“They will have that job posted before your funeral.” (Yes, they will.)

Some people love their jobs (or claim to) and tie up all their relevance in said job, to the point that you think it’s the only fun in their life. But then it all begs the question: do jobs love you back? The short answer is “No.” It’s different if you’re a founder, executive, or protected-class employee. But for most of us? No. Work does not love us back. Let me tell you a quick story.

I worked with a lady in Minneapolis for a few years. I was in graduate school up there, a move I have now come to regret, and I was working at the university. This lady who sat 10 feet from me, her husband died on the treadmill at age 58, unexpectedly, on a Tuesday morning. It was chaos, as you’d imagine. She’s trying to get a funeral ready for Saturday.

This dude (her husband) was a VP at, if I recall correctly, Honeywell. He was pretty high up. In the space between his passing on Tuesday and the funeral on Saturday, what do you think Honeywell did? They posted his job.

That’s obviously an extreme example — the job is posted before the family has had a chance to celebrate the life — and not every company does this. And, honestly, a lot of companies have internal processes that are so flawed that it would take them six weeks to get the job posted anyway.

But if you ever think about work in the grand scope of your life and how important it is / how relevant it makes you, just remember that 48 hours after your body hits the treadmill for the final time, your job is already getting applicants to it through some shoddy HR Tech portal.

Ruminate on it.