The Year I Gave Up On Prestige
When I examined my trophy-chasing behavior, I realized it wasn’t serving me—and I didn’t need it anymore
In the final moments of 2021, I’ve been reflecting on what was perhaps the biggest change in my life in the last twelve months: It was the year I gave up on chasing prestige.
Several things contributed to this. One was when an ostensible career highpoint in 2020 turned out to be one of the worst experiences of my professional life. I sat in my therapist’s office in February of 2020 and realized that if this is what success in my chosen industry felt like, I’m not sure I wanted it anymore.
It was a stark and identity-shaking realization, one that my therapist said I was lucky to figure out relatively early in life, when I’d only invested a decade in this path, rather than three. Shortly thereafter came the pandemic, when the whole idea of building a shiny and impressive professional self behind a screen started to feel hollow and frankly a little dumb. I felt a drive to create a richer off-screen life and more practical skills —the kind that don’t belong on LinkedIn, but might be more useful in a climate-disrupted future.
The second factor was moving away from a large city where virtually everyone I spent time with was chasing prestige in some…
