5 Weeks in 35 Years

You can’t scroll through more than a few updates on LinkedIn to find talk of promotions, success stories, and what’s next.

Together, we celebrate the climb. We analyse the collapse. We optimise the pivot.

What we don’t talk about is the space in between. The unplanned stretch of time when work stops involuntarily and there is no immediate script for what happens next.

Redundancy is often dressed up as something else. A career break. A transition. A pivot. A sabbatical.

But involuntary redundancy is not a rebrand.

It is a rupture. And time does something in the aftermath of a rupture.

Roughly one in three workers will experience involuntary job loss at some point in their career. This is not a rare derailment. It is woven into modern life.

And yet we behave as if it is an anomaly - something to make excuses about. Something that brings with it a quiet sense of shame - even stigma - a feeling of perceived failure.

You may have gone through it yourself. If you haven’t yet, you may well do at some point.

The First Morning

No commute. No inbox. The morning stretching out in front of you. No low-grade urgency nudging you forward. No implicit hierarchy organising your day.

Just time.

And if you let it creep in, a faint, unsettling question underneath it: who am I without the role?

For many people, work is not just income. It is structure. Status. Belonging. Proof. The late Psychologist Marie Jahoda argued that employment provides “latent benefits” beyond pay: time structure, social contact, shared purpose, identity. When work disappears, those scaffolds go with it.

For many men in particular, identity is tightly braided with occupation. Research consistently shows strong links between unemployment and psychological distress, and in cultures where men are socialised to equate work with worth, the impact can be especially sharp.

This wasn’t my first redundancy rodeo. I thought I understood the mechanics of it - the practicalities, the emotional arc. I’d been here before, including once without a new job to go to.

But this time was different. This time, I was lucky. I had another role waiting at the end of the five weeks. Even with that awareness, it was still an adjustment. Because what shifts isn’t just your diary.

It’s your mirror.

At first, though, it didn’t feel existential.

It felt like annual leave.

And so I gave myself a week. A full week to do whatever I wanted. No structure. No targets. No pressure to make it “count”.

I played video games. I tried to get better sleep. I let my brain idle. I thought about what I wanted the remaining weeks to be for. I thought about priorities - not in a performative way, just quietly.

After decades of full-time work, five unstructured weeks is a rounding error in a career. I’ve been working for 35 years. Five weeks in that context is nothing. And yet it felt enormous.

Because I had never had five legitimate, uninterrupted weeks between jobs knowing another role was waiting at the end.

That combination - freedom with a runway - is rare. The first week was decompression. And with decompression came a sense of relief. Relief from the constant vigilance. Relief from the background hum of responsibility. Relief from the forward lean of modern professional life.

But relief wasn’t the only emotion in the room. There was mourning too.

Not for the mechanics of the job.

But for the scale.

For the privilege of working at a level where decisions had reach. For the people I worked with through intense moments. For work that touched thousands of people across the UK and Europe. For conversations that mattered beyond the room they happened in.

I loved the stretch. I loved the impact.

When that disappears, you don’t just lose meetings.

You lose a certain altitude.

You lose the rhythm of influence. The relationships built under pressure. The satisfaction of shaping something larger than yourself.

That’s not ego.

That’s purpose. And purpose doesn’t evaporate neatly when a role ends.

It lingers.

If I’m honest, I couldn’t let go of that identity straight away. My body wasn’t ready. For weeks beforehand, I’d been in a kind of low-grade vigilance. Not dramatic. Just constant. A subtle readiness for the next email, the next conversation, the next decision.

That posture doesn’t disappear overnight. Even in the first week of decompression, I caught myself checking my phone reflexively. Opening email without thinking. Walking slightly too fast, as if I were late for something that no longer existed. The bracing was still there.

It softened gradually.

Sleep deepened. My shoulders dropped. The urge to refresh my inbox faded. Conversations felt slower, less transactional. I noticed I was more patient at home. Less reactive. Less forward-leaning.

Modern professional life trains us into a certain tension. We call it drive. We call it accountability. We call it high standards. But some of it is vigilance. And vigilance leaves a residue.

Only when that residue began to clear did something else become possible — something began to loosen.

This wasn’t a sudden epiphany. I’ve understood for years that identity and occupation intertwine. I’ve written a lot about purpose. I practise mindfulness and meditation. I’m not naïve about how modern work conditions self-worth.

But understanding something intellectually is different from experiencing it viscerally. Even with the best intentions, your identity braids itself with your role.

Psychological research on work and retirement transitions shows that when a central role disappears, people often experience a subtle destabilisation before things resettle.

Not collapse. Just recalibration.

As the nervous system settled, the story underneath it began to shift.

It wasn’t “Who am I?” in a dramatic sense.

It was quieter than that.

If nothing is required of me on a Tuesday morning, what could I choose to do?

I had hundreds of thousands of air miles sitting unused. I had time - genuinely unstructured time - which, in 35 years of full-time work, I’d never really had between roles.

Madrid crossed my mind. Maybe Korea. Travel. Projects long postponed. Time with the boys without the background hum of obligation.

Possibility has weight. When structure disappears, the horizon widens. And widened horizons demand authorship.

About a year before the redundancy, I was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. It wasn’t a dramatic moment. More a clarification. A lens that helped explain certain intensities; sensitivity to right and wrong, deep focus, the need to really understand, a nervous system that can run hot under sustained pressure.

If anything, it sharpened my awareness of how braced I often was. So when the role paused, and the vigilance slowly eased, something unexpected emerged.

Calm.

Not the absence of noise. The absence of internal friction.

There’s a Japanese concept, heijōshin, often translated as “everyday calm” — a steady presence regardless of circumstance. It’s close to what mindfulness points toward, but rarely what modern life sustains.

That’s the closest word I’ve found.

Peace.

And peace is one of the most underrated states in professional life. We optimise for productivity. For growth. For impact. For influence.

We rarely optimise for calm. But in those weeks, I rediscovered it. Not permanently. Not perfectly.

But enough to remember what it feels like when your body isn’t anticipating the next demand. When your mind isn’t rehearsing future conversations. When you can sit on a Tuesday morning and simply be.

In 35 years of full-time work, I’m not sure I’d ever experienced that without an endpoint circled in red on the calendar.

Next week, I start a new role. This morning, my new laptop arrived. It is sat on my kitchen table still in its box. New. Charged. Full of possibility. And I could feel something subtle beginning to shift.

A forward lean returning. A mild alertness. A sense of gearing up.

Not anxiety. Just activation.

It’s remarkable how quickly the body remembers.

Over the past five weeks, something in me softened. The vigilance eased. The nervous system reset. I reconnected with a quieter version of myself. The calm re-emerged.

I know it won’t disappear entirely when I start again. But I also know that work asks something of us.

Focus. Speed. Performance. Masking, sometimes.

Even when you understand your wiring. Even when you practise mindfulness. Even when you try to stay centred.

Work is structured intensity. And intensity has a cost.

The gap reminded me of that.

Five weeks in 35 years is nothing. And yet it has changed me.

Not dramatically. Not visibly. Just enough. Enough to remember how to just be. Enough to notice when the body braces. Enough to know that peace is not weakness.

As I open that laptop on Monday morning, I’ll step back into responsibility, into scale, excitement and influence. Into new challenges with new people.

But I’ll carry something with me from the gap. A memory of what it feels like not to rush.

And perhaps that is the real value of time we never planned to have.