Why More People Are Rethinking Work—and What Comes Next

By Jenny Holly Hansen | Langley News | April 28, 2026

For a long time, there was an unspoken understanding between employers and employees. If you showed up, worked hard, stayed loyal, and did your job well, there would be a certain level of stability in return. It wasn’t a promise of lifelong employment, but it was enough to build a life around. You could plan ahead, make financial decisions, and feel reasonably confident that next year would look somewhat like this one. That understanding is quietly shifting.

Across industries, layoffs are no longer rare or surprising—they’ve become part of the rhythm of business. Companies restructure, downsize, and pivot, often with little warning and even less personal connection to the individuals affected. At the same time, we’re seeing a renewed push for control through mandatory return-to-office policies, despite years of demonstrated flexibility and productivity in remote environments. For many employees, these changes feel less like collaboration and more like a reminder of where decision-making power truly sits.

The result is a growing awareness that the kind of security people once associated with traditional employment is no longer something they can rely on in the same way. It’s not that jobs have disappeared, but the sense of predictability around them has. And while there are ongoing conversations about broader societal solutions—like a universal basic income or living allowance—those ideas remain largely theoretical for most Canadians. They don’t solve the immediate question people are facing today: how do you create stability in a system that no longer guarantees it?

For many, that question is leading them to reconsider something that once felt out of reach—starting a business. Not necessarily in the traditional sense of building a large company or taking on significant financial risk, but in a much more practical and personal way. Starting a business today often looks like taking what you already know and finding a way to offer it independently. It might begin as a side project, a small service, or a way to test whether your experience has value beyond your current role. It doesn’t require walking away from employment overnight. In fact, for many, it starts alongside it.

What’s changed is not just access to tools and platforms, although those certainly help. It’s a shift in mindset. People are beginning to see their skills, their knowledge, and their networks not just as contributions to someone else’s organization, but as assets they can shape and direct themselves. The expertise built over years of working within a company doesn’t disappear when a role ends—it becomes portable. And increasingly, people are asking what it might look like to build something around that.

This doesn’t mean the path is simple. Starting a business brings its own uncertainties, its own learning curves, and its own pressures. But there is a meaningful difference in where that uncertainty comes from. In a traditional role, change can feel sudden and imposed. In building something of your own, the uncertainty is something you engage with directly. You make decisions, test ideas, adjust course, and gradually create something that reflects both your capabilities and your intentions.

In that sense, what was once seen as risky is beginning to feel, for some, like a form of stability. Not because it eliminates challenges, but because it reduces dependence on a single source of income or a single decision-maker. It allows people to diversify their efforts, to build relationships with multiple clients or communities, and to create a structure that is, at least in part, within their control. Even a small step in that direction can change how someone experiences their work and their future.

This shift doesn’t require abandoning traditional employment altogether. In many cases, the most sustainable approach is a combination of both—maintaining a role while gradually building something on the side. It’s a slower path, but often a more grounded one. It creates space to learn, to refine, and to grow without the pressure of needing immediate results.

What’s emerging is not a rejection of employment, but a rebalancing of it. A recognition that stability may no longer come from a single source, and that building something of your own—no matter how small it begins—can be a way to participate more actively in shaping your future.

We’re in a moment where the old assumptions about work are being tested. That can feel unsettling, especially for those who have built their lives around those expectations. But it also opens the door to new ways of thinking about security, contribution, and growth.

If stability is no longer something that can be assumed, it becomes something that can be built. And for a growing number of people, that process is starting not within the walls of a corporation, but with a simple question: what can I create for myself?

Let’s Keep Talking:

Jenny Holly Hansen, Business Insurance Broker since 2006

Email: hello@jennyhollyhansen.ca

Phone: 604-317-6755

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-holly-hansen-365b691b/.  

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