💼 6.6.2025 - Job Addiction, Circle IPO, Economic Guesses, Stablecoin efficiencies...
You are not your job. Your salary and title is not your worth. You are bigger than those things. Do you believe that?
🎧 Listen here or on Spotify
💼This issue in 30secs:
- 🌊 A wake-up call on the waves: A quiet moment while surfing revealed how small and distant the problems at work really are when viewed from the outside—sparking the realization: your job should never define your happiness or potential.
- 🧠 Job addiction warning signs: When your mind is always spinning about work, when meals and rest take a back seat, and when productivity becomes a substitute for well-being—you may be caught in a loop that’s harder to spot while employed than after a job ends. How to break free.
- 🏦 Macro reality check: Inflation figures in April were partially fabricated due to understaffing at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—raising concerns about data reliability even as policymakers reference those stats.
- 📉 Services sector in decline: The U.S. service economy, a major driver of jobs, has entered contraction territory according to ISM data, adding pressure for interest rate cuts to avoid a broader recession.
- 🪙 Circle IPO & stablecoin momentum: Circle’s IPO success signals growing mainstream confidence in crypto infrastructure. Companies like Uber are exploring stablecoins for cheaper global payments—foreshadowing financial transformation for healthcare and beyond.
- ⚡ Tech shift with real implications: As regulation around crypto becomes clearer, expect tokenization and stablecoins to play major roles in industries like healthcare, investing, and supply chains—reducing transaction costs and increasing agility.
[perspective]
Signs of Job Addiction
I guess it's easy to be immersed - and not realize it.
We lived in Hawaii for 12 years. One weekend I was surfing on the townside of Oahu. Beautiful clear day. Perfect glassy waves. In the distance all the buildings of Honolulu sparkled in the sun, with the jagged green Ko'olau mountains in the background. As I was waiting for the next set, I spotted the building where I worked - where I'd been having what I used to call "monster days" - lots of high stakes stuff happening, not always going in my favor. Inside that tall building, the problems seemed huge and immersive. But out here on the water, under the big blue sky, I couldn't' help but notice how small the buildings were. The thought hit me as I stared at the little rectangular shapes in the distance: "Nothing that happens inside those little boxes should ever define my happiness or potential."
The same is true for you. You are not your job. Your salary and title is not your worth. You are bigger than those things. You are more. Do you still believe that? Or have you forgotten that?
Are you addicted to your job? (your current or former job?)
Its always a good time to check.
Job addiction is really clear when you suddenly lose your job. Suddenly so many things you depended on - in ways you didn't realize - are just GONE.
Job addition may not be so clear to you when you still have your job. But that's actually the best time to recognize it. And deal with it.
One of my first mentors told me early in my career: "Always be ready to walk away (from your job) because some things aren't worth it."
It was so out of the blue, it puzzled me. A recent college grad, knowing so little about the real world, I just thought you showed up with a big smile and did whatever they told you. I didn't understand until later what prompted the unsolicited advice. The person was navigating toxic politics and power struggles I was blissfully unaware of at the time.
But the puzzling advice stuck with me. I began to see its wisdom and later braided it with another piece of advice from someone else: be frugal and save up enough to live for 9 months without a salary.
Over my adventuresome 35 year career there have been only a few rare "showdowns" where those 2 pieces of advice gave me the ability to be decisive when I needed to be.
Looking back I realize something:
The 2nd piece - about saving up - is important. But I think the first one might be more important, and harder: "always be ready to walk away".
It means maintaining a healthy separation between your identity and self vs your role in your current company or project. Which is key to avoiding job addiction.
Maintaining that healthy separation can be tricky. After all a job can give you more than a paycheck:
- Community - a steady group of people you talk to and work with every day. A group you belong to.
- Dopamine. The small hit you get from checking off a to-do, turning in your slides for a presentation, sending a perfectly crafted email, getting those thumbs ups...all these little things can become more important to your daily living pattern than you realize.
- External validation & "standing" - being part of a team taking on challenges (large or small) with feelings of accomplishment. Having a title. Recognition from others - large or small - feeds a cycle of validation and sense of belonging that gets harder and harder to step away from.
- A structured way of seeing the world - that cozy feeling of having a strategy, annual goals, projects with timelines. An inbox full of ways to look busy. Priorities spelled out for you. Even if there are always too many - it oddly gives us that feeling of feeling needed.
What does job addiction look like?
What should you watch for:
- Putting your job ahead of your own needs, or the needs of others who are important to you. Meals, exercise and other things get skipped.
- Your mind runs on and on about issues at work, even when you need to be engaged in downtime, exercise, or time with significant others.
- Conversations with friends become venting sessions where you dump out all the work worries bottled upside you.
- You equate high performance with self deprivation.
What to do to avoid or break free from job addiction
Start by just letting this awareness sit with you. Just realizing that job addiction is a thing, and realizing that it might be happening to you is a really important step. It will help you start to manage your patterns and thinking in a more healthy manner.
Then, learn how to listen to your thoughts. When you have an impulse to start working again even though it's after dinner, ask yourself: what's my real line of thinking here? What's my goal? When you start evaluating your own thoughts about your work, you may find a lot of fear based narratives. "If I don't do it now, I'll forget" Or "Its going to be embarrassing if I wait til tomorrow."
Face your fears. It can be helpful to start with the worst case scenario, then work backward from there:
What's the worst that could happen if I maintain a healthy work life balance? What if I lost my job? What would I do?
Often what surfaces is the fact that we already know what we'd do if we lost our job. We'd find another one. Probably a better one. But what we're really avoiding is a simple conversation with a manager or a business partner because we're afraid to be human. Going to someone proactively and saying, "Hey I am going to need an extra day to complete this" doesn't mean you're a bad person. It means you care enough about your team mates to communicate with them about your availability. It means you care enough about yourself to ensure that you balance time for work with time for your personal needs. It also means you care enough about your work, to make sure that you're at your best when you do it!
Allocate downtime and personal time as part of your daily calendar. Creating time to step away from work is key to maintaining a healthy perspective on it. Going for a walk or run, working out, gardening, playing music or singing. Cooking. Whatever renews you. A renewed person has better ideas. Usually finds better ways to get things done. Is more positive and has better relationships with others.
I have two suggested exercises that you could do to help reinforce what you're learning about here:
- Try writing about your job and your career in the third person. This may feel a little weird at first, but as you do more of it, you'll start to see yourself and your work in a different light. You can just give you a way of putting things into perspective.
- The second exercise mimics the perspective shift I experienced when I was surfing, and noticed my office building in the distance. Think about your place of work. Go find the furthest distance away where you can still see the place, and where it looks very small from where you stand. Embrace the insight that hit me that day: whatever goes on in that little box should never limit your happiness or your potential.
That perspective shift: recognizing that things can seem overwhelming from one vantage point, and very small from another is the perfect reminder: You are more than your job. Your job is just one part of your life, not the whole of your identity. Let that realization spark a new way of seeing. You are more than your role, your calendar, or your output. Step back, breathe deep, and start exploring the full landscape of who you are and what makes you come alive.
PS. None of the surf photos here are me. On my best best best day, I could never be so cool. 😄
[macro-economics]
Full Access Members: See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.
April's rosy inflation figures were guesstimates
The figures sounded good - inflation crept up only .2 percent in April. Word is getting out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics lost so many staffers that they couldn't really gather and assemble the data.
So they did the best they could with the staff they had: about 1/3 of the data inputs were guesses because they lacked staff to conduct the required research. Is low inflation returning? Guess not.
Service Economy in Recession Territory
Latest data from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) shows the US Service Sector is contracting - meaning likely decrease in jobs and growth for this very significant part of the US economy. (BTW ISM is not staffed by federal workers so was not impacted by DOGE hiring freezes and layoffs).
Rate cuts needed to forestall recession in next 12 months
Weak economic outlooks have investment analysts around the world in consensus that rate cuts are inevitable over the next 12 months in the US and abroad: central banks will be forced to cut rates in order to address recessionary trends.
Billionaire bromance goes south
This week Trump and Musk decided to focus on hurling threats and accusations at each other from their own personal social media platforms. Tesla stock is directly impacted, but the feud also casts uncertainty across the federal budget process.
[emerging tech]
Mixed emotions over Circle's IPO
Share prices of Circle (CRCL) surged more than 200% after its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this week. But top 20 crypto assets slid today, suggesting a shift of funds from crypto to equities. As Coindesk notes, funny things can happen after crypto related IPOs: Bitcoin dropped 60% in the 2 months after the Coinbase IPO in 2021.
Stablecoins as cost savings approach
Uber is considering whether a stablecoin approach would help reduce transaction costs - particularly for cross border transactions.
This idea of using crypto approaches for more efficient money movement is not new. Its implementation has been delayed by the immature regulatory environment in the US. The successful IPO of Circle (as noted above) suggests the time for this idea is arriving. In fact Circle is pushing this idea on its home page as of Thursday night June 5 (screen shot below).
The TLDR is that stablecoins combined with tokenized approaches can move money faster cheaper than traditional finance rails can. This use case has broad applicability across industries that handle high volume transactions: healthcare, banking and investing, supply chains, consumer payments and more.
As US crypto regulation becomes more coherent, look for more and more players to examine the cost benefits of stablecoin and tokenized approaches for their financial workloads. Important for individual companies to do their own math, and consult their trusted advisors - but earlier indicators are that the cost savings could be substantial.
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.