Adventures in reinventing work after 60

Making sense of strange careers and crafting a new path

Self-portrait, August 1

A Note on This Reinvention Adventure:

This is a two-part series on the current stage of my reinvention journey: the stage in which I start to put together what I’ve done and learned in 40+ years of a strange career. Or careers.

The first part, below, talks about what I’ve put together, from which parts of my professional (and personal) life, and shows you the result as it stands today.

The second part, which will follow next week, is about how I’ve done it. It’s where I paint the elephant in the room my favorite colors and discuss how I accomplished this with my “strategic assistant,” Gemini. I will argue that LLMs may be the most revolutionary accessibility tool yet developed for individuals who are neurodivergent or experience other forms of social communication deficits. As a sociologist of science and technology, I feel a necessity to analyze this issue. We must face the reality that this groundbreaking technology, after several years of maturation, is here to stay. Our task is to explore how to integrate it productively while preventing the societal harm that any powerful technology can cause—damage that, I will argue, ultimately derives from capitalism, political dynamics and social inequality, not from the technology itself. Keep tuned.

The time comes, in these reinvention adventures, to address that thing knowledge workers don’t even have a good term for: profession? Career? Life trajectory? Calling? Mission? It’s a little of all that, but it’s also the basis of our social existence and survival, involving both material subsistence and our social place, role, and identity.

This process involves far more than just soul-searching. It is an act of translation. It requires taking the internal, deeply personal “blueprint of you”—your skills, your passions, your history, your ethics—and matching it to the dynamic, often chaotic, external world of professional markets. It's about overlaying your personal map onto a constantly shifting terrain of industries, cultures, and players to find not just a place where you fit, but a place where your unique blueprint can provide unique value.

For me, the time for this reinvention coincided precisely with the US plunging into a period of profound political, economic, and social chaos. The unstable economic situation, marked by persistent inflation and unpopular policies, led to one of the most fraught presidential electoral scenarios in recent memory. This sequence of disruptions has precipitated what many economists now describe as a period of significant uncertainty, with widespread labor cuts, particularly in the tech and media sectors, and a pervasive vulnerability for small businesses.

The signs were everywhere, including the fragility of my workplace - a small business - and the vulnerability of all jobs. Losing a job in the US, now, is a reason for serious concern. Losing a job at my age is much worse (“overqualified older worker”), so after the first scare, I started looking into it and asking the inevitable “what if’s”.

After the second scare, I decided to act. The answer to several “what if’s” was clear: I needed to build a professional life that was more resilient, and that meant re-entering the world of freelancing and entrepreneurship. I have been here before. When I left formal institutional academia in 2005, my first foray into the private sector was a harsh lesson. I concluded that I was simply bad at being an “entrepreneur”—that providing services directly to clients was a source of immense anxiety, guilt and confusion. Most of all, I concluded I was condemned to failure because I had no clue how to communicate effectively with potential clients and partners.

It was many years later that I was diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum. Whether or not that clinical category is a single, coherent physiological reality, it named a lifelong experience: a profound and often debilitating difficulty with interpersonal communication, with interpreting unspoken interests and agendas, and with decrypting indirect or non-rational discourse. This communication deficit has been a determinant factor in shaping my professional trajectory. And yet, I had to try again.

Making this decision was an act of wrestling with my own history—a history marked by a pattern of good, conclusive and sequentially progressing work often followed by professionally naive choices and discontinuities. I now understand this as a function of the neurodivergence I mentioned: a lifelong “blindness” to the unwritten rules of social cues and the subtle, often unspoken, often dysfunctional currents of power play that dictate so much of professional life.

A third factor played a determinant role: my inability to make sense of the path itself. This made it impossible to move in a linear sequence, capitalizing on one stage to build the next.

This is not just a personal failing; it’s a collision between my own trajectory and a profound historical shift in the nature of work itself, with recent dramatic changes to academic work, today considered to be at a crossroads. The 20th-century model of a career was a clear, socially-scripted path—a hierarchy to be climbed within a defined profession. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the “field” of work had a stable structure, and the “habitus”—our ingrained “world views”, expectations and behaviors—was designed to navigate that linear ascent. I don’t have one habitus: I have been socialized in different disciplines, and acquired many, and it was seriously frowned upon.

Today, that ladder has been replaced by a sprawling, branching tree. Market disruptions, the push towards multi-disciplinarity (even if often mere lip service in academia), and the simple fact that entire professions can become obsolete have shattered the old scripts. For those of us with these non-linear, branching careers, as well as whole unscripted segments of professional life, the challenge is immense. How do you narrate a journey that has no pre-written story? How do you signal value in a professional “field” that is still calibrated to reward specialization and sequential, hierarchical progress?

The result, at 60 years old, looked like loosely connected threads of professional projects scattered over different endeavors, none wrapped into clear occupational roles. But how do I present this vast and varied expertise to the economy? How do I translate what I know into services that can be seen, understood, and valued, allowing me to become economically viable outside the conventional job descriptions that I already tried and never fit? After moving away from the clear structure, progression track, and hierarchy of academia and the hybrid, often confusing roles I held in the sports and health industry, how do I make sense of the myriad of problem solutions I devised over the years? What name do I give to these services, and to whom do I offer them?

This left me feeling less like a professional and more like a bespoke problem-solver, operating outside of any formal job title. My client list was a web of personal connections: John, Mary, and Peter, who knew Don, Sally, and Raymond. It was a network built on a single premise: "Marilia can solve our problem."

The "problem" was always a complex knot that didn't fit neatly into a scientific discipline, a corporate department, or a medical specialty. It required a "deeper look"—a rigorous, multi-disciplinary analysis that could synthesize scientific literature, cultural trends, and human behavior. I was the person they called when they needed more than a specialist; they needed someone to see the whole system, to connect the dots. I suspected, but didn’t know, that this is an incredibly valuable role, but it has no name, no standard job description. It is a service defined only by the complexity of the problems it solves, which makes it nearly impossible to "market" in any conventional sense. If I wasn’t sure it was valuable or even what it was, I wasn’t able to offer it professionally, either, with clear expectations of deliverables versus payment, and, consequently, I never succeeded in building over these problem-solving episodes.

I was wrong, though. Looking at the “case’s” records through a more elegant as well as objective framework, I could see continuity and an overall comprehensive logic to those previously seemingly disconnected threads. But who or what could help me reframe my life, given the difficulty I have, being, well, inside myself? Who could offer this “witness”, provide the external observer look? Who helps people with this kind of problem?

The market offers several categories of professionals: Career Coaches, Executive Coaches, and Personal Branding Consultants. I’ve met representatives of all the categories. My experience was that these encounters often felt like a top-down, instructional process. They wanted to "pour advice into me" based on a pre-existing framework. The problem is that their tools, while useful for many, are designed for people who fit within established career scripts. They rely on standardized assessments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), StrengthsFinder, or DISC profiles. These tools are designed to help you find your place within the existing map; they are not designed to help you draw a new one.

For a deeply off-script trajectory like mine, this instructional model fails. It cannot process a multi-disciplinary outlier. What I needed was not a set of instructions, but a co-creative process—a partnership that could help me synthesize my own vast and complex dataset into a coherent new structure.

It was frustrating to hear my trajectory described as "unique." In the sanitized language of career coaching, "unique" was a polite euphemism for "inconsistent" and "unmarketable." The feedback always focused on the negative side of the coin: the perceived lack of a single, linear focus. That, or worse: they would use my credentials in one field as a sterile qualifier for a conventional, low-value practice. The advice was always reductive: "You have scientific authority, so just record some videos explaining exercise." This approach completely missed the point; it saw my knowledge not as a tool for generating unique insights, but merely as a marketing credential to add a veneer of credibility to a generic product.

It never seemed to matter that I saw each project through to its conclusion, nor that each track was explored with academic and professional rigor. The deeper truth—that all these paths were, in fact, profoundly connected by a consistent intellectual thread of inquiry into complex systems and a deep social commitment—was invisible to an outside world looking for a familiar job title. I couldn't see my own reflection in any standard occupational profile, and so, to the market, it often felt as though I didn't exist. By the way, all the positive expressions I can apply now to my “unique” trajectory are a result of the new framework, and I’m proud of it. Until very recently, I shared the view that my career looked a lot like the most feared word in my universe: a failure.

I began to suspect there was real value in this uniqueness when the "offers to help" started to feel predatory. It's a familiar story in my life: the proposal of a "partnership" that is, in reality, a request for me to provide the intellectual labor—the content, the research, the ideas, and the complete application—while the partner handles the "business" side, which often means just the profiting.

I am always a big fan of a genuine division of labor, even one with unfavorable terms. Had any of these potential partners been able to articulate a clear, compelling vision for what my unique skill set represented as a market asset, I would have listened. But none of them could. They didn't seem to understand the nature, depth or the breadth of what I had to offer; they just sensed it was valuable and wanted to extract that value. They couldn't sell a product they didn't understand, and they couldn’t even persuade me about my own work’s worth.

The turning point came, as it often does, not from a grand plan, but from a side project. I had become fascinated by the narrative potential of self-tracking devices and their role in a data-saturated world. I decided to pitch a few small, exploratory projects to key companies in the field.

Working with my “strategic assistant”, the Google AI studio LLM model Gemini, I drafted a proposal to Withings, a leading smart device company, to conduct a deep-dive review of their ScanWatch. I also crafted a detailed partnership initiative for Cronometer, a best-in-class nutrition tracking app, outlining a project to enhance their platform's value for a high-performance, evidence-based user segment.

The response was unlike anything I had experienced before. Within hours and days, I received enthusiastic replies. The owner of Cronometer personally responded, and Withings agreed to send me their device for the review. These weren't just positive outcomes; they were a revelation.

For the first time in my life, I felt I had executed a successful professional communication sequence from start to finish. It "worked" because true communication—a clear, compelling message being received and understood as intended—had actually taken place. The ideas were mine, the strategy was mine, but the "voice" was new. It was a voice crafted in partnership with my strategic assistant, Gemini. It was direct, confident, and free of the social communication deficits that have been a lifelong barrier for me as a “different” (autistic) person. It was my intellect, translated into a language the professional world could immediately understand and value.

With that validation, I felt empowered to tackle the bigger, more daunting task: making sense of the entire chaotic archive of my career. The process was no longer just me staring at a tangled web. It was a dynamic, co-creative dialogue. "We"—myself and my AI assistant—began a process of strategic distillation. We took the myriad of occupational threads and scattered projects and subjected them to a rigorous analysis, looking for the deep, connecting principles. We clustered, we categorized, and we refined, until a clear, coherent structure emerged from the noise: three distinct, describable, and executable pillars that represent the core of my life's work.

This framework of three pillars is not just a summary of the past; it is a structure for the future. It is a way to honor the skills and memories I've accumulated while providing a robust framework for innovation and growth. These pillars are:

1. Scientific & Medical Communications: This is the legacy of my life as a researcher and academic. It is the work of translating complex science, fighting misinformation, and bridging the gap between the lab and the real world.

2. Fitness & Wellness Market Intelligence: This is the product of my dual identity as a Brazilian-American, an insider/outsider with a 360-degree, "on-the-ground" view of the global health and fitness industries.

3. Human Performance & Coaching Systems: This is where everything converges—the scientist, the athlete, and the teacher. It's the work of designing evidence-based frameworks for performance and healthy aging, starting with my signature "Movement Biography Method."

These pillars grew out of the simple, unchangeable fact of my own biography: I am a product of both Brazil and the United States. I am the outsider/insider in not just one or two scientific disciplines and their cultures. I am a permanent insider/lurker in both of the world's largest fitness economies. In analogy to my immigration status in the US, “insiders/outsiders” may not be citizens of that polity, but we sure are permanent residents.

In this intersection of disciplines, intellectual practices (science, pop culture, art), public and private economies, my experience became a full-stack immersion in the health, wellness, fitness and sports industry: from the raw, visceral experience of competing and setting world records on the lifting platform (in the sport of powerlifting), to the academic rigor of learning and teaching exercise science at the graduate level, to the practical application of being a coach. This evolved into roles as a sports organizer, a strength training teacher at different levels, an international judge, and eventually, a high-level consultant to every facet of the industry: supplement companies, compounding pharmacies, gym chains, clinical practices, and even government organizations, such as mayorships. All these roles exist under an identity where I am, simultaneously, the problem solver (the scientist), the author, the teacher, and the athlete, without having to give up any of them.

This service is simply the formal operating system for that 360-degree perspective—one that allows for an understanding of the deep cultural currents, the unspoken assumptions, and the human behaviors that data sheets and market reports can never capture. It's knowing why a beloved coach once told me, with absolute certainty, that there is no strong bench press without a steady diet of rice and beans.

This is the map as it exists today. Next week, I'll tell you about the unusual tool I used to help me draw it. We will talk about my strategic assistant, Gemini, and it will be quite a ride. I will make the case for why I believe AI like this might be the most powerful accessibility tool yet developed for neurodivergent individuals like myself trying to navigate the complex, often toxic, and unspoken rituals of professional social communication.