You can do great work and still get misunderstood, simply because people don’t “see” the work the way you do. This piece is about managing perception without playing politics: reducing guesswork for your leader, your team, and yourself, through clarity, consistency, and fewer surprises.

As AI-generated content floods the web, what happens when models mostly learn from each other’s output? The risk isn’t failure. It’s slow drift: confident language, weaker grounding, and fewer real-world signals.

Productivity is soaring in 2026, yet anxiety is rising too. As AI becomes a teammate and handles most tasks, people quietly wonder what they are still valued for.

At forty-four, I’ve already resigned and moved back to Chennai to be with my family. What surprised me wasn’t the lack of work, it was the identity shift. After twenty-two years in Talent Acquisition and HR, the role had become a shape I lived inside, and stepping out of it has been both freeing and oddly exposing. I wrote about the “forty-year itch,” that quiet restlessness that shows up when the old script stops fitting, and what it feels like to sit with a blank calendar without rushing to package it into a neat answer.