Why I Love My Job
How the days feel when I’m doing the work
What’s Your New Job, and Why Do You Love It?
The question came from a family group chat.
It started as a joke. Retirement. Being “done.” What’s next. I answered without hesitation.
No retirement for me.
I love my job.
That answer didn’t surprise me. It was immediate and heartfelt. I can’t imagine retiring while I’m still this engaged by the work.
The pause came after.
So tell us about it.
What do you actually do?
Why do you love it?
That’s where things slowed down.
Not because I didn’t know the answer.
Because I didn’t have a neat way to say it.
Most jobs are easy to explain. You point to a title, outputs, a lane. Over a long career, you learn how to compress your work into something socially legible. This work resists that. It doesn’t resolve cleanly into a sentence. Loving it isn’t about momentum or ambition anymore. It shows up in how the days feel when I’m doing the work. And admitting, late in a career, that you’re not winding down but leaning in can feel oddly misaligned with what people expect.
When I try to describe the work without jargon, this is where I land.
I work on how complex systems behave.
Not just whether they function.
But whether people can understand them.
I spend time on whether systems tell the truth about themselves. Whether they surface the right signals at the right moments. Whether they help people reason, decide, and recover.
Whether the systems we build leave room for judgment and care, or crowd those out with noise and ceremony.
That’s not a role you can summarize quickly.
What’s different now isn’t the difficulty of the work. I’ve been working on hard systems for a long time. What’s different is the orientation. I’m allowed to stay with the questions. To follow the thread when something feels off. To notice where friction accumulates and ask whether it’s necessary. To shape work that makes other people’s work clearer, calmer, and more honest.
I don’t love this job because it’s new.
I love it because it’s still asking something real of me.
And at this point in my career, that feels like exactly the right place to be.
Alison + Wiggins