You Got Use To The Smell
Spend enough time around a pile of shit and eventually the smell stops hitting you the same way. The pile stays exactly where it is while your senses get used to the room, and after a while you can stand there having a perfectly normal conversation without thinking much about what you’re standing beside.
I’ve been thinking about this every time I open LinkedIn lately.
There’s no shortage of legitimate employer mess to talk about. Some companies handle layoffs terribly, promotion processes develop another hurdle once a woman is already doing the work, and people spend years contributing beyond the level at which they’re recognized or compensated. These experiences deserve to be named accurately because work has material consequences for people’s money, health, time, opportunity, and lives.
What keeps catching my attention is how much of the career conversation stays parked there.
So much of the language revolves around what the employer did, what the manager failed to see, why leadership got it wrong, what the company should have paid, and what somebody else should have recognized sooner.
After enough of it, “they” starts becoming the most important word in the career.
They didn’t see me. They didn’t promote me. They won’t pay me. They keep moving the goalpost. They don’t value people like me. They control whether I get the opportunity.
The language can feel completely reasonable because the underlying experience may be completely accurate. The employer may have handled the situation poorly. The manager may have made a decision that overlooked important information. The compensation may be badly misaligned with the contribution. A promotion process may have revealed exactly how decisions get made there.
I’m interested in what happens once the truth has already been established and the career conversation keeps orbiting it anyway.
Repeated exposure makes familiar ideas easier for the brain to retrieve. When we encounter the same interpretation again and again, it gets a head start the next time something happens. Familiarity can make a particular way of understanding work feel so normal that, over time, an interpretation starts behaving like a belief about how careers work.
This is what’s happened across much of employer-centered career discourse.
We can spend all day criticizing companies for having too much power while continuing to organize the conversation around what the company sees, pays, rewards, decides, and recognizes. The employer keeps the starring role, and after enough repetition, the arrangement starts to feel so ordinary that we stop noticing the smell.
Eventually, capability gets understood through whether someone recognized it, readiness through whether someone promoted you, value through whatever number appeared in the compensation band, and career movement through whatever opportunity someone else decided to open.
The same handoff can happen when the response is favorable. A promotion, generous compensation, or meaningful recognition can add useful evidence to the record without becoming the source of your capability. Career ownership asks you to stay close enough to your own evidence that applause can affirm what you know without becoming how you know it.
It’s a tremendous amount of career meaning to hand over to organizations whose decisions we spend half the day questioning.
And I’m tired of this being treated as the only serious way to talk about work.
I care much more about the woman who already knows the relationship with her manager has limits and now has to decide what the information means for her career. What has she learned about the exchange? What has the experience revealed about her capability? What has she built while she was there, and what does her own evidence support from here?
The center of gravity shifts back toward her working life.
Employer behavior belongs in the record because it tells you something about the environment you’re operating inside. A company can show you how it values the work, how it makes decisions, where access lives, and what kind of future is reasonably available there. Recognition can tell you something. Compensation can tell you something. So can being overlooked, supported, challenged, promoted, or passed over.
The response adds information. Your judgment still has to decide what the information means.
At some point, another story confirming what you already believe about a manager or organization stops adding anything new. The environment has already given you enough evidence to trust your read, and another six months spent studying the same conclusion won’t make it more useful.
There’s a whole working life happening beyond that conversation.
There’s work you’ve done that travels with you, judgment you’ve developed through experience, and preferences that have become clearer because you lived through something. Your relationships, money, ambitions, constraints, desires, and possibilities deserve enough room for you to see them clearly and decide what they mean.
That room gets harder to find when so much career attention keeps getting dragged back toward somebody else’s response.
Sometimes distance is what lets the smell register again. A different kind of career conversation, less time spent consuming employer-centered outrage, or closer attention to your own evidence can make the atmosphere feel unfamiliar enough for you to notice it. When you return, you begin hearing how often the story still starts and ends with “they”, and the pile you had grown accustomed to standing beside becomes obvious again.
The shit may be real. Read what it tells you about the environment, add the information to the record, and remember that you have an entire career beyond the pile.
In Your Own Working Life
Notice where “they” appears most often in the way you currently talk or think about your career. What has the employer, manager, or organization already shown you clearly enough to become evidence, and what in your own working life deserves more of your attention now?
