Who Told You?
On job hugging, fake it till you make it, and the truest version of you that's still waiting to be expressed
This reflection emerged from a recent conversation with Lindsay Whitby on the Here and Now podcast.
Who told you the goal had to be exponential? Who told you that the only option is to keep getting promoted? Who decided that more, faster, higher was the shape your life should take?
Somewhere along the way, you inherited a script. And somewhere along the way, you started performing it so well that you forgot it wasn’t yours. It’s like when you spot Keanu Reeves and you say “Oh my God, it’s Neo!”
We do the same thing to ourselves. We mistake the role for the person.
I recently came across a term — job hugging. Different to quiet quitting. Job hugging is when you know, somewhere in you, that this role no longer fits. That you’ve stopped growing. But you’re so terrified of losing it — the income, the identity, the sense of worth it provides — that you cling anyway.
Underneath the clinging is something worth naming: we have built entire lives around a corporate credo that says fake it till you make it. While it may sound like resilience, I see it as a prescription for inauthenticity. And when you keep being inauthentic — when you perform the version of yourself that the system rewards — you know. In the quiet moments, when no one is watching, you know you’re lying. And the fattest lie is the one you tell yourself.
It’s what happens when we spend decades suppressing who we actually are in order to belong, to be accepted, to keep the attachment intact. The authentic self keeps sending signals. The Sunday dread. The hollowness after the win. The question at 3am that refuses to go away. Buried — not destroyed, just buried. We lose touch with it — and slowly forget who we are.
And by authentic I don’t mean unfiltered. I mean indigenous — the expression that emerges when you are connected to your deepest self, not your loudest reaction. Real purpose — when you find it — is never at the expense of others. It is always, at its core, an expression of love. The truest version of you doesn’t feel the need to assert itself. It simply serves.
The world is changing faster than any script can keep up with. The roles many of us have built our identities around are being automated, restructured, made redundant. When the title disappears — when the job that told you who you were is simply gone — what remains?
This is not a threat. It is an invitation. Perhaps the most important one of our time.
Viktor Frankl — who found meaning even in the darkest of human circumstances — wrote that the search for meaning is not occasional. It is inevitable. Every human being will return to this question, again and again, throughout their lifetime. Not because something is wrong with them. Because finding meaning and purpose is profoundly right.
The poet Mary Oliver asked it simply: what will you do with this one wild and precious life?
Not your role. Not your function. Your life. The one you actually chose — or the one you’re still waiting to choose.
Underneath every role, every performance, every inherited goal — there is something that was there before all of it. Something that cannot be automated, replicated, or made redundant. The truest version of you — waiting to be expressed.
What remains is the question every human being is ultimately here to answer: what is my unique way of loving and serving this world? This is the truest expression of purpose. Not a job title. Not a career. A living, breathing expression of who you genuinely are.
The wise ancient teachers called it the self. The soul. The divine within. Different translations of the same doorway. And the way back to it is not complicated. It requires only what most of us never give ourselves: space, silence, stillness, and the honesty to ask who we actually are beneath everything we have been told to be.
I recently recorded a reading of Rumi’s poem Return to the Root of the Root of Yourself.
Listen here: https://youtube.com/shorts/k9k9hfKGIk8?si=IDDP8x8uvus-uBUz
After listening, sit quietly for five minutes with one question:
Whose life have I been living — and what would I do differently if I chose it myself?
Don’t rush to answer. Let the question sit. That is enough to begin.