The Necessity Renaissance
Picture the chair, the imaginary mic clip, the camera one or camera two confusion, the pause before the documentary soundtrack hits.
The Netflix documentary trend has taken over social media feeds this summer. People sitting down dramatize their most mundane or humiliating moment with the prestige documentary treatment. I'll admit it's fun to imagine HRnB’s founding story getting that lighting, that clip-on mic, and that signature score. The reality is, I've been doing my own quiet version of this for six years, just without the chair.
Working title: Sight Unseen.
The Trailer
Before I started HRnB, I was firmly rooted in an e-commerce company that went from ambitious beginnings to a remarkable, Philadelphia start-up success. So when people ask why I left, I usually tell the fun version: had an opportunity, built something of my own, been my own boss for six years, and wouldn't trade it.
All of this is true. It’s just not the whole story.
The unglamorous footnote is that it started with a surprise CEO change. The company I'd spent nearly eight years helping build was getting a massive script flip. In a span of four weeks, I needed to quietly offboard the co-founding CEO and CTO and onboard a stranger. Then I learned the new CEO was bringing in a Chief Talent Officer, someone they were best friends with and had worked with before. Until the new CEO's first day, I was a complete unknown to them. Sight unseen, no conversation, no interview for a job I was already doing. I figured they were a package deal, and it crushed me completely. I resigned in October, about a month after my replacement started, left in December with nothing lined up, and promptly went to Vegas like a fake adult who needed to blow off some steam. I started HRnB two months later.
I tell the fun version because it's the one that sounds like a choice, the one with a hero's arc, and a clean edit. The truth is it's both. I did build something of my own on purpose. I also built it because the alternative disappeared out from under me without so much as a conversation about what my career was about to become. Renaissance and necessity, same story, and I've spent six years giving it the theatrical version instead of the director's cut.
I tell this story now because I've been reading the recent articles about the boom in new business applications. In 2025, there were 5.7 million new business filings, the most ever recorded, and nearly every outlet is covering this story by telling their own, shiny version: AI is fueling a renaissance, chatbots are co-founders, and a wave of builders finally brave enough to chase the thing they always wanted.
It's a great story; it’s just not the only one. I suspect plenty of the 5.7 million have necessity underlining their renaissance. It’s just not what they put in the trailer.
The B-Roll
I read through the data behind these filings, and the explanation splits into more threads than any single headline can hold. Pandemic-era layoffs pushed people out of jobs they didn't choose to leave. Along came stimulus money and low interest rates, bringing people the runway to try something new, even if it was temporary support and not a long-term plan. Then came two years of a labor market that's stopped both hiring and firing, leaving millions of people with no obvious next move except making one for themselves.
That freeze hasn't landed evenly. Black women's unemployment rate climbed from 5.4 percent to 7.3 percent last year alone, the highest in four years. This is territory white women haven't seen since the worst months of the Great Recession.
I'd gently suggest this isn't just a labor market being cautious. "AI efficiency" and "pandemic restructuring" have both made a remarkably convenient excuse to cut the people companies were already inclined to cut first. Two distinct moments, five years apart, and neither one gave the labor market time to fully recover before the next hit.
The technology changes. The label changes. The people on the losing end of it look strikingly similar both times.
Add a stock market and housing market flush enough to make some people feel like the risk of starting a business was one they could afford to take. Tack on new revenue channels like social media shops that didn't exist a few years ago, and it stops looking like one story with one cause.
Of course, AI is one of those threads and a very real one. I just think it's getting more credit than its share because it has the best press kit. "The labor market quietly stopped offering people a way back to a paycheck" never makes a magazine cover. The story doesn't have a hero; it's just true, and the truth doesn't sell the way renaissance does.
Necessity in Disguise
Here's the part that’s amusing (for lack of a better word) to me. A meaningful chunk of these 5.7 million filings aren't renaissance stories at all. They are necessity stories in disguise. Someone got laid off in a job market that isn't hiring the way it used to, they needed income, so they invented the only job available to them. If someone were to ask for their story, they would probably share the fun version. I know that’s the story I was giving six years ago.
The Director’s Cut
My own consulting practice has always been flexible by design and built to answer whatever a company needs instead of offering one fixed thing. What's changed over the last year and a half isn't the model. It's what companies have been asking for, and that shift is the business echo of the census data. Some of the reach-outs I get are for a genuine need for flexible expert help. Some of them are companies that quietly stopped hiring full-time roles and started buying the work in smaller pieces instead, out of the same caution that's kept the labor market frozen for two years. Necessity disguised as renaissance again.
None of this makes the AI story false. It's one real thread in a much bigger tangle, next to the labor market and the quiet math of necessity, both of which did their share of the work without much fanfare. I'd rather see the whole picture than the highlight reel, mine included. Your renaissance probably has necessity underlining it, too.
