What Grief Has Taught Me About Wealth

Hi Sheconomist Insider 👋 It’s Thamina, Founder of The Sheconomist. This is your bi-weekly dose of celebrating the female economy where I help ambitious, purpose-driven women like yourself flip the script on money, career & wellbeing conventions so you can live life on your own terms.

TLDR:

• 💼 Why getting promoted to manager might be a risky career move

• 💛 One of the most beautiful posts on love

• 💰 What grief has taught me about wealth

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🧪 Freedom Formulas

Getting promoted to manager might be a risky career move. Hear me out.

In the last 18 months, CTOs from Workday, You.com, and Adept, plus Instagram's co-founder and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, have all taken roles at Anthropic under one flat title: member of the technical staff.

People who ran thousand-person orgs chose jobs with zero or very few direct reports. On purpose.

Let’s take a step back: Manager headcount at public companies dropped 6.1% between 2022 and 2025. Meta, Amazon, and Google are all stripping layers.

Meanwhile companies like ElevenLabs and Lovable run lean teams where revenue per employee triples the industry standard, because AI now does much of what coordination layers existed to do.

The executives at the frontier have concluded that the most exiting (and maybe safest) place to stand is next to the work itself.

Not above it.

This matters more for ambitious women, and here's my honest take on why.

We were sold management as the only legitimate ambition. More reports, more meetings, more "scope."

So we became excellent at glue work, at running the process, at making the org function. That skill set is real. It is also the first thing this era devalues.

To be clear: if you love developing people, management is still a beautiful career.

The danger is defaulting into it because it was the only path anyone showed you.

The reframe I'd offer: stop measuring seniority in headcount. Start measuring it in proximity.

How close are you to the product, the model, the revenue, the decision?

The seven-figure flat-title roles at AI companies prove the market now pays for closeness, not altitude.

Before your next career conversation, ask yourself one question:

“If my title disappeared tomorrow, what would I still be paid for?”

❣️ Thamina’s Top Picks

🎙️ Really enjoyed this very candid conversation between two of my favorite creators

💎 In case you want to commemorate a loved one (including pets) after they pass

💛 One of the most beautiful posts on love I have seen recently

📈 What to know about the upcoming IPOs (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI)

✨ This week’s Moodboard

Post credits go to Pixel Vista Studio, Styler, Deborah Brown, Lauren DiBacco️

💸 Cooking up Wealth

What grief has taught me about wealth:

I logged back into work this week. Two weeks of being with my family after my beloved Oma passed. Two weeks of not opening Teams. Two weeks of remembering that the actual asset I have been building is not the portfolio, the job title, or even this newsletter.

It is the option to disappear when the people I love need me. And when I needed space myself. Because the truth is I have never been in this much pain and I have yet to reach a state of acceptance that one of the most important people in my life is not here anymore. That she won’t be at my wedding, nor will she have the opportunity to meet my future children. Gut-wrenching.

At the same time, I have also been feeling a lot of gratitude. Gratitude for the life I have been able to build, precisely because of how supportive, loving and generous my grandma was.

Here is what these past two weeks actually looked like (all the tears and headaches from all the crying put aside):

A short trip to a beautiful but insanely cold lake in Austria, where we disconnected, spend time kayaking and standup paddling, and got drunk on local wine every night by the outdoor fireplace underneath the stars.

Lunches and dinners out when nobody had the energy to cook.

Lots of reformer pilates and matcha.

My Oma's old watch, dropped off at a jeweler to be repaired so I can wear it.

1:1 breathwork sessions to release the emotions stored in my body.

Commemorative jewelry for the women in my family, so we each carry a small piece of her on us.

A plaque with my Oma's name on it, going in front of her favorite tree in the park we used to walk to every Friday afternoon as a family. (still working on that)

Quietly making my family's day to day a little easier, so grief had room to breathe.

That is what radical money self-advocacy actually buys you. Not status. Not stuff. The freedom to soften the world around the people you love, on the worst possible days.

My team and my company were unbelievably understanding through all of this. Ironic how I have a lot more bereavement leave working for a company in the US than my family in Germany did. I am grateful for that every day.

But here is what I kept thinking about anyway: if my team had not been so supportive over the past 9 months following my Oma’s accident, I would have taken unpaid leave. If unpaid leave was not enough, I probably would have walked away from the job entirely.

That is what years of negotiating, investing, maxing benefits, and building income on the side actually buys you. The option to leave. The option to stay. The option to choose your family without doing emergency math first.

I knew this intellectually.
Now I know what this feels like on a deeply visceral level.

And while I don’t wish this experience on any of you (even though most of us will experience loss and grief at some point), whenever you do go through something equally painful, I genuinely hope you too will have the freedom to pause and prioritize your loved ones.

And the chance to honor them in whatever way makes you feel connected to them.

In love, gratitude, and abundance,

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