Preparing Our Children For The Post-Career Future
When They Grow Up: Preparing Our Children For The Post-Career Future
There was a time when “going to work” meant stepping into a lifelong covenant.
You got up, packed your lunch, and lent your labor to an institution that would, in return, take care of you and your family. For Baby Boomers, their job wasn’t just a paycheck; it was a pillar of their identity. What you did and where you did it spoke volumes about who you were. How long you stayed and how you were compensated said what you were worth.
The company picnic, the watch at retirement, the pension, these weren’t just perks. They were the cultural and ritual markers of stability and belonging in a post-war America riding high as the world’s unchallenged superpower. Your job title and your contribution to society were interconnected.
For Black boomers, that stability came with particular significance added. They were the first generation to reap the tangible benefits of the Civil Rights Movement: access to better schools, government jobs, and the corporate corridors that had long been closed to their parents. This helped to form the backbone of a new Black middle class that bought homes, sent kids to college, and believed in the promise of “twice as good” as a path to respectability and safety. For them, professionalism wasn’t just about ambition; it was an ironic form of resistance through assimilation. Change the system by becoming the system.
Work was the proof of their legitimacy.
And for those of us raised by those Black boomers, we were taught to follow the blueprint: go to school, get a good job, stay loyal, stay humble, don’t rock the boat. Work hard, play the game, and you too can build a good life for you and your family when it’s time to have one. That was the playbook. That was the dream.
But, for better or for worse, the world that dream was built for doesn’t exist anymore.
Between the Reagan Revolution, the end of the Cold War, the dot-com bubble, 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and finally COVID-19, the generations who followed the boomers learned the same harsh lesson: the company isn’t your friend, jobs are temporary, and loyalty is not a two-way street. The “career” as our parents understood it, a steady climb up one corporate ladder with guaranteed rewards, has quietly disappeared.
What’s replaced it is something far less secure but arguably more honest: opportunity-hopping.
Stay long enough to learn, level up your skills, then bounce to the next opportunity that pays better or feels more aligned with your needs. The implicit deal between worker and employer has been rewritten. The company is no longer responsible for your well-being; you are. You are the brand. You are the asset. You are the product.
It’s a transaction.
For Black professionals, this functional shift came with complicated consequences. The Great Resignation… that short-lived moment of worker empowerment during the pandemic… felt, for many of us, like an overdue chance to breathe.
Working from home wasn’t just about avoiding traffic; it was a reprieve from the daily micro-aggressions and macro-annoyances of office life. We got to work without the mask — not the N95, but the one we wear to make white colleagues comfortable.
But that window of freedom slammed shut almost as quickly as it opened. “Return to office” mandates crept back in. Remote job listings dried up. DEI initiatives that had exploded in 2020 quietly withered in 2024. The Great Resignation became the Great Reset and, as usual, Black workers bore the brunt of the fallout.
Over 300,000 Black women have disappeared from the workforce just this year. Federal agencies, long the bastion of Black middle-class stability, have seen a contraction in Black labor under a new political mandate of overt hostility. Corporate America, once eager to wave the diversity flag, has replaced those budgets with AI tools and “efficiency” initiatives to conform to the prevailing right-wing pressure. The same work that promised progress has now become the site of erasure.
In a matter of months, we went from exalted to expendable.
So here we are, Gen Xers and elder millennials, raising children who will inherit a workforce that looks nothing like the one that raised us. The social contract has been amended with new terms and conditions. There’s no pension. No gold watch. No promise that your degree or your loyalty will keep you safe.
Add to that that the systems and norms that gave us the opportunity to climb the ladder are evaporating rapidly.
The question now is: how do we prepare our children for a world where work is not a destination, but a portfolio? Where careers are no longer ladders but mosaics: a mix of jobs, gigs, skills, and experiments that may or may not add up to stability?
This isn’t just about jobs; it’s about identity. For those Black families who’ve long equated professionalism with progress, it’s disorienting to imagine a future where our children’s value isn’t defined by job titles or tenure. But if we want them to thrive, not just survive, we have to prepare them for what’s coming.
Here’s how we start.
1. Reinforce Education — But Redefine It
There’s a trend online, particularly in the “hustle” corners of social media, to dismiss college as a waste of time. The argument goes: skip the degree, learn a trade, build a business, and make your own way. It’s not bad advice, especially given the crushing weight of student debt. But it misses a deeper truth: education is not about credentials; it’s about cognition.
In an economy where artificial intelligence can code, design, and even write, the skill that will separate our children from the machines is not memorization, it’s synthesis. The ability to think across disciplines, to question assumptions, to adapt when the rules change mid-game. Learning a singular skill is important, but learning how to learn will be the ultimate competitive advantage.
That’s why we can’t afford to abandon education; we just have to reimagine it. We should be pushing for curricula that emphasize creativity, cultural literacy, and critical thinking just as much as calculus or chemistry. Because in a world where intelligence is a commodity, curiosity is the only true currency.
2. Capitalize Our Own Institutions
One of the great paradoxes of integration is that, while it gave us access, it also eroded our social infrastructure. During segregation, Black communities survived and thrived by providing for one another. We built our own schools, hospitals, insurance companies, media, and banks because we had no other choice. The result was an economy of mutual reliance… flawed, yes, but fertile.
Post-Civil Rights, access became the goal, not ownership. But in a post-career world, the lesson of collective enterprise feels resurgent. We can’t keep waiting for companies or governments to hire us into safety. We have to build the institutions that hire, train, and protect our own.
That means investing in Black-owned businesses, startups, and cooperatives. It means treating HBCUs not as nostalgia pieces but as principal incubators for the next generation of innovation. It means teaching our kids that collaboration is not a concession, it’s a survival strategy.
We don’t have to romanticize segregation to recognize that our ancestors’ ability to identify a community need and meet it at scale is exactly what the future of work demands. If we want our children to thrive in a decentralized economy, they need to see that community is capital, and the more we invest in each other, the stronger our safety net becomes.
3. Decenter Money as the Metric of Success
We’ve all been conditioned to chase the bag, get that guap, and make it rain on these fools, and to be clear, financial security is not optional in America. But when jobs can disappear overnight because an algorithm got smarter or a CEO got scared, we have to ask: Is pursuing the paycheck enough?
Maybe we need to teach our children that purpose is a form of wealth. That art, service, creativity, and curiosity aren’t side hustles but central to a fulfilling life. The more we define success by income, the more we tether our worth to forces outside our control.
Instead of asking our kids, “What do you want to be?” maybe we should start asking, “What problem do you want to solve?” or “What kind of world do you want to help build?” That’s how we re-center meaning in an economy that has stripped our work of it.
In this new world, liberation may not come from earning more, but from needing less. From decoupling our dignity from our titles. From remembering that proximity to white-collar norms was never the end-goal, freedom was.
4. Reclaim the Meaning of Work
Our children are entering a world where “work” itself is being redefined. Side hustles, gig apps, creator economies, remote contracts, and freelance collectives. This is the patchwork that has replaced the corporate monolith. Some call it instability; others call it autonomy.
What’s clear is that the next generation won’t be employees so much as entrepreneurs of the self and proprietors of their purpose. And as parents, especially Black parents, we need to guide them through that with both realism and imagination.
We should be honest about the precarity and how capitalism rewards flexibility only when it benefits the top. But we should also show them that adaptability can, itself, be power. That they can design their lives around their values, not just their résumés. That self-definition is the most radical act of all.
If we raise children who see work as a tool, not a master. If we can make success more of a feeling than a destination, then we’ve done our job.
5. Rebuild the Social Contract at Home
The corporate social contract may be broken, but that makes the familial one that much more crucial. For generations, Black families built stability through networks of care. Extended kin, church groups, neighbors. That infrastructure frayed as we became more mobile and “professional.” We left the hood, but that also meant leaving some of our support system.
But maybe the post-career era is calling us back to those roots.
Maybe the next safety net isn’t institutional, it’s interpersonal. The more we can rebuild trust, mentorship, and collective care, the better equipped our children will be to navigate instability. Because when the system fails, and we’ve all learned the hard way that it will, community will be what carries them through.
When I talk to my oldest daughter about her future, I don’t dwell on her finding “a good job.” I tell her to look for her place; the kind that makes them feel useful, grounded, and whole. I tell her that careers may come and go, but character endures. That fulfillment is not a salary band, and stability is not a spreadsheet.
Our parents’ dream was security.
Our generation’s dream was freedom.
Our children’s dream might be something in between: Sustainability, a life that can flex without breaking, a career that evolves without erasing who they are.
Preparing them for that means letting go of our nostalgia for permanence and our notions of success. It means recognizing that the ladder our parents climbed has become insufficient in solving modern problems, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In that realization, there’s space to pivot, to experiment, to rest, and to reinvent.
The post-career world doesn’t have to be a nightmare. If we teach our children to see themselves as more than their labor, it can be a liberation.
Because in the end, the real work that matters has always been about defining success on your own terms.
Corey Richardson is originally from Newport News, Va., and currently lives in Chicago, Ill. Ad guy by trade, Dad guy in life, and grilled meat enthusiast, Corey spends his time crafting words, cheering on beleaguered Washington DC sports franchises, and yelling obscenities at himself on golf courses. As the founder of The Instigation Department, you can follow him on Substack to keep up with his work.
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When They Grow Up: Preparing Our Children For The Post-Career Future was originally published on newsone.com
