A teammate for the days you're being five people at once.
Where does the day go? Mostly, the gaps between apps. Viktor sits in Slack alongside you and simply helps you gets more work done. You decide what matters; Viktor does the doing, so you can spend your hours on the work only you can do.
"Viktor is like the most capable all-round colleague you can imagine."
"I have come to realise over the last 12 months, that those other identities, those hobbies, those other parts of ourselves, you gotta keep hold of them, otherwise work becomes everything. And then when it's not, you're lost."
Listen now:
Rachel Fenton is a British researcher, accountant, and consultant currently in a career gap, living in Switzerland. She started as an archeology PhD student conducting field research across Europe, then pivoted to forensic accounting, and spent the last decade in big consulting firms despite growing disillusionment. She's passionate about making things by hand, mountain biking, and maintains a generalist mindset that refuses to be pinned down to one niche. She left big consulting about a year ago and is exploring what comes next while rediscovering the hobbies and identities she lost along the way.
📚 What You'll Learn
Why staying connected to multiple identities and hobbies is essential insurance against work consuming everything in your life
How the career gap is often messier and less linear than the polished LinkedIn stories we see, and what that realistic timeline looks like
What "the right size" means for your career and why growth isn't always the answer
✍️ Some Takeaways
When work becomes everything, leaving becomes impossible because you've lost all your other selves. Rachel spent a decade in big consulting while her mountain biking, making, and outdoor time gradually disappeared. The burnout came not from overwork but from having no other life to retreat into. She hit a break point and left only because she was completely ground down. The early career changes didn't paralyse her because she had other identities thriving outside of work.
Career moves are pragmatic sequences of small decisions, not pivotal moments. Rachel's path from archeology to accounting to consulting wasn't a deliberate pivot but a series of pragmatic choices: funding ran out, job became available, uncle suggested accounting. Each step felt natural because she had other parts of her life. The thread connecting them all was curiosity, whether digging in soil or digging through accounts.
The career gap is messy and turbulent, even with privilege and safety nets. Rachel describes it as being in a washing machine. She's had periods of mourning, pretending the gap didn't exist, doing nothing, flip-flopping between paths. Only after months did clarity emerge. She's trying to make choices that last to retirement while keeping enough options open that nothing feels locked in.
Making things by hand is medicine for a life spent on keyboards, and it's non-negotiable. Rachel learned woodworking, makes clothes, bakes sourdough, grows food, and plans to build cob houses. This isn't leisure; it's survival. She sees "chronically online" as an actual chronic condition and thinks people need permission and alternatives to just go do the hobby. The tactility of creating something is how you stay connected to yourself.
Links
Where to find Rachel Fenton
Where to find Milly
Generalist World Resources
🙏 Special thanks to our podcast producer James McKinven! (get in touch for all your podcast needs, he’s really great!)
