.
Career cushioning became a course. Became an HR lecture. Became a productivity podcast theme. And by becoming all this, it stopped being what it really is: a collective symptom that something fundamental changed in the relationship between human beings and institutions. When a society needs to create a market term to name the basic right to exist beyond a function, this doesn’t say something about people. It says something about the depth of the collapse of a model that should never have monopolized human identity to begin with.
What organizations can do — and what they cannot
Here it is necessary to be honest in a way that most texts on this theme refuse: if the problem is structural, no cultural change resolves it completely. And any text that, after diagnosing a civilizational collapse, offers “five practices for more engaging organizations” is being, at minimum, naive.
Organizations cannot reconstruct what institutions lost. They cannot return to professionals the certainty of belonging that late modernity dissolved. They cannot, however much they invest in culture and purpose, be what they were between 1950 and 1980 — and probably shouldn’t want to be, because part of what they were in that period was also control, standardization, and manufacturing of conformity.
What organizations can do is more modest — and, precisely because of this, more honest. They can stop pretending to be more than they are. They can abandon the theater of eternal purpose and corporate family and replace it with something more real: clear contracts, genuine development, and the honesty of saying that the relationship has a term and conditions — but that, within that term and those conditions, there is space for real growth.
A professional who knows that the organization isn’t their identity factory — and who knows that the organization knows they know — can build a much more honest relationship with it. Without the anxious dependence of someone who delivered their self to an institution. Without the resentment of someone who was betrayed by a promise that should never have been made. Real presence doesn’t come from those who have nowhere to go. It comes from those who, being able to go, choose to stay. And this choice only exists when the relationship is honest about what it is — and about what it is not.
What comes after the factories — and why it isn’t the individual alone
Here is the question that texts on this theme systematically avoid — because the answer is uncomfortable and incomplete. If institutional identity factories have collapsed, what comes in their place?
The easiest answer — and the most dangerous — is: the sovereign individual. The human being who builds themselves alone, who needs no institution to define themselves, who is complete author of themselves. This narrative is everywhere: in perfectly curated digital profiles, in personal brands cultivated with surgical precision, in the vocabulary of entrepreneurship of the self.
But this narrative is, itself, a trap. Because identity built completely alone, without collective structure, without belonging, without shared ritual — isn’t emancipation. It’s loneliness with a pretty name. It’s the individual who, liberated from the factories that suffocated them, discovers that they also needed them to not get lost.
What is being gestated — in fragmented, imperfect form, still without a consolidated name — isn’t the sovereign individual. They are new forms of belonging. Smaller than 20th century institutions. More porous. Chosen, not inherited. Revocable without ceremony. Built around shared practices, not dogmas or fixed hierarchies.
Communities of people who do the same thing and recognize themselves in it. Networks of affinity that form around a project, a cause, a way of seeing the world. Bonds that don’t need headquarters, statutes, organograms — but that offer what every institution always offered at its best: a mirror, a place, a “we.”
The professional who builds something parallel at 10 PM isn’t just seeking alternative income or protection against dismissal. In many cases, they’re seeking this “we” that the organization stopped offering. They’re trying to find people who make sense — not by the position they hold, but by what they do when no one is evaluating. They’re building, brick by brick and without knowing how to name it, the structures of belonging that will replace the factories that collapsed.
This isn’t nostalgia for old institutions. It’s the human response, always collective at its core, to a void that market individualism promised to fill — and didn’t fill.
You are living a historical moment — inside you
This is what this text came to say, at its core: what you feel when you open those tabs at 10 PM isn’t just professional anxiety. It’s an echo of something much larger. It’s what happens when one era ends and another still has no name.
For two centuries, modernity built a model in which institutions were the obligatory intermediaries between the human being and meaning. You needed an organization to work, a religion to have faith, a State to be a citizen. Identity was always mediated. Always dependent on a larger structure.
This model is coming undone. With real losses for those who depended on it. With real openings for those who were suffocated by it. And with a new demand, falling on everyone without distinction of class or vocabulary: that each person find ways to build themselves that don’t depend entirely on any institution — but that also don’t fall into the isolation of those who believe they can exist without others.
Career cushioning — that behavior that research measures, that experts debate, and that HR tries to manage — is, at its most honest root, the first collective and unconscious gesture of a generation learning to do this work. Learning to exist beyond institutions. Learning to build belonging without depending on any factory for it. Learning, stumbling and without a map, to be author of themselves — without ever being able to do this completely alone.
This isn’t small. This is historical.
And it’s happening inside you.
The question that remains — and has no quick answer
If you’ve made it this far, something has changed in the angle you were looking at your own behavior. What before seemed like a career strategy now has a different weight. A different density.
And the questions this text leaves aren’t about how to do more efficient cushioning. They are more difficult, slower, more necessary:
Who are you becoming — outside any institution, beyond any position, independent of any external approval? What identity are you building that survives the collapse of everything that once told you who you were? And with whom are you building this — because no one builds true identity completely alone?
These questions have no quick answer. They shouldn’t have. Because they are, perhaps, the most important that a human being can ask in the time we live in. And the fact that you are asking them — even if unconsciously, even if at 10 PM in an open tab no one will see — is the beginning of something that matters much more than any plan B.
It’s the beginning of you. Built by you. With others.
If this text displaced something in you — a restlessness that won’t go away, a question that remained, the sensation that you were living something larger than you knew — know that this discomfort has a name: it’s the beginning of real development. Not the development that companies ask for. The development that life demands.
On my blog, there are hundreds of texts that explore human behavior, relationships inside and outside organizations, and cognitive development with the depth and honesty these themes demand. No self-help. No recipes. With the courage to go where most won’t — and to sustain the questions that have no easy answers.
Visit: marcellodesouza.com.br — because the path to who you are becoming begins with the questions you haven’t yet allowed yourself to ask.
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