EverMore Edit: The Art of Excavation
- Aug 11
- 5 min read
Dear Readers,
Last month my family gadded about Austin visiting museums, vintage shops, and even a cavern. Time dedicated to this idleness is essential in allowing my thoughts to coalesce.
A mantra for me this year is—Consuming deserves friction. It deserves confrontation, and being able to decide what you like or don’t like. Otherwise, it’s too easy to live in the bubble of a tiny screen where the content stays in a perfectly round patch.
Our first jaunt was to the Blanton Museum of Art. We began in a data-driven art exhibit that I expected to barrel right through. How interesting could it be? Then I found myself in front of The Graduate—a digital chromogenic print by Jason Salavon from 2004.
It had no obvious beauty. Salavon took 100 graduation portraits that he found online and used a computer program to produce a soft, blurred composite.
But it lingered—A single portrait of a personal milestone morphed into a collective average. It felt like this had something to tell me about the rituals we keep generation to generation. Graduations trace back to the 12th century, and our world has vastly changed in that time.
Even smoothing data to an average—feels ahead of its time in 2004. Now it’s inescapable. The digital world is organizing and repackaging our experiences everyday. Standing there, I started with “Whose graduation is this?” and left with “What does graduation mean to us?”
What does it mean to experience something that many others have and will experience?
Graduation is a celebratory rite of passage, but what awaits us on the other side is deeply tied to our generational inheritance, and improved or hindered by individual circumstance. It’s layered.
So as I think of those entering their final year of high school or college, I wonder about that generational inheritance—What do we owe to those who come next?
For me, college graduation was nothing to celebrate. I’d worked most of my life to be a writer, only to enter the workforce with The Great Recession looming.
Twenty years later, and I’m watching new graduates enter a familiar, dire workscape. At the same time, my peers languish in the “Millennial Career Crisis.” We jumped into the first jobs that would take us, watched our salaries lag job-to-job, and saw no trappings of earlier generations—gone were pensions, vacation time was now “unlimited,” and layoffs—once a shameful beacon of financial woes, became commonplace.
Corporate work, once an emblem of security and social standing, doesn’t want to nurture the “entry-level” and the folks in the middle, don’t want to be there.
Our experience feels deeply personal, yet it’s a composite of so many around us.
The theme of interconnectedness widened at our next stop—Inner Space Caverns.
Our guide shared stories about ancient flora and fauna all unearthed through exploration. Each layer carved a story about life—the climate, the organisms that adapted to the dark, and the bones of prey v. predator revealed through the brushing and smoothing away of dirt. What was once buried came to the surface.
What will history say about how we carved a life together?
Perhaps a robot guides bot assistants through some abandoned skyscraper to showcase for the humans at home what life was like in 2026. Our email scraps paper the halls, the cubicle sits enshrined by rope and stanchion, and the guide regales the crowd with stories of corporate prey and predators.
And perhaps in some other hallway hangs all the odd art that we created and crafted to distance ourselves from that part of our life.
It's easy to feel lonely or alone in our experiences, but we're all intertwined. In some distant land our excavated bones will reveal shared clues about society and the corporate or creative spaces built for us or by us.
So, if everything comes to the surface one day—What stories will have settled into your bones?
xoxo,
Courtney @ EverMore
p.s. Keep reading for more musings on what we leave behind.
Echoes in the Bedrock
Speaking of what once was buried, during my trip I read Welcome to the OC: The Oral History. I was a huge fan of The O.C. in the aughts; I even set my work schedule at Abercrombie around new episodes.
The book is at heart about a workplace 20 years later—the stories people remember, the stories people told themselves, who was protected, who wasn’t. Or even who is willing to take accountability? Spoiler it wasn’t the people in charge.
There were a lot of set rumors at the time, and I finished the book feeling that most of those weren’t real, but rather a distraction from the actual problems. Notably, the showrunner confesses that he hid from the cast and made character decisions based on his personal feelings, not audience opinions, which ultimately hurt the show.
At one point, the interviewer lines up two versions of events that contradict each other as a little wink to us about perspective and who gets the final say on what happened.
A book that started with behind the scenes takes on the casting and music that created a zeitgeist-y show devolved into a cautionary tale about leadership.
Leaving me with the question…In the oral history of your career—How do you want to be remembered?
Excavate Your Career
There’s no need to wait until it’s all over to reflect on your legacy. Careers leave fragments all the time—a resume, a rejection email, a performance review, a notebook.
You can be the archaeologist of your own life by examining your ephemera to uncover the monsters, milestones, and myths that shaped you.
Here are two resources to unearth the story hidden beneath layers of titles and timelines to discover what belongs on the surface.
When I’ve been scared or flustered in my career, it’s easy to reach for the familiar roles, people, places. So, I devised this series of conversation starters to challenge myself on where I’m saying yes just for friction-less familiarity.
While we’ve predicted and pushed for the death of the resume, we still want everyone to have the lore about how to avoid the middle layer where a resume is hard to reject, but equally hard to champion.
EverMore’s Footprint
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