This all started before my workday had even officially begun.
I was sitting in that quiet, liminal space before the world wakes up—the window of time before peak output demands take over and “work mode” forces you into a box. My phone buzzed. A colleague had sent me a recent BBC article detailing the current state of the UK economy. The headlines were bleak, but familiar: unemployment rising, the job market weakening, opportunities shrinking, and competition fiercer than ever.
Instantly, that familiar, universal wave of anxiety hit me. It’s a feeling almost everyone reading this knows intimately:
Fear.
Uncertainty.
“What does this mean for me?”
But instead of rushing into my day or burying the panic under a mountain of tasks, I did something different. I sat with it. I read the article closely. I reflected, and then I opened my journal.
As I wrote in that quiet morning space, a profound shift happened inside me. I realized something unexpected, something that felt like a quiet rebellion: While the world around me was panicking about the job market... I wasn’t afraid anymore.
The System We’ve Been Taught (And Why It’s Broken)
We have all been conditioned by the exact same playbook from the moment we enter school: get a job, stay secure, work hard, and wait to be chosen.
We are taught to treat our labor, our time, and our talent as something that requires external validation before it can exist. But what happens when the math of that system fails? What happens when available jobs don’t match the actual population, when stability becomes an illusion, and when the opportunities we were promised begin to shrink?
We panic. Because when you are trained only to be chosen, a lack of choices feels like a lack of existence.
I see the human cost of this broken system every single day in my role as a Careers Adviser. People come to me utterly broken by the machinery of the modern job hunt. They sit across from me and say things like:
“No one wants me.”
“I keep getting interviews, but nothing ever works out.”
“I’ll take anything now. Just give me anything.”
It’s not just in their words; it’s written entirely in their body language. I see people entering my office defeated, their confidence entirely eroded, operating in pure, exhausting survival mode.
And looking at them, I am constantly reminded of a very specific parallel.
The Modern Job Hunt is Like Tinder
Let’s be honest about what platforms like Indeed have done to our professional lives: looking for a job right now is exactly like being on a dating app.
The mechanics are identical. You apply everywhere. You swipe through listings. You throw your profile into a digital void, waiting for responses, desperately hoping someone—anyone—chooses you. And when a company finally does? You feel a sudden, desperate surge of relief.
But it’s a false relief. You accept the offer even if it’s not right. Even if it doesn’t fit your skills. Even if, deep down in your gut, you know: this isn’t what I actually want.
We settle because we are terrified. I know this because I lived it. In my 20s, I did the exact same thing in my personal relationships. I stayed in “waiting to be chosen” mode. I adjusted my personality, shrunk my boundaries, and accepted whatever scraps came my way simply because the background radiation of my life was a fear that asked: “What if nothing better comes along?”
But here is the truth we have to face: Indeed is the Tinder of the professional world. It is fast, deeply transactional, and entirely volume-driven. It is a system built for numbers, not for deep alignment or human capability. When you rely solely on that system to dictate your worth, you inevitably start behaving like the system itself. You apply faster, you lower your standards, and you chase validation from strangers. The fundamental question shifts from a position of power (“Is this company right for me?”) to a position of submission (“Will they take me?”).
And that right there is exactly where people lose their power. If you rely entirely on the permission of others to build your life, you will always remain powerless.
The Shift: Self-Worth vs. Self-Value
My life changed completely when I stopped asking “Who will hire me?” and started asking “What value do I bring?”
It sounds like a subtle shift in vocabulary, but it is an absolute paradigm shift in psychology. During a breakthrough period in therapy, I learned a distinction that reshaped my entire worldview:
Self-worth is an internal metric; it’s how you feel about yourself as a human being.
Self-esteem is comparative; it’s how you rate your performance against others.
But Self-value? That is something entirely different. Self-value is the absolute, unquestionable knowledge that you possess something real, tangible, and impactful to offer the world.
Most people navigating the job market right now don’t have self-value. Not because they don’t have skills, but because the system they are trapped in has never allowed them to see it.
Unveiling the Supercar Engine
I come from a poor background. For over forty years of my life, operating in survival mode was just my normal. To me, life was a simple, brutal equation: work hard, push through the pain, get nowhere, and repeat the cycle. When you grow up in that environment, you are conditioned to just “work harder”—even when it’s blatantly obvious that the work isn’t working.
Sometimes, when we see people struggling, they aren’t failing at all. They are simply working incredibly hard in the wrong places, entirely unsupported, while quietly carrying heavy, invisible burdens. For me, those hidden struggles included profound burnout, mental health battles, and navigating hidden disabilities while pushing myself far beyond human limits.
On the outside, I was completely high-functioning. I was the reliable one, the one who delivered. But on the inside, I had entirely broken down.
I was like a high-performance supercar engine that had suffered a catastrophic internal failure—yet the world kept treating me like a basic, disposable car that should just keep running without a mechanic.
Then, the universe pulled the remaining ground from beneath my feet. COVID arrived, transforming the world overnight. Simultaneously, my personal life fractured, and I was blindsided by a divorce. It felt like having two massive carpets violently yanked out from under me at the exact same moment. I didn’t even have the vocabulary to understand the sheer scale of what was happening to me.
When Passion Becomes Pressure
Throughout my life, I always had passion projects. They were my true expression—writing, building things from scratch, creating digital platforms, and experimenting out in the open. They weren’t just hobbies; they were me.
But in the wake of the collapse, when the financial terror set in and I desperately needed money, I made a mistake many creators make: I tried to force those organic passion projects into immediate, rigid “businesses.”
The moment I did that, the life choked right out of them. Passion driven strictly by financial desperation, without a stable foundation, breaks. The pressure became so immense that a profound resistance took over; I reached a point where I couldn’t even bring myself to open my laptop.
It was only back in therapy that the realization finally hit me: My passion projects were never the problem. They were the truest reflection of who I am. I hadn’t lost myself; I had just lost the freedom around myself.
The evidence of who I actually was had been there all along, stretching right back to my childhood. From a young age, I was always building: selling on eBay, designing websites, running community platforms, creating content, and constantly experimenting. I didn’t call it “entrepreneurship” back then; I was just doing what I loved.
And ironically, that unforced creativity is exactly what originally led to my biggest real-world breakthroughs. It opened doors to marketing, events, brand strategy, and content creation. It led to collaborations with massive teams, features on the BBC, the Huffington Post, and Hello Asia.
I didn’t get those opportunities because I begged an algorithm on a job board to notice me. I got them because I built undeniable value first.
The Return of “Self-Employed Sarah”
Recently, a very mundane, everyday frustration triggered a massive internal awakening. I was looking for an outfit for a special occasion, and absolutely nothing worked. It was the same design flaws, the same lack of insight into what real people need, the same old frustrations. I realized that after 20 years, this specific market hadn’t changed at all.
But instead of just sighing and accepting it, something clicked. Within two to three hours, I was possessed by an old energy. I mapped out a complete business idea, structured a product concept, drew up a research plan, began prototyping the logic, and conducted an instant market insight analysis.
Just like that.
In a flash of a few hours, I met myself again. That was the pre-COVID me. That was “Self-Employed Sarah”—the version of me who instinctively sees gaps in the world, builds ideas, and engineers creative solutions.
That version of me never actually left. She had just been buried alive under years of survival pressure.
Reclaiming the Choice
Now, I finally see my own value. If others don’t see it, that no longer dictates my reality; it simply means we are not a structural match.
When I was a young adult, I used to say a line that defined my early ambition: “If a door doesn’t open for me, I’ll just build a new one and open it myself.” That is exactly what I am doing again. Except this time, it isn’t an act of desperate survival—it is entirely intentional. I am returning to self-employment, to my passion projects, and to my raw creativity, but with an entirely upgraded toolkit. I now deeply understand human behavior, market economics, culture, and systemic structures. I see the chessboard of the world with absolute clarity.
Even my current role as a Careers Adviser wasn’t a detour or a limitation. It was a vital piece of the puzzle. It was the space that forced me to slow down enough to look at the trees, to look at the sky, and to reconnect with the basic beauty of life. In learning to truly see the world again, I finally saw myself.
I am no longer afraid of job interviews or corporate gatekeepers. When I show up now, I show up entirely as myself. The desperate energy of begging to be chosen is entirely gone. Instead, the proposition is simple: “Here is who I am, and here is the exact value I bring. Let’s see if this works for both of us.”
My internal landscape has undergone a total elemental shift:
From Fear to Trust
From Anxiety to Understanding
From Stress to Calm
From Pressure to Choice
I know who I am now. I am a creator, a strategist, a deep thinker, and someone who genuinely sees the hidden potential and hope in other people. I always have been.
Back in school, my teachers used to write on my report cards: “She’s incredibly bright—she just doesn’t perform well in exams.” I understand now what they couldn’t: I was never built to find success inside their rigid, pre-packaged systems.
But I have been performing. I have been running a high-performance engine for decades without a support team, without recognition, and while breaking through invisible glass ceilings designed to keep me small.
My engine is fully running again. Life didn’t break me; it simply stripped away everything that wasn’t me until my true shape was revealed.
I stopped waiting to be chosen—and I finally started building a life where I am the one who chooses.
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