The new rules for work in America

Feiler explains why the old playbook no longer applies and drafts a replacement

Joanne McHugh

Nov 25, 2025

“There is no universal story anymore. With no single job that will make you happy, you are free to accept whatever job you want. With no single path that will lead to your dreams, you are free to follow whatever dream you wish. With no single career that will define you forever, you are free to create your own uncareer,” said Bruce Feiler.

There goes the career “The résumé normalized–even fetishized–the linear career. One was expected to move in an uninterrupted, progressive line from school to school, job to job, from adolescence to retirement… The world of work today is meaningfully different from any world of work that came before it…To think of work primarily in terms of a single employer, a single profession, even a single skill set is deeply misguided,” according to Bruce Feiler.

Words and tools haven’t kept up “As the pace of life has quickened, the pace of work has quickened. And yet during similar inflection points in history, when the numbers around work changed, the words around work changed, too–as did the tools for how to find work. But that hasn’t happened this time. We’re still using outdated words and outdated tools. Neither the old-fashioned résumé nor its online facsimiles have kept up…Even the word career itself has lost value–it suggests we’re all pursuing a shared dream,” said Bruce Feiler.

Workquakes overtook work “A workquake is a moment of disruption, inflection, or reevaluation that redirects our work in a meaningful way. I collected data on 3,000 such events. The two biggest takeaways: (1) Workquakes are more plentiful, more varied, start earlier, run later, last longer, and touch us more deeply than most people expect; and (2) as destabilizing and scary as workquakes feel when we’re in one, they’re also invitations to reexamine our priorities and opportunities for growth and renewal,” according to Bruce Feiler.

Lies about Work #2: You have a path “The average person experiences a workquake every 2.85 years…How many workquakes do we have in total? If you start the clock at 16 and stop at, say, 72, which accommodates our longer work lives, the average answer is 20. The bright blinking warning light is that we simply must begin to think about our work lives as more unsettled and serpentine than we already do. There is no standard path anymore; we’re all on a path less traveled,” said Bruce Feiler.

Worst Advice about Work #1: Follow your bliss “Coined in the 70s by Joseph Campbell, the phrase has become a watchword of the happiness movement. Decide what brings you joy, then go for it with single-minded determination. The problem: This advice applies to almost no one who is happy at work and helps almost no one who wants to be. A mere 1 in 10 people in my conversations said they followed their bliss. The rest said they took another route entirely. And yet, they still ended up happy,” said Bruce Feiler.

Worst Advice about Work #3: Keep your personal life out of your work life According to Bruce Feiler, “The happiest people do the reverse: they understand that their lives are inseparable from their work… A stirring conclusion of the Work Story Project is that the single biggest influence in our decisions about work–from what jobs we seek to what jobs we accept to what jobs we quit–is our life outside of work… The very idea of separating life from work is a legacy of a time when the workplace was dominated by white men and someone else took care of the laundry, the kids, and the aging parents.”

Worst Advice about Work #4: Always keep your eye on the bottom line According to Bruce Feiler, “The last piece of legacy bad advice from the linear age is that the primary benchmark for measuring success is money… Two researchers in Toronto, Jing Hu and Jacob Hirsh, found that if workers consider a job meaningful, they’re willing to accept salaries that are 32% lower than for unmeaningful work. A separate study by bestselling author Shawn Achor and colleagues found that 9 out of 10 employees were willing to give up a quarter of their entire life earnings in exchange for work that’s meaningful.”

The New Rules of Success #3: Success is not means; Success is meaning According to Bruce Feiler, “For too long, success was calculated almost entirely by numbers. The more money you made, the more successful you were. Today, a rival interpretation has taken hold. Success is a function of words. It’s about the meaning you assign to success. And each person gets to decide the meaning for themselves… Money is no longer the only metric by which meaning is calculated. For an equally large number of people, meaning is found through service, creativity, self-expression, or giving back…Success is not means; success is meaning.”

Write your own damned story “The lesson of the Work Story Project is that there is power in the upright choice. There is pride in the unseized compromise. There is beauty in the unaccepted trade-off. Every search for meaningful work seems to contain at least one such uncustomary twist… The glory in these stories is that our unnormal choices are becoming so common that they’re fast becoming the norm… We are forging new rules for success in America. Write your own damned story. If not you, who? If not now, when?” said Bruce Feiler.

The Things Your Mom Should Have Told You Book of the Month: The Search: Finding Meaningful Work in a Post-Career World by Bruce Feiler

In the olden days, moms used to clip articles from newspapers for their kids if they thought it was something they needed to know. I’m keeping an eye out for things that you might have missed that may be helpful to you.

This week’s clips:

Which jobs is AI actually replacing today? Bloomberry, a tech stack intelligence company, analyzed 180 million job postings.. Their conclusion: While it’s hit some creative work hard, roles requiring empathy, strategy, or complex problem-solving, such as software engineering, creative directors, and customer service, remain surprisingly resilient.

When Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist Jonathan Clements died recently, a colleague gathered five pearls of his financial wisdom worth remembering. One pearl: it’s better to pursue your passion in your 50s rather than in your 20s–if you get yourself in great financial shape early on.

Want to feel happier and sleep better? In this video, Arthur C. Brooks outlines 9 science-based steps for ending the day calmly and contentedly.

Share Things Your Mom Should Have Told You

Things Your Mom Should Have Told You

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?