“You are not the sum of your job description, and you are not the sum of your latest annual review. You’re so much more than that.”
So many people need to hear that.
I’d just spent an hour with Laura LeBleu, two-time Emmy winner, former New York City theater director, lead singer of an Italian band, cabaret performer, the voice of a virtual TV character, and — this is real — a stilt-walking circus ringmaster. She’s now the co-founder and creative director of Geezer, a print-only magazine telling the truth about Gen X and aging.
I’ve interviewed entrepreneurs, theologians, and athletes on this show. I’ve never had someone sing Italian cabaret on the mic. (She did. It was beautiful. The audio is in the episode.)
But the moment that stayed with me wasn’t the singing. It was the line above. Because Laura is the rare guest who shows up to a podcast not to sell you a framework, but to give you permission.
Permission to lean out.
“Lean In” got it backwards
When Lean In came out a decade ago, Laura was raising a young son, working full-time, and being told — by a billion-dollar publishing apparatus — that what she really needed to do was lean harder into her job.
She called shenanigans.
“I made a conscious decision to lean out, which did not mean I leaned out as far as doing good work. I’m always going to do good work. That’s just a core tenet of who I am. Where I leaned out is where my ego was concerned.”
Read that twice. This isn’t a permission slip to coast. Laura is one of the most accomplished people I’ve spoken to. The point is more surgical:
Do excellent work. Just don’t tie your soul to it.
Because if you tie your sense of self-worth to your performance review, your title, your manager’s mood that quarter, you are forever at the mercy of “an ever-changing circus that is the nature of the corporate beast.” (Her words. She would know. She’s literally been in the circus.)
I pushed back on her in real time. I told her that as a man, so much of what I do is oriented toward my work. I find it hard not to attach my self-worth to the thing I’m pouring myself into.
Her answer was generous, and it was honest:
“In a patriarchal society, we attach men’s self-worth to their ability to earn. But someday you won’t have work anymore. Someday you’ll quit, or get fired, or the company goes away. Even if you work for yourself, someday you’ll stop working, and then you’re just going to be who you are.”
I’m still thinking about that.
Print is the new vinyl
We spent a good chunk of the conversation on Geezer, the magazine she and Paul Vons (a previous guest of the show) launched as a print-only love letter to Gen X.
Why print, in 2026?
“We’re all realizing the empty calories of digital content. We want to touch grass, as the kids say. And the way Gen X is doing it is by picking up a magazine.”
She’s not wrong. I love vinyl. I love books. There’s something my soul recognizes in the analog that the algorithm cannot fake. Laura’s 15-year-old son apparently agrees; he looked at the first issue of Geezer and said, “Analog media is fire.“
If a teenager will say that out loud, the trend is real.
The death of human discovery
Laura made the case that Gen X was the last generation to experience genuine, human-mediated discovery. She talked about Friday nights at Blockbuster, where you’d walk in and the clerk, usually a film savant who’d memorized the entire criterion catalogue, would hand you something on the basis of a 90-second conversation.
“It was a human algorithm that was very specific to their brain and their knowledge. We would see things we never would have seen in a million years. Sometimes they were crap, and sometimes you’d say: this is my new favorite movie.”
I told her about a hotel I just stayed at in Charlotte that has a vinyl library and a librarian. I described what I liked — funk, a beat, dancing — and she handed me a French pop-funk record I’d never heard of in my life. I wore it out over two days.
“Discovery used to be built in. Now discovery is fed to us, like with Spotify recommendations and your social media feed, which means it’s not really discovery at all.”
That’s a mind bender, even though you’re discovering it, are you really if a corporation is calculating what to feed your feed?
What do we say to the 19-year-old who has given up?
I told Laura about a man I met at a work event. His son is a college senior. Hasn’t done a single internship. Won’t apply for jobs. Just plays video games in the basement. His reasoning, according to his dad: “With AI, what’s the point?”
This is not an isolated story. I’m hearing it more and more.
Laura’s answer was tender, and clear-eyed:
“Poor baby. Poor baby. They’ve been, by design, completely sucked into a digital existence. Now they’re seeing that digital existence get cannibalized by AI, and they don’t have an IRL world to fall back on. The walls are collapsing in on them.”
But she didn’t stop at sympathy. She kept going:
“By leaning into our humanity, that’s the best way to navigate the age of AI. Become a really good hairdresser. A plumber. A historian. Do the things robots can’t do. There is beauty in working with your hands. There is greatness in being competent enough to fix the things that need to be fixed in this world.”
If you have a young person in your life feeling some version of this, share that quote with them. It might not fix it. But it might crack a window open.
Go back to your 10-year-old self
Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Laura who she actually was, underneath the resume and the magazine and the corporate work.
She laughed and said:
“Honestly? Deep in my heart, I’m kind of a 12-year-old boy. I just want to run around and ride my bike and play with my dogs and write cool stories and do cool stuff.”
There is a thread here that I keep returning to in my own life, particularly during silent retreats, particularly when I’m doing an Examen at the end of a hard day.
The version of you at 10 (before the job descriptions, before the performance reviews, before the masks) already knew what fed your soul. Most of the spiritual life, and arguably most of a fulfilling career, is just the slow work of returning to that.
Laura, in her words: “I’m in my 50s, I’m starting to feel more like myself than I have in many years.”
That is, I think, the whole project.
What I’m taking with me
If you only remember three things from this episode:
Lean out, but do excellent work. Your worth is not your output.
Reclaim analog. Read a book. Buy a magazine. Talk to a stranger.
Your 10-year-old self knew something. Go listen to them.
Three ways to keep this going
🎙️ Listen to the full episode. Laura sings Italian cabaret on the mic. You will not regret it.
📬 Subscribe to The Fulfillment Project. I drop a new conversation every week with people who are doing the slow, unflashy work of building lives worth living. Hit subscribe here — it’s free, and it’s the easiest way to make sure the next one lands in your inbox.
📰 Go support Geezer. Whether or not you’re Gen X, this is one of the most authentic independent magazines I’ve come across. GeezerMagazine.com.
If this resonated, the most generous thing you can do is forward it to one person who needs to hear it; the friend who just got passed over for the promotion, the cousin whose 19-year-old has gone quiet, the colleague who keeps asking what they’re doing with their life.
That’s how this thing grows. One forwarded email at a time.
— Andy
