The Inner Monologue

Let’s be real for a second—you think your job is important. Not just important, but critical. The gears of your industry would grind to a halt without you, right? Your meetings, your deliverables, your niche expertise—it all matters.

Well, here’s a fun fact: The person who designed the lid on your coffee cup also thinks their job is vital. The engineer optimizing warehouse logistics for a multinational corporation? They’re convinced the global economy hinges on their spreadsheets. The guy who calibrates industrial freezers so your ice cream doesn’t melt in transit? He sleeps soundly knowing he’s the unsung hero of dessert.

And guess what? They’re right—within their own tiny, hyper-specific universe. Just like you are in yours.

The Great Illusion of Professional Relevance

We all live in bubbles where our skills seem irreplaceable because, within our immediate ecosystem, they are. A graphic designer’s kerning choices might send their art director into a spiral, just as a misplaced decimal in an accountant’s ledger could ruin someone’s quarter. But step outside that bubble, and… crickets.

No one cares.

Not because your work isn’t valuable, but because everyone is buried in their own version of the same story. The surgeon saving lives doesn’t have time to marvel at the brilliance of the IT admin keeping hospital servers online—and vice versa. The lawyer negotiating a billion-dollar merger isn’t pondering the agricultural scientist who engineered the wheat in their sandwich.

The Equalizing Truth: Everyone Is Both Essential and Irrelevant

The beautiful (or humbling, depending on your ego) reality is this: The world is built on millions of people, each convinced their work is the linchpin of society, while simultaneously ignoring everyone else’s.

• You think your marketing strategy is genius? Cool. The forklift operator moving your product thinks you’d be useless without them.
• Proud of your coding skills? The plumber fixing your office’s pipes is the reason you have a functioning bathroom to stress-cry in after a bug-filled sprint.

This isn’t to diminish your contributions—it’s to remind you that importance is contextual. You are vital… to the tiny slice of reality where your expertise is needed. And so is everyone else in their own little domain.

Why This Is Actually Freeing

Once you accept that your sense of professional grandeur is just a happy little delusion, life gets easier. You can:

• Stop taking yourself so seriously.
• Appreciate the invisible labor that makes your job possible.
• Realize that no one is inherently “more important” than anyone else—just differently specialized.

So go ahead, keep feeling important. Just remember: The guy who installed the bolts on your office chair? He’s out there somewhere, smug in the knowledge that he is the reason you’re not sprawled on the floor mid-Zoom call.

And he’s not wrong.