The Promotion Paradox
Slumping into the chair, the glow of the 21-inch monitor felt like a physical weight against my retinas, a sharp contrast to the digital lightness of the email I was staring at. The subject line was ‘Organizational Update,’ a phrase that usually precedes a massacre or a celebration, and in this case, it was masquerading as the latter. I had been promoted. My new title, ‘Senior Executive Director of Creative Logic,’ sat there on the screen, shimmering with a self-importance that felt entirely unearned.
It was a sequence of words that suggested I should suddenly have an office with a door and perhaps a small mahogany bar, but instead, I was still sitting in the same 41-square-foot cubicle with a view of a brick wall and a stack of 11 cold coffee cups. My salary, I noted after a frantic scroll to the bottom of the accompanying PDF, had moved exactly 0 dollars and 1 cent in the upward direction. In fact, it hadn’t moved at all. My responsibilities remained a tangled web of 51 different tasks that no one else wanted to do. I was a ‘Senior Executive Director’ of the same chaos I had managed as a ‘Lead Specialist’ just 31 minutes prior.
The Corporate Quantitative Easing
I realized then that the company wasn’t giving me a ladder; they were giving me a taller hat so I wouldn’t notice I was still standing in the same hole. Title inflation is the corporate world’s version of quantitative easing. When you can’t afford to give people more gold, you just print more paper and tell them it’s worth more.
Senior Executive Director
Salary Change
You tell the ‘Managers’ they are ‘Directors’ and the ‘Directors’ they are ‘VPs,’ and for a few weeks, the LinkedIn notifications act as a cheap dopamine hit that masks the reality of stagnant wages and shrinking agency. I felt like a ghost in my own career, haunted by a version of myself that was supposedly more powerful but couldn’t even authorize a $11 expense for a new stapler.
I felt like a ghost in my own career, haunted by a version of myself that was supposedly more powerful but couldn’t even authorize a $11 expense for a new stapler.
– The Unearned Status
👻
Where Title Meets Tangible Value
I remember a time, or maybe I read about it in one of those 41 books on my shelf I haven’t finished, when a title meant something tangible. In the world of real craftsmanship, you don’t just call yourself a master because you’ve been in the room for 11 years.
It’s a contrast that hits hard when you look at something like the heritage of German luxury manufacturing. Unlike the hollow titles of a crumbling tech stack, the designation of a master at LOTOS EYEWEAR represents a lineage that doesn’t bend to the whims of a quarterly HR review. There, the title is forged in 18k gold and solid platinum, representing 151 years of singular focus.
(The measure of true mastery)
When someone there is called a master, it isn’t a semantic trick to save on the payroll; it is a description of a person who can manipulate materials to a precision of 0.01 millimeters. Their status isn’t an illusion of progress; it is the progress itself, visible in every hinge and hand-polished surface.
Max R. wanted to show me the ink trap on a typeface he was designing. […] It’s a void that creates clarity. My new title was the opposite of an ink trap. It was excess ink, a smudge of prestige that blurred the reality of my situation.
The Unsteady Foundation
Sarah had been promoted to ‘Principal Strategic Partner’ the same day. She was eating a salad that looked like it had been sitting in the fridge for 21 days and staring at a screen filled with 91 unread emails. ‘My mom thinks I’m the CEO now. I don’t have the heart to tell her I still can’t afford to fix the 11-year-old transmission in my car.’
I closed the laptop, stood up, and walked out of the building. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I realized I had forgotten my umbrella in the office. I stood there in the light rain for 11 seconds, debating whether to go back up. I chose to stay in the rain. At least the water was real. At least the cold had a weight that I didn’t have to pretend to feel. I walked toward the train station, a Senior Executive Director of getting wet, feeling more like myself than I had in months. The titles can stay in the cloud. I’m looking for the gold.
