What Career Professionals Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Career professionals spend years optimizing for promotion, stability, and the next milestone, often without pausing to ask whether the path they are climbing actually reflects what they want their working life to add up to. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes describes a culture that outsources death to specialists so no one has to confront it directly, and argues that this same avoidance shows up anywhere people prefer comfortable distance to honest reckoning. For a mid-career professional, that avoidance often looks like postponing a hard conversation about direction, ignoring warning signs of burnout, or assuming there will always be more time to reassess before it actually matters, until a colleague's illness or a family loss forces the question into the open.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The office trained to keep hard realities offstage
Just as funeral culture moves a body out of sight quickly, office culture moves illness, loss, and serious personal crisis offstage fast, a brief HR notice, a covered shift, then back to normal operations. This trains professionals to treat their colleagues' hardest moments, and eventually their own, as disruptions to be managed rather than realities to sit with.
Professionals avoid checking in honestly with a colleague going through a serious illness or loss, assuming it is not their place or that HR has it handled.
This week, ask one colleague going through a hard personal situation a direct, honest question about how they are actually doing, rather than a passing pleasantry.
Direct engagement beats polite distance
Doughty found that people who stayed close to death, rather than delegating it entirely, processed it more honestly. Professionally, that translates to engaging directly with hard realities, a failing project, a strained relationship with a manager, your own fatigue, instead of managing them at arm's length through avoidance or delegation.
Professionals let performance reviews, HR processes, or vague self-assessment substitute for an honest look at whether their current role or pace is sustainable.
Block thirty minutes this week to honestly assess one thing about your work life you have been avoiding, without immediately trying to fix it.
Your benefits and institution are not automatically protecting you
Doughty shows how funeral homes can steer families toward decisions that serve the business more than the mourner. Employer benefits, life insurance defaults, disability coverage, retirement plan choices, are often set up for administrative simplicity, not necessarily what best serves you or your family.
Professionals accept default benefit elections at onboarding and never revisit them, assuming HR has already optimized things on their behalf.
Pull up your current benefits elections this week and confirm they still reflect your actual situation and beneficiaries.
Memento mori as a career compass
Doughty treats regular awareness of mortality, memento mori, as a habit that clarifies present priorities rather than a grim distraction. For a career professional, that might mean periodically asking whether this year's goals reflect a life you actually want, or just the next expected rung. Keeping mortality in view tends to produce clearer, more deliberate career choices than drifting on autopilot from one milestone to the next.
The pull toward honest self-assessment about your career can conflict with practical realities, benefits, tenure, financial obligations, that make walking away from a misaligned path genuinely costly. The answer is not abandoning stability for honesty's sake alone, but using clear-eyed reflection to make deliberate choices within real constraints, rather than drifting for years without ever looking directly at the question.
Name one thing, honestly
- What career decision have you been postponing because reassessing feels disruptive? - Where have you let default benefits or plans stand in for an actual choice? - If this year were your last at full capacity, what would you change about how you work?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Pull up your current benefits elections this week and confirm they still reflect your actual situation and beneficiaries.