I retired last June after forty-three years in the same building and the relief lasted exactly six weeks before I realized I had built my entire identity around a job that replaced me in eleven days - Silicon Canals

"For about six weeks, I felt like I'd won the lottery. Then one morning, I woke up and didn't know who the hell I was anymore. The identity crisis nobody warns you about. You spend your whole life being something. In my case, an electrician. Started as an apprentice at eighteen, straight out of high school, and that was it. That was who I was."

"They replaced me in eleven days. Eleven. Four decades of showing up, knowing every circuit in that building like the back of my hand, and it took them less than two weeks to find someone else to fill my spot. I remember standing in my garage about two months after retiring, looking at all my tools. Thousands of dollars worth of equipment I'd collected over forty years."

"The thing is, I'd let the job become everything. When someone once told me "you're just an electrician" at a party, it stung. But instead of realizing how messed up it was to let a job define me, I just worked harder to be the best electrician I could be."

A retired electrician reflects on leaving a 43-year career and experiencing an unexpected identity crisis. Despite initial relief from ending early mornings and work stress, he discovered that his entire sense of self had become defined by his profession. Being replaced within eleven days highlighted how replaceable he was despite decades of expertise. Standing in his garage surrounded by tools he no longer used, he confronted the reality that he had allowed his job to become everything. A casual insult about being "just an electrician" years earlier had driven him to prove his worth through work rather than addressing the deeper issue of over-identifying with his profession.

Read at Silicon Canals