Everything Counts

Episode 1: Loren

• Kristin • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Job security is a myth.

In this inaugural episode of Everything Counts (but nothing is real), host Kristin interviews her partner Loren (they/them), an artist turned web developer turned business owner whose story embodies the everything counts spirit. Loren started in sculpture, taught themselves design and web, and said yes to the kinds of opportunities that don’t look like a plan, until they do. After nearly two decades in nonprofits, tech, and e-commerce, a layoff at 40 became the turning point.

We talk about the intersection of creativity and technology, the myth of job security, and the quiet rewards of building something on your own terms. Loren shares what self-employment has taught them about growth, money, and meaning and why believing companies will care about you as much as you care about them is… cute.

If you’ve ever wondered whether starting over is riskier than staying put, this conversation might rewrite your equation.

How to get in touch:

  • loren@lateraltranslucence.com
Kristin:

Welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real, a podcast about careers, detours, and the absurdity of work. Here we explore the twists, the pivots, and the tiny choices that shape our work lives with humor, feminism, and honesty. I'm your host, Kristen. Let's get into it. Hello, and welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real. I am so fucking excited and nervous. This is my first episode. I have my first guest. I'm going to be talking today with Lauren, an artist, turned developer, turned business owner, who, yes, just so happens to be my partner. What are partners for, if not to be the subject of all experimentation? So thank you for being here.

Loren:

Yeah, I'm excited.

Kristin:

Lauren, I wanted to have you as my first guest because you are my partner and you are obligated. And also because your career really encapsulates what I mean when I say everything counts. Your career is one of my favorite tales. It has twists and turns, but everything really does like add up and tell a narrative. And also it tells a story of like a young person at first, really just saying yes to things and like navigating and building. And I know that you don't always feel that way because it's yours, and I'm looking at it from the outside. But your career is part of my Everything Counts inspiration. Everything counts as a motto I've had for years before I met you. But then when I met you, I was like, wow, you are the living embodiment of that.

Loren:

Well, that's very flattering. Whenever it's your own journey, it tends to feel like you're just kind of careening out of control towards nothing.

Kristin:

So thank you for my gosh, you're so welcome.

Loren:

For reframing it like that.

Kristin:

Um, I want you to share a little, I mean, a little bit about what you're currently doing, but also how you got there. Whatever that means to you.

Loren:

So I um, you know, I started my career uh as an intern, and then um I did some freelancing at the very beginning there, and then I was embedded in various companies in various sectors, um, real estate, nonprofits, uh tiny little local tech company for a few months, that kind of thing. And then when I moved to New York, I started at an uh online office supply retailer, wound up at a fairly large nonprofit and stayed there for about six years, and then went to an AI company and then eventually got laid off there.

Kristin:

So uh the like the canon event of getting laid off, everyone experiences it.

Loren:

Apparently, yeah. Once. And then you decided to not do that again was uh was basically it. I mean, for a for a while, I took some I took some deliberate time off where I wasn't even contemplating work. I was, as it happened, very burned out. I did feel like getting laid off, it was perfect timing. And then um looking for a job was just very demoralizing as it tends to be. And um, I had just turned 40 and I felt a very big difference between looking around the job market as a 40-something than I did looking around as a 30-something.

Kristin:

Um, and so you felt like during that job search you were you were old.

Loren:

I was old and nice. That's what I felt like. And then and and so the the feeling was, oh, aren't you sweet? Goodbye.

Kristin:

Can we go backwards just a teeny tiny bit? Because this is my favorite part of your story. Can you add anything about how you studied art?

Loren:

So uh undergrad, I was pursuing an art degree. Uh sculpture was my focus. But prior to that, I had always been interested in graphic design and had gotten into web development through my aunt, Susan. So uh circa 1999, maybe 2000, I was a sophomore in high school, and Susan had decided to like take some community college classes, and she took uh intro web development class in 1999. So things were very different and simple then. And um, it was an online course, which was also rare.

Kristin:

Yeah, I didn't even know we had the capabilities.

Loren:

She was living in Jacksonville at the time, and I was you know, at home. I was in high school uh with my family in Tallahassee, Florida, and um so the course was online, and so she thought that I would be interested in that, and she sent me all the course materials. So she just you know sent me all these documents that they had given her, and um I went through the exercises and learned HTML lightly and badly, but like it was uh an initial introduction to it, and I was already making a lot of fan desktop wallpaper for Enya and Sinead O'Connor and the Cranberries, etc. So there's a comment right there. Graphic design was already well underway, and this was my intro to web development. Then in high school, I took a class and already had a leg up, and so I excelled in that class, which was just really good validation. Um, but anyway, so then in college, I had a uh job that Susan got me as a runner at a law firm, and then one day I got into a very public and political disagreement with one of the managing partners there, and he yelled at me in front of the entire staff. And uh I went and cried in my car and called my girlfriend, and she said I should talk to my graphic design teacher and see if he needed an intern or knew anyone who did. So I did, and I wound up with an internship at a very small studio in in Pensacola, Florida, but it was uh uh kicking off point. And I met someone after that uh through through those guys that um gave me a real job.

Kristin:

And at the time, you know, I feel like you would you probably just felt like you needed a job, go get the job. I just need to get a job. And you weren't building any, you just were like, I'm gonna just do it. And when we're young, that's like that's that's where this everything counts motto comes from. If I give advice to young people, I always tell them that. Um, and I think that again, yours really embodies that you were just trying to survive. And yeah, it was the actual beginning of your actual career.

Loren:

Yeah. I mean, I never would have guessed that at the time. That internship introduced me to other people who were kind to me and liked me and saw that I did have some potential in the field. And so they kind of took me under their wing and led me to the career I have now. So I never would have known that that getting yelled at by uh that terrible man would have led to uh led to the beginning of my career.

Kristin:

The things that happen when men yell at us.

Loren:

I know.

Kristin:

Um, okay, there's a through line in this early part of your career, and actually throughout a lot of your career, that is very much around being self-taught. And I want to know what you've what you think shaped you when you were like landing in this career. And when I say what shaped you, I do mean family, birth order, the astrology. These are all like things that um are my own special interests, but I think they do kind of push us towards a path. Do you have reflections on that?

Loren:

Um, probably my birth order and astrology would have been big motivators for what's your astrology? I am a uh Capricorn sun, an Aquarius moon, and an Aries rising.

Kristin:

Oh, yeah. I can see like the Aries rising energy of like leaving the law office of going and getting another job.

Loren:

Yep. Right that moment.

Kristin:

I love it.

Loren:

That was just lucky, but man, it felt good.

Kristin:

Can you tell me a little bit about how creativity and logic meet up in design and web development?

Loren:

Yeah, I mean, it's a really great marriage of those two things, as is sculpture. So to me, the uh the move from studying sculpture to getting paid to build websites did not feel like a great leap. Um I think that when people look at my history, maybe they do, but but if they think about it, it really doesn't. Like you're taking a creative idea and then you have to turn it into something that is tangible and uh and real and some degree of usable, even if that usable is just survive out in the air long enough for someone to view it. There's engineering in that. And so um it was a very natural regression, really. And I have felt like I've gotten to use a lot of the skills that I learned in art school from just a technical perspective, even mostly just because when you're building sculptures, it's not like building houses. There's not a recipe for it, there's no standards to really adhere to. And um, in the early days of web development, people would present you with problems that there might not have been a well-established, thought-out solution to, and you had to find it. And so the scrappiness of that, I think, does flow very smoothly from artistic endeavors into these application developments endeavors.

Kristin:

I do forget about how sometimes in art, like math is a thing. And it makes me feel better because I don't feel like I'm creative. I also don't really feel like I can do like math and hard skills. So I'm always, you know, you got it all, you got the whole package. But I think it's because both are getting trained while you're doing it.

Loren:

Yeah, after a after a fashion, I mean, I naturally lend myself more towards um like a mathematical kind of astringency. And so for me, being in art school was helpful because it was like helping balance me out as a person. And so I think that really that is the training that comes into play here. Like I'm naturally wanting to calculate the the ratios and balance things and all of that. So for me, what what I then have to like take a deep breath and and uh let happen is something more organic because otherwise your designs look extremely unfriendly. Foreboding.

Kristin:

Is that where like um brutalism?

Loren:

Yeah, that.

Kristin:

Yeah, that makes sense.

Loren:

Which is which is beautiful. And whenever you're just tired and need a chair, that's fine. But whenever you're trying to convince somebody that what they need to do is fill out your contact form, you need to be a little bit more subtle than brutalism.

Kristin:

Um, I want to talk through how you navigated the the what I assume would be fear around going out on your own.

Loren:

Um, yeah, that was hard for me, especially after a solid um, you know, 19 years of being full-time employed. I I never even took so much as a week off in between jobs. So you're talking just constant employment from the age of uh 21 until 40. Um, so that was tricky. I did at that moment in time happen to have a bit of a nest egg. And so that did that helped alleviate the uh any panicky feelings that I had cropping up. I was able, in the early days of having just been laid off, able to kind of calm myself down. And I think that that whole experience uh kind of just reshaped uh how I think of job security. I realized in that moment that despite the fact that I had dedicated five very hardworking, difficult years to that company, they had just one day called me up and told me that I didn't work there anymore and gave me four weeks of severance. So what I actually had was four whole weeks of job security in reality. Once I started finding freelance work and then ultimately decided that I didn't want to apply for any full-time roles anymore and just do that, the math was easy to do. Like, okay, well, I would like to have more than four weeks of security. And then, like, okay, well, then what would make me feel actually secure? What's an amount of time where everything could fall apart, but I could scramble and be able to pick everything back up and have some sort of employment again, whatever that looks like. I decided on three months, and it took me nine months to save up three months worth of salary. So a year after getting laid off and having ultimately what turned out to be four weeks of job security, I now have a minimum of three months at all times. And that has really made this feel a more like the right move and b more sustainable. Like I can do this. I wasn't sure if I was cut out for it because I like security. I do not like to not know what's going to happen and when. And so now I I look at it as well, I do know what's going to happen. I have three months of knowing what's going to happen.

Kristin:

I think that's incredible. And it's definitely getting to watch you do this is teaching me a lot about like my own relationship with salary, income, money, how I spend it, how I save it. But this morning you said something, and I can't quite remember what it was, but you said something about like let them try to tell me that it's more secure for someone else to sign my paychecks. How it's kind of crazy how we think it's more risky to go out on our own when in fact you've gone out on your own. And it's not like you're bringing in five-figure contracts on the red. You're you're doing like hourly work for organizations. Um, obviously, five-figure contracts come, but they're we're not talking about that like happening every month. So building up your reserve is still very like intentional and slow work. But because it's your company, you're you're you're able to sort of see that money differently.

Loren:

Yeah, that that is true. Um, you know, every penny that comes in it is the that is the amount of money that I I worked for. I can point to an hour of work that equals that money. And then, you know, also there's the like, I did the work, I know that the money will come in, where at a regular job you don't actually know. Because again, they can cut you off. They can cut you off at any time. They can go belly up. Yeah. There could be years worth of lawsuits before you get your last paycheck. You actually do not know. That's a really good point. But now that money goes into my own business checking account, and I pay myself out of it a set salary every month.

Kristin:

We're gonna switch gears and we're gonna go into our lightning round of questions. These are short-ish questions that I plan to ask all of my guests. And I don't want you to overthink it. We're just gonna run through them. What was the very first job that you ever had, and what did it teach you about work?

Loren:

Um, so as I mentioned earlier, one of my first jobs was uh runner in a law firm in Pensacola, and that is where I got yelled at by one of the managing partners in front of everyone. And so what I did learn is that I do not enjoy reporting to Sysmet.

Kristin:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is something you have really followed your heart on.

Loren:

Oh, I sure have. Yeah, I have uh really gone out of my way to And it has not been a bad strategy. No, it hasn't.

Kristin:

Um, amazing. What's one thing you believed about careers when you were younger that you definitely don't believe now?

Loren:

I I think I that I, like many Americans, believed that, you know, companies care about you as much as you care about them.

Kristin:

Hmm, that's cute.

Loren:

It was cute.

Kristin:

Okay. Okay, best or worst piece of advice you've ever received.

Loren:

Um, well, it's actually kind of related to my previous answer when I was I was getting ready to leave a job I had been at for about six years that I genuinely loved. I had just um kind of outgrown and it was clear that there was not space for me to continue growing there. So I was kind of agonized about the decision to leave. And if I was asking a friend's opinion because they had a few years earlier left the same organization. And their advice was pretty much what what we said prior, which is, you know, organizations don't care about you. So what's best for you? And in this case, the job was more money and seemed like it had room to grow. And so that seemed best for me. And so I I took it and it was the right move.

Kristin:

Awesome. What's your career armor? So, what is the little thing that you reached for during work to bring you comfort? It's like food or an outfit that makes you feel strong.

Loren:

My nicotine vape.

Kristin:

Oh. What a good answer. What a good answer.

Loren:

It's the co-star in all of my meetings. Well, that and my sparkling water.

Kristin:

Um, most embarrassing work story.

Loren:

Oh, uh, so one time I was signing on to a meeting with these two women who they worked out of Chicago, and I so I'd never met them in person and only been in a couple of meetings with them. And you know, they're their names are kind of escaping me, but one of them's name is Lisa, and we'll call the other one Jane. So I uh I arrive on the call and it's just me and Jane, and she says, Hi, this is this is Jane, and I say, Hi, Jane, this is Lisa, um, which is the other person, not me.

Kristin:

Oh, so good. Yeah, that's good. Okay, fixing typos in casual communication, yes or no?

Loren:

I always fix typos, yeah.

Kristin:

We're coming back to that. Um, okay. The last question is what would your advice be to someone who feels off track right now?

Loren:

That everyone feels off track all the time. You're not alone and no one really knows what the track is. So honestly, you can kind of form it for yourself and put yourself right back on it.

Kristin:

Thank you for that answer. You're such a good first guest because your approach to work is very straightforward, but also like really principled. You know, I think you have some like fairly radical takes on work while also being a very willing participant. And I like that. You inspire me in many ways. I'm constantly jealous that I don't have the skill set that you have.

Loren:

Well, you can learn. If I can do it, anyone can.

Kristin:

Oh boy, that like literally makes me break out into sweats because no, I can't. Okay. Do you have anything you want to promote?

Loren:

Uh yeah, I have my new business up and running, Lateral Translucence. I specialize in working with startups, small businesses, and nonprofits. Contact me at Lauren at lateraltranslucence.com.

Kristin:

Um, okay, Lauren, this was so fun.

Loren:

This was fun. Thank you for having me.

Kristin:

Thank you for being here. This was really fun. I appreciate it. Um, until next time. You know, Lauren's episode made me think of a lot of things, but I really think we missed something key in our discussion with Lauren. One huge way in which I'm really inspired by their everything counts journey is that when they were in college, they they actually left. They were in Pensacola, they left school, they moved home to Tallahassee. There were several reasons for that move. But one was to be around their family as they transitioned, which I think was actually just such a lovely thought to like care about their family getting to sort of be part of that process and at no point being like jarred by a new appearance or new voice. So then when they left, they kept working. They went and they worked at various places where they got to be a graphic designer and a web developer, and they did all of this without a degree, and then got to be a non-traditional student. They went and worked at FSU. And because they were working at FSU, they got to go be a student there, finished school, still got that degree in studio art, understood what their passions were and how they could get a degree in something they truly loved, and simultaneously build an incredible career. And I think it's that part that actually inspires me the most because I think we all think of like really traditional paths. And in a lot of ways, their path, career-wise, has been traditional. They were a graphic designer and a web developer and now a business owner, and that's all very linear, but the path to that wasn't. And I think that's really inspiring. And I think the fact that they just kept going and at every turn found a way. That is exactly what I think of when I think about everything counts. And that is why they inspire me and I sort of gushed multiple times during this episode, because it's incredibly beautiful. Because life comes at us, life unfolds, and we don't necessarily know what's around the next turn. But if we can stay flexible and really believe in ourselves and do the things that we know we're good at, but that also really drive us, I think that's the only way. Thanks for listening to everything counts, but nothing is real. Remember, even when nothing feels real, everything you do counts. Capitalism may be absurd, but so are we. And on that note, well, it's been real. Don't forget to subscribe. I'm Kristen. See you next time.