The Sovereign Builder

TL:DR: Why you are the source of “patient capital”

Essay 3 of 3

This essay bears witness to my messy breakup from traditional employment and the raw, unfiltered odyssey of self-reclamation by way of my portfolio career. Written from inside the liminal space where so many working professionals now find themselves, it offers a mirror—and maybe a little courage—for those seeking a softer, kinder, more honest path forward whilst rebuilding their career.

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I. We Were Never Meant to Be Free Here

I don’t mean to sound jaded, but I don’t believe the modern American career was ever designed for freedom. In fact, I think it was engineered for control. Akin to a prison cell with pretty window dressings—titles, benefits, and a 401(k)—that promised stability in exchange for our silence and compliance.

And for a while, it worked on us. The perks muffled our unrest. We overlooked the subtle (and not-so-subtle) violations of our personal boundaries and belief systems.

We stayed tethered to these systems not out of alignment, but out of comfortability. We forgot we ever had a choice: the comfort we were afforded just enough to dull the ache of exiling pieces of ourselves.

But the foundations of the institutions our livelihoods depend on are cracking, trembling under the weight of polycrises—climate disaster, economic precarity, runaway AI, the rise of authoritarianism, and the concentration of wealth.

And through the chaos, something ancient is beginning to stir within us.

A deeper knowing.
A hunger for authorship.
A memory of self.
Our intuition is trying to call us home.

If you’ll indulge me, I want to share the story of my own silly little career and how it led me to discover the portfolio career model and embrace my own discernment for how the working world really operates.

II. The Underbelly of Globalization

I graduated college in 2006, delaying “real life” by taking part in a short-term Peace Corps-style program in rural Mexico. I lived in the beautiful outskirts of Oaxaca, working for a small nonprofit in a town hollowed out by free trade, corruption, and the drug war. Eighty percent of the men from Santa Cruz Papalutla—fathers, brothers, sons—had left for the US on the promise of a better life. Their families left behind to hold it all together in their wake. 

I am still to this day deeply appreciative of starting my adult life with this experience. I think it planted the early seedling of systems-thinking, forcing me to open my eyes. To look at the underbelly of capitalism and globalization that had not, until that experience, touched my day-to-day life.

III. Baptized by Bailouts

I moved onto gainful employment in 2007, spending my days in a glass-and-concrete tower in North Carolina—working as a financial analyst for Bank of America—immersed in fluorescent lights and six-figure gripes. I’d joined a post-grad analyst program, but I struggled to make sense of the entitlement I witnessed on a daily basis. Only a few months prior, I had no access to running water.  And now I was surrounded by junior execs complaining about the drink limits at the company happy hours and their lackluster bonuses.

Then, the situation got even more weird. I was plucked for a plum analyst role on the merger and acquisitions team for Countrywide Financial along with a gaggle of other 20 somethings. For those unfamiliar: this was the very epicenter of the 2008 housing crisis and Countrywide a key actor in the subprime mortgage collapse. I sat in the conference rooms where the fallout of the financial meltdown was being managed: in name, but not in justice.

Over the next three years, I had a front-row seat to one of the greatest wealth transfers (and moral bankruptcies) of my lifetime. I helped unwind the “Friends of Angelo” program—a VIP list of D.C. politicians who got sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide in exchange for looking the other way while the company vacuumed cash from working families. I watched Warren Buffett’s $4 billion lifeline to Merrill Lynch get processed like it was just another Tuesday. I even sat across from the cocky trader who kept a CD on his desk labeled “pile of shit”—his words, not mine—referring to the toxic loan portfolio he was proud to have modeled. And then there was the kerfuffle surrounding what to do with the CEO’s pet tiger, perched in the Countrywide lobby like a corporate spirit animal. (Turns out, tigers don’t liquidate well.)

And after all of that? The banks carried on with business as usual, just with new compliance checklists brought to them by Sarbanes Oxley. 

Meanwhile, middle America lost their homes. And their pensions. 

I didn’t have words for it then. But now I do: what I had witnessed was not just a failure of financial markets, but a breach of a moral and social contract.

The system had not broken. It was functioning exactly as designed, efficiently extracting wealth from the many to enrich and bailout the few.

It was a formative experience to say the least.

IV. The Field of Organic Dreams

I didn’t yet have the language—or the fully formed prefrontal cortex—to process what I’d witnessed in those early years: systemic rot wrapped in a pretty 401(k). It all seemed so divorced from the world I grew up in, where I watched two sets of parents run honest small businesses in carpet cleaning and construction. I was used to commerce, not unfettered capitalism. Where value was tangible and mutually beneficial and where bad actors suffered consequences.

So I drifted for a bit. Spending the rest of my 20s dicking around professionally, working in dry finance roles and partying a lot. Partly, yes, because I was young. But also because I didn’t know how to metabolize what I’d seen in those early years of my career. I distanced myself from this idea of a job as an identity.

Then I discovered Michael Pollan and the good food movement. I quickly became enamored of this new philosophy of business: the triple bottom line of profit, people, and planet. The talks of “slow food”! And from these ideas a new corporate governance structure was birthed: the B Corporation. There were finally businesses that claimed to care about more than profit and scale, wow!

So I enrolled in business school, hungry to participate again in building a better future. I got my start at Target and then got a coveted gig at a “sustainable” seafood company with a vision to distribute its products nationally. On paper, that gig represented everything I wanted: a role in a values-led, mission-driven, company that was environmentally conscious.

And yet, one question kept nagging at me while I worked there: Why exactly did we need to expand? 

The early employees debated this too, but unfortunately our early investors were hungry for their 5-10X return.  So, like a non-b corp business, growth and scale became our mandate. I pretty quickly realized that the dream I was sold by those greenwashed venture capitalists of a more “patient form of capital” was complete bollocks. The software business model was taking the food business out to lunch.

Was this really it?, I wondered to myself, by age 35.

I simply couldn’t tether my career to yet another company that dressed up extraction in prettier fonts.

V. Is AI get the corner office?

It was at this point that I decided to pivot to tech. Not out of hope, but out of a sense of realism. At least here, I told myself, the pay would be decent and the technology was interesting. I didn’t need the mission anymore, and I really couldn’t stand the cognitive dissonance of the better food movement.  Plus I wanted the same paychecks those rich tech bros seemed to be making. (It would buy me that compound in the woods some day!).

But the pay faucet ran dry. 

Interest rates spiked. 

Capital investments cooled. 

And in 2023 I was laid off unexpectedly. 

And a creeping panic consumed my body before my mind could catch up. 

It was oh so familiar, the same panic of 2008, of 2017, and of 2020. 

I was overwhelmed by this profound sense of grief. 

It was deep. Cellular. 

And this time around, I couldn’t push the feelings away. They screamed from my conscious brain demanding to be known while I mindlessly clicked apply on over 800 full-time job applications over the next 10 months, hoping an employer would cho-cho-chooooose me.

This also happened to be the season where AI hype began flooding our platform feeds and Slack threads. 

I finally found a full-time position again, but pretty quickly thereafter I started witnessing a whole cohort of fellow tech employees that I coached push past their compounded trauma (of COVID, the 2023 layoffs, DEI backlash, and now being voluntold to adopt AI quickly).

“Increase your output please.”

“Trim those costs.”

“And make sure to justify that you can’t do the job first with AI before we approve your FTE request!!”

(All just to keep your current job btw.)

And outside the virtual walls of these successful companies making public declarations about AI? 

Everyone in tech seemed to be breaking a bit.

We screamed at each other on social platforms in a state of self-righteousness about.. em dashes of all things (WTF? Of all the things to get on a soap box about, that’s what we picked?).

And questions about our deepest existential concerns–the loss of meaning and our impending professional obsolescence–began saturating the cultural dialogue.

I like you, can become consumed by the ambient anxiety of this daily paradox we are living through: I simultaneously wanted to be more productive and I also want to be made more whole again. And, for once in my god damned adult lifetime,  for the systems I participated in to be more humane.

I’m actually not anti-AI. I’m just fucking tired at this point.

And I want a new operating system free of the posturing bullshit.

V. The Career Multiverse and Distributing Risk in a World on Fire

Enter stage left: the portfolio career.

A model of work that invites in a curious set of participants: humans willing to reside in the liminal space it inhabits to ask themselves a scary set of questions:  What if you didn’t choose this time to rebuild your career inside the systems that broke you? What if you, instead, rebuilt your life and career from a different center entirely?

Because I, like you, don’t want another escape hatch. What I want is a way of being that allows myself and my clients to remain intact while the world is on fire.

I don’t want anymore freedom porn. And I refuse to claim a portfolio career is inherently liberating; that depends on you, on all of us, modeling something different to the world. To obtain those ends, we must practice this model with integrity and extreme care. To acknowledge our whole selves. To stop pretending that work is neutral and to give ourselves permission to engage with our various employers on our own terms and conditions.

To allow ourselves to say yes more slowly. 

To track our energetic debits and credits. 

To build systems that support how our individual brains are wired while honoring our creative rhythms.

And maybe most importantly, to let the body finally vote for what comes next.

VII. The Architects of the Afterward

A portfolio career, I’ve come to realize whilst writing these essays, might actually be an act of conscientious objection as we live in the in-between. I imagine it has potential to become more of a movement than it already is. That if enough of us exercise the choice to distance ourselves from these deeply extractive spaces of work, by working alongside versus inside them, we reclaim the human experience. 

We stop worrying so much about the robots taking our jobs or our dignity.

We remember who we are. And how to feel.

So, I’ll end this essay series with this…

If you too choose this path, know that you are not a gig worker with prettier branding. 

You are a builder of a strange and holy system. 

You make altars out of spreadsheets. Sanctuaries out of timelines. 

You compost your rest into sensemaking.

My sincere hope is that the archives of this tiny blip in human history show: we didn’t just brand ourselves all over again like we did in the mid-90s,  hoping for a different outcome but behaving similarly.

That we unbound ourselves by bearing witness to our experience.

 And in doing so, we became architects of the afterward.

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That’s all for this essay series, folks! I am humbled and honored you made it this far. 

About The Author:

Tired of performative marketing? Yeah, me too! Hi, I’m Brie. I’m a Product Marketer and Storyteller. My jam is helping fellow creators and entrepreneurs turn their big ideas into honest thought leadership platforms and portfolio careers. Over the last year, I have been building a portfolio career in public, which includes a podcast, a marketing advisory practice, two newsletters, and a full-time product marketing role. All of these endeavors  are rooted in my ideas, not a contrived persona. They’re a blend of paid and unpaid work that feeds her soul. I help other professionals in transition build similar portfolio careers too. Find out about my work and my process via my website.