Episode 32: The Price of Nonconformity: Navigating Life After the Job Matrix

Ever wonder what happens after you walk away from the job matrix? When the title, the paycheck, and the tidy calendar disappear—and you’re left staring at the open sky thinking, “Now what?”

In this episode, I'll dive into the price of nonconformity and what it’s really like to navigate the liminal space—that raw, in-between season where the old life has ended and the new one hasn’t fully taken shape.

This isn’t a “five steps to instant clarity” kind of episode. It’s honest. It’s tender. And it’s for anyone standing on that foggy shoreline, wondering what comes next.

🌿 Listen If:

• You’ve recently quit or are thinking about leaving a traditional job
• You feel lost, unanchored, or like you’re “flying by the seat of your pants”
• You want a realistic, soulful perspective on transition seasons
• You’re craving reassurance that the fog doesn’t last forever

Links:

https://theintercept.com/2022/07/29/bank-of-america-worker-conditions-worse/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vz3HKkVrJE4

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

 #PriceOfNonconformity #LiminalSpace #LeavingTheMatrix #CreativeLife #DecodingTheUnicorn #PodcastEpisode #LifeTransitions #PurposeOverPaycheck #WhatNow 

Transcript

Sara Causey discusses the challenges of escaping the traditional 9-to-5 job, highlighting the shift to remote work during the pandemic and the subsequent "great resignation." She recounts her personal experience of being denied remote work and the impact of AI on the job market, particularly in HR and staffing. She emphasizes the importance of adaptability, strategic planning, and personal resilience in navigating career transitions. She warns against following generic advice, such as freelancing or selling on platforms like Kindle Unlimited, and stresses the need for individualized solutions and the willingness to embrace uncertainty as a creative opportunity.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Non-conformity, job matrix, eight to five, remote work, pandemic impact, great resignation, corporate America, AI in recruitment, job market, career transition, uncertainty, creative living, personal responsibility, economic downturn, career advice.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 32 of decoding the unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you joining me in today's episode, I want to talk about the price of non conformity. There are a plethora of directions that I could go in and other sub topics that are certainly worth exploring for today, I want to talk about what happens when you escape the job matrix, when you have chosen a life that's vastly different from most of the people that you encounter. What next? How do you handle that? How do you handle it, internally and externally? So if you have also escaped the eight to five grind, or if you're thinking about it and you're just weighing your options. Stay tuned. 

Searching for your next great read - the kind of book you can't put down? Check out Sara's award winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn on Amazon.com. Now, back to the show.

For a long time, the scene looked something like this. You get up early in the morning, you dress and groom yourself a certain way, whether it's something you want to do or not, you have to conform to the jobs dress code. So you do it, you fall in line and you conform. Then you get in the car, or you get on public transportation and you commute. Maybe, if you're lucky, you have a short commute and you're only five or 10 minutes away from home. If you're not lucky, if you're like a lot of people living in the suburbs, then you may have a commute of 3045, 60 minutes one way. You go to the job and you stay there all day. You leave your animals and your stuff behind, and you hope that they're okay at the house or the apartment while you go to this office to use a telephone and a computer in a cubicle under fluorescent lighting, and then at five o'clock you punch out, you have to go all the way back home. And then finally, you have a few hours in the evening that belong to you, and you may be too tired to do much of anything. Maybe you go out to happy hour with your friends, or you hit the gym and try to move your body after you've been confined to a cubicle and you've been seated for a vast majority of the day trying to get some exercise and get your blood pumping. Or maybe, like a lot of Americans, you go home, plop yourself down on the couch, eat junk food and watch television, and then that's your life. Monday through Friday. On Saturday, you have to spend time running your errands, doing laundry, getting the groceries purchased, mowing the grass, taking out the trash, all the things that you didn't have the time or energy to do. Monday through Friday, somehow eat up your entire Saturday. And then on Sunday, if you're religious, maybe you go to church in the morning, or you just sleep in. And then you get the Sunday scaries, thinking about how you're going to have to spend an entire week in Groundhog Day, doing the same thing over and over again, dreading it. Then the pandemic happened, and the cat was really out of the bag. Unmistakably, it was clear that a vast majority of office work, slash knowledge work could, in fact, be done from home. I remember reading Tim Ferriss book The Four Hour Work Week, and at the time I tried it because the job that I was working at I had worked very hard for them, and I felt like I probably don't have a chance, but it's worth asking. If you don't ask, you don't get if you don't ask, the answer is always no, and the book made it sound so easy. He uses examples from people, I think, in Silicon Valley, that went to their bosses and said, I will work on my laptop, and I will work from home, and I will do as good a job or better as I would here in the office. And that's going to be my proof of concept. And they were allowed to do it well, the Midwest back in the aughts was not Silicon Valley. Let me tell you, I was turned down immediately. And they told me, you know, the workplace here small, it's intimate. It's almost like a high school. Everybody knows everybody else's business. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing and what we do for one we have to do for all now, you're responsible and you're diligent and you're a hard worker, you would go home and actually work. The problem is nobody else would the other employees would spend half the day in bed and the other half drinking beer, and nobody would get anything done. So the work from home thing is not going to fly here. If you're tired of the commute, you can leave, but we're not going to allow you to work from home, either come in, sit down and shut up, or go find somewhere else to be. And that was that. So back in the day, people who were allowed to work from home, oh my god, that was perceived as something exotic. That was like the Holy Grail of jobs. You get to work from home in your pajamas. Oh my god. Well, then the pandemic happened, and a lot of people went home, and it was obvious that commuting and sitting in an office had been ridiculous all this time. It's like the Emperor wasn't ever wearing any clothes. We just had to pretend that he was and we were pretending for money, because nobody wanted to starve out. So we went home with laptops and cell phones. And really, as long as you have some connection to the Internet, a laptop, and either a cell phone or a VoIP through the computer, you can do a vast majority of white collar knowledge work from the house. And that's the truth, and we all saw it. Then there was this great war that broke out. Remember the great resignation? People were sick and tired of corporate America. They weren't going to take it anymore. And I could see the writing on the wall. I was in HR and staffing work for 15 years. It wasn't ever something that I planned to do. And to be blunt, it wasn't ever something that I really wanted to do. I fell into it, like a lot of people, I don't know, of anybody who goes through high school and college thinking I want to be a third party recruiter when I grow up. It's a tough racket man, and with AI, it's only gotten worse it is. Yeah, that's a separate topic for another time, but suffice it to say, I really niched in hard with the job market. I could read the ebbs and flows, and I knew what was coming, and I knew that the great resignation was not going to last, that corporate America was not going to tolerate it forever, and they didn't. I linked to an article that was posted by the intercept. I'll find it again and link to it here in the write up for this episode, in case you missed it, but they leaked a memo from Bank of America saying, we hope that conditions get worse for workers. They wanted people compliant, and they wanted them back in the office, and I knew they were going to get their way. So now here we are. It's 2025 a lot of people have, in fact, returned to the office. I also saw an article just the other day that the job market in America is as bad as it's been since 2009 that doesn't surprise me, because I knew this was coming, and I tried when I was still really focused on the job market, and my writing, my blogging, was focused on the job market, I tried to warn people, and I felt like Noah building the ark while the sun is shining like nobody wants to listen to you when they're living off the fat of the land and everything's good, they don't want to hear you like you're just a doomsday prophesy, or you're a weirdo, you're a crackpot, and it's like, no, not really. I'm somebody that has ridden a lot of ebbs and flows, a lot of boom bust cycles. I know what's coming, and I'd rather be prepared than scared. I don't want to wait till the last minute to figure out what I'm going to do. So the job market is in the dumper. Things are not good. You have people that have been laid off, and I will be honest with you, I'm in a somewhat similar situation, because I had my HR and staffing business, and I could watch the numbers dwindle year by year. And I knew this is not a coincidence, and it's also not an isolated incident. If you have one bad quarter, you can shake it off. If you have one bad month, you can shake it off, maybe even if you just have one bad year. And you know why? If it was difficult to make money, but you were reinvesting into the business, or you made a couple of bad hires and they set you back a little ways. It's explainable, but when you see the culture changing, it's a bit like the old cliche, you can't fight city hall or going out like King Canute trying to fight the waves, you're in a losing battle. There was also an interview published by The Economist with you all, Noah Harari, where he talks plainly about AI. I'll find the link to that and put it in the podcast. Write up for this episode as well. But he says, AI will be like an alien invasion. It will be like aliens landed from outer space, except it won't be aliens from the planet zircon that look like Martian men. It will be aI the era, he very plainly says, The era of human dominated history is over. I think to ignore that is to do so at your own peril. Now, how this ties into our theme about careers and the job market is this, a number of jobs are going bye, bye. Some already have, and I have absolutely positively noticed this trend in staffing recruit. And HR work. You have so many HR departments now where it's mostly AI and robotics, you have hiring managers that are either not hiring at all. That's one part of it, right? Because if the job market is as bad as it was in 2009 which is smack dab in the middle of the Great Recession, they're not hiring anyway. But when they do hire they're looking at AI and technology so that they don't have to pay fees to a staffing agency, or they don't have to hire a freelance recruiter and pay them 20, 530-550-6070, bucks an hour. It's like, well, if I can make chat, GPT do this for me, or Claude, or some other AI application, why would I not just do that if you ignore that kind of reality, in my opinion, you're doing so to your own detriment, because it's not going to make corporate America or corporate wherever you live, the corporate structure in whatever place you're living in. It's not going to make them change their mind just because you ignore what they're doing.

My prayer, my meditation in this situation was, I want to have a long off ramp from staffing in HR, and a long on ramp into creative living and artistry, because my life got turned upside down last summer. So that would have been the summer of 2024 because of DAC and the writing process and absolutely falling in love with a new vocation and and feeling like it was my vocation. I really shouldn't say a new vocation. I should say a vocation period, because whenever I was working in corporate America, I never felt that way, even when I had jobs that weren't too bad, where I was like, that's nice people, a good boss. This is an all right situation. It was always like that, this is okay, this is all right. This is fine. But it was never like, Oh my God. I feel electrified. I feel like I'm doing exactly, precisely what I was put on this earth to do, and I wanted the off ramp, on ramp, because that's smart, isn't it? It's sensible. It's practical. It's what a practical responsible adult does. A Practical responsible adult doesn't throw caution to the wind and say, I quit and march off without a clue as to how they're going to make money. Well, there's also a famous Yiddish proverb that man plans and God laughs, and that's really quite true, because the door slammed shut. I didn't get a long off ramp and along on ramp, not at all the exit ramp was more like getting thrown off the edge of a mountain and told to survive. And there are other people in that situation too, which is a huge motivator for me to record this episode. It wasn't that I quit the HR and staffing business, it quit me. I fully intended to have a nice, good exit ramp, a nice, good exit strategy. And instead, the business dried up, and there was nothing former clients that had consistently farmed out work to me disappeared. It was almost like in The Avengers when Thanos does the finger snap and everybody well, not everybody. Half the planet blips off. It was like that, except in my case, it was everybody. It was like gone. And I thought, Oh, wow. But at the time that that happened, my last client dissolved on Black Friday of 2024 now why they thought I would be working on Thanksgiving weekend, especially when I had told them that I would be gone until Monday of the next week. I don't know, but they sent me an email saying, Hey, we're we're in dire straits. We need to start cutting and we're going to cut freelancers and temps. First. You're in the business. You know how it goes nothing personal? Well, I was in the middle of trying to get everything ready for decoding the unicorn to go to market at the beginning of January. I knew that I wanted to release it on Tuesday, January the seventh. And I'm like, in order for that to happen, there's a lot of work behind the scenes it. It takes a lot, a lot, to get a book ready to go to market. It's just nuts. The amount of work that goes into it that people in the public never see. They just see a book on the shelf and they it's almost like they think it just came there, like the stork or the cabbage patch for babies. Well, it doesn't. There's, there's a lot that happens that's like, I'm going to release simply dag on July 29 of next year. I'm sitting here recording this episode on Monday, October, the 620, 25 and let me tell you, I'm already like, Oh my God, there's so much to do. There's so much to do even now. Like, it's like, how am I going to do this by July? Everybody else is like, Oh my God, you've got all the time in the world. And I'm like, No, not really. I. So I was busy, and I just thought, I don't I don't really have time to worry about this. I don't really have time to sit and twist my guts into a pretzel over it, because I'm busy. My priority so much. Once that job dissolved, it was like it is full steam ahead, turning on all engines to get the book to market on time. So I guess I can't really say that I had too much stress about it. I worried about it, yes, but not over much, because I was so focused on the book and I was so in my element of doing what I loved. I think that's another part of it too. When you really feel called, you feel that you're absolutely in love with what you're doing. It's not just hours that fly by, it's days, it's weeks, it's months, it's like your life just feels so full, it feels so different than it did before. And when you're you're doing something for a higher purpose, whether that for you is God or some religious figure or it's another person, whatever it's like I I'm outside of myself. This is not all about me. It's about something bigger and better than me, and that's deeply meaningful as well. This video popped up the other day on my YouTube feed, and I don't know this person. I I'm sure that they're a good person. I didn't get any con artist vibes from them, but I have to tell you, the advice this person was giving was just sad, sad, tired and dumpy. That's how I would categorize it, and it's not much different than the advice that you would get from any AI engine or a basic Google search of like, I'm out of work. How do I make money? One of the points that I want to make here is when we start looking at what everybody else is doing, we start looking at the cliches, it's like we're going right back into the matrix. So whether you have recently been laid off, you got fed up and quit, you got fired, the company dissolved and there's nothing left, or you were owning your own business, and suddenly you have no clients and your income is zero. You're sitting there like, Well, what do I do now? Maybe you have something else that you already know you would like to do. You just don't know how to monetize it. Warren Buffett famously said, when everybody else is getting greedy, that's when you should panic. When everybody else is panicking and acting like Chicken Little that's when you should get greedy. That's when you should be calm and strategic. But that's hard. Theoretically, it's perfectly fine to talk about it, to think about it, to daydream about it, but to actually do it to go against the grain. When humans are conditioned to be sociable, be part of the pack, don't make any waves, get along with everybody, or you'll be exiled from the tribe. It's tough. It's okay in the mind, but when you really have to do it in practice, it can sometimes be terrifying. I also had a mentor in my early days in the staffing world, and one of the things that he would say is, look at what the crowd is doing and move in the opposite direction. Again, in theory, yeah, absolutely. In practice, it can be tough. So in this video, this person was talking about how they were laid off from a job that they liked in 2023 and they've been just trying to cobble together this, that and the other strategy to make ends meet while they look for another full time job. They've been on the market for two years, looking, and nothing has come together. They've had a few interviews, but most of the time they don't even get called. They're sending out resumes and nothing is happening. And the times when they have interviewed, it's been like, Well, you did good. We appreciate you, but we're going to go in another direction. And that story is super typical. A lot of job seekers feel the same way right now.

The advice this person was giving, it was very much like, this is what the crowd is doing. This is what this is the general information that you're going to get that doesn't really help very much, in my opinion. Okay, it's kind of like when somebody tells the younger generations, you should just quit buying coffee and brown bag your lunches, and then you'd be able to buy a house. And it's like, What planet are you living on? Saving $5 a day maybe is not going to be enough to pay for a house in this economy. That's just terrible advice. It's the kind of crap advice that makes people feel like I've given you a good point, but it's not a good point. It's pointless. So this person was talking about, I freelance, and I use some of the major websites, but they're they're pretty much terrible, because. It's a race to the bottom on pricing, and I'm sitting there nodding my head like, yeah, that's another reason why I think freelancing on a major platform is, by and large, a waste of time. Okay? Controversial statement, throw rotten tomatoes at me if you want to, but I've seen it play out. It is indeed a race to the bottom of pricing, and you have so many people that marketplace is so crowded. You have so many people that are on there that are fighting for scraps. It's a great position if you're a client and you have picking choice of who you want to hire, but it's not great if you're the freelancer and you're trying to find honest work for a decent pay, it's tough. This person said they also wrote some cheap books and put them on Kindle Unlimited. And I'm like, oh no, oh no. Kindle Unlimited is like an ocean of stuff, and some of it is good. A lot of it isn't. It's like swimming through, in my opinion, which could be wrong. In my opinion, a lot of the books and booklets on there are like swimming through a sea of mediocrity as well. As you know, I try to keep this podcast very G rated, very clean, a plethora of inappropriate, nasty type of stories, I'm sure you catch by drift, but things that would be are rated to say the least. So I'm like, Okay, we've got go be a freelancer, publish some cheap stuff on Kindle Unlimited and see if you miraculously get a following. I'm also thinking about this from the perspective of being an author with an award winning book. I know what it's like to do the heavy lifting on all of this, and you don't give book sales just willy nilly. It's not like people just show up. They materialize from thin air, and they're like, Hey, take my money. I want to buy your book. There's effort that goes into it. It is, it is not a magical get rich quick scheme at all, at all, at all, at all. You better love what you're doing, and you better believe in the message that you're promoting if you're doing it. This person also talked about trying to do like Amazon affiliate links to get a little bit of money if somebody clicks on your link, which I'm not super familiar with that, but it's my understanding that you're lucky if you make a few bucks a month doing that. Then they talked about going to places like thrift stores and garage sales and looking for diamonds in the rough that they could sell on eBay or Facebook marketplace. And I'm like, this is the same advice that everybody gets all the time. So again, I'm thinking in my mind of Warren Buffett, if everybody's doing this, do the opposite, or what my mentor used to say, look at what the crowd is doing and move in the opposite direction. So what do we do? How do we handle this? I talked about the price of non conformity, because there is a price your friends, your family members, that are still clocking in at an eight to five job. They feel like they have the illusion of stability. I get up, I do this routine. I know what's going to happen. I come home, and then I get a paycheck every other Friday, and I know basically what the amount is going to be, especially if they're not working in a commission situation, then they probably know exactly what that paycheck is going to be when you Escape the Matrix, whether you have done so willingly and consensually, or whether you were tossed out because of a layoff, a company closure, you were terminated, whatever you're in a completely different space, sometimes that can feel like emotional whiplash. Sometimes it can feel like you are flying by the seat of your pants, and the people around you are not always very helpful, because they can project their own external panic onto you. Aren't you worried? Aren't you scared? What are you going to do? Or if it's been a while, well, why can't you get hired? Why is it so hard for you to find a job? What are you doing wrong? Then you might have people that it's like on the surface, it seems like they mean well, but it's kind of passive aggressive, because they'll be like, well, you're so brave. Look at you. You're living your dream. Isn't that fantastic? I mean, I could never, because my job is not so bad, and I like that paycheck, and I like that health insurance, but look at you. Look at you. Living your dream isn't that great? It takes. A massive amount of faith to believe that your path or your bridge is going to assemble under your feet. In the autobiography that Brando wrote, he talked about times that he felt like a frog who jumps from lily pad to lily pad. It's like whenever one lily pad was starting to get stale or starting to disappear, he would jump to another lily pad. And it was like almost a sense of magic in life. You have to have that. I would really say it's almost like having a childlike sense of wonder and a childlike sense of faith. Because if you don't, if you get into that Chicken Little space you're doomed. I would also say that you have to remember this too shall pass if you're in, if you're in a space where it feels like you're in free fall, it's helpful to remember this too shall pass. At some point there will be more stability. I will figure it out. It's like Susan Jeffers landmark book, feel the fear and do it anyway. One of the things that she prescribes in that book is I'll handle it. I don't have to know everything that's going to happen to me point by point. I'll handle it. It will be okay. I will handle it. The in between phase, if you're still looking for another job, or you've decided Forget it. I'm not trying to be an entrepreneur. I'm not trying to be a business owner, and I'm not trying to be an employee. I want to figure out what else I can do to make money that doesn't involve something soul crushing, that makes me want to jump off the roof. That's a liminal phase, and it is finite. It may feel infinite. It may feel like for the rest of your life, you're going to be floating weightless and untethered, but that's not true. You will find your footing, and you will have bursts of intuition and bursts of guidance. The more that you're open to that, the easier it becomes if you stay in that Chicken Little space, the sky is falling. I'm doomed, and we're all going to die. You're not going to attract in or listen to that still, small voice inside of you that will give you the guidance that you need. You also have to remember that when you're in the matrix, uncertainty is something to fear. It's bad, it's scary. It's the Boogeyman. Bad things come out of the unknown. We have to stay here in our cubicles and do what we're told and get our bi weekly paycheck, because uncertainty is something to fear. There are other people that look at uncertainty as raw, creative material. They feel like I may not know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow or next week, but I'll handle it, just like Susan Jeffrey says, but I'll handle it. And over the course of time, as you get more practice, improv can become rhythm. So at first, if you've been on a job for a long time, and then you get fired or laid off or you quit, the company closes down the first few days, or even first few weeks, can feel like, what am I doing? What even is this I'm so accustomed to going on autopilot, to getting up at a certain time and going through a certain routine and drinking a certain coffee and then getting to the office, you can feel like, what am I going to do with myself? But you'll find that tempo. If you want to find that tempo, you can build your own routine. Spider Man would always say, with great power comes great responsibility. But with freedom comes responsibility too. You have the freedom to determine your own structure, to determine how you're going to spend each day. And is that sleeping until noon and then spending the rest of the afternoon in a haze, feeling depressed and mad at the world, or are you going to get up and do something?

It can also feel like a free fall or some endless purgatory because your old metrics are gone. You don't have the quarterly goals, the yearly performance review, the boss's approval. Oh, every Wednesday morning at nine, we have our stand up, and I have to talk about this, that and the other. You don't have these checkpoints to tell you you're doing well or you're doing poorly, we favor you or we don't. You have to figure out your own metrics. Quite frankly, do I feel more grounded? Do I feel better today than I did yesterday? Do I feel that what I did was productive? Do I feel that I'm sensing the work that truly lights me up. Do I have a rhythm that's loose but reliable? Do I feel sustained enough in what I'm doing? And last but not least, when we're in this non conformist space, we have to consider, are you really Flying Without Wings and just flapping your arms back and forth? Or. Are you growing new wings? Is the improv that you're doing panic? Or is it agency? Is it a permanent emergency, or is it just the sensation of getting used to something new and different? There is a cost to non conformity, and in my opinion, and in my experience, that cost is you have to decide how you want to spend your freedom, how you want to structure your day, what you are and are not willing to do purely for money. There's no clean and tidy answer that I can give you here, and I'm certainly not going to give you a here's five ways that you can make money. Just go to garage sales and go be a freelancer. I'm not going to do that. I have no idea if that makes any sense for your life or not. I know that based on my observations and my personal experiences. By the time you get people on YouTube telling you, here's how to make money, here's how I did it. It's played out. It's already too late. The market is already too crowded, and it's going to be a cluster. The reality is you have to figure out those answers for yourself, and you have to decide, would I rather go back to a job, a, J, O, B, where a boss is doing the figuring for me, or am I willing to pay the price of non conformity and figure it out for myself? Just some food for thought for today. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.