Life After the UN ... Routines Shattered.

I still remember the first morning after I left my job. For years, I had been used to waking up to a buzzing phone, a flood of emails, and a day packed with meetings, deadlines, and urgent tasks. That morning, the silence felt deafening. I had chosen to step away from the sector to build my own career, but even though it was my decision, I hadn’t anticipated just how disorienting it would feel. The structure that had once shaped every hour of my life was suddenly gone.

For a long time, I had lived in the rhythm of humanitarian work, a rhythm that never truly stopped. Emails piled up, deadlines approached, and proposals often had to be finalized over weekends. Boundaries between professional and personal life blurred until they hardly existed. This culture wasn’t accidental. It was rewarded and reinforced, with availability and personal sacrifice often seen as the ultimate markers of commitment. Exhausting as it was, work became the center of my life, leaving little room for anything else.

When I stepped away, that rhythm collapsed overnight. The stream of calls, emails, and urgent requests that had defined my days vanished. At first, I thought I would welcome the quiet, but instead, I found myself unsettled. The silence wasn’t restful, it was empty. Without the constant structure of work, I felt adrift, almost as if a part of my identity had been stripped away.

In my coaching work, I now see that I wasn’t alone in this experience. Many people who lose their jobs due to UN and INGO funding cuts describe a similar struggle. The sudden absence of routine is often more destabilizing than financial uncertainty. When the job disappears, so too does the framework that held daily life together, the wake-up alarms, meetings, and even the frustrations of bureaucracy. Stability often comes less from the work itself and more from the structure it provides. When that collapses, it leaves a void that can feel overwhelming.

For international staff, especially those posted in emergency duty stations and living in guesthouses, the disruption can be severe. Daily life is almost entirely structured around work, with social interactions and leisure tied to the mission. When a contract ends or someone steps away, the collapse is profound. Unlike national staff, who may have family or community support, many international staff have little to fall back on beyond the professional identity shaping their days. The loss is not just financial or professional, it is social, emotional, and existential, leaving emptiness once the mission rhythm disappears.

As funding continues to shrink, the true cost becomes clear: it is felt not only in stalled projects but in the lives of people whose days, identities, and routines were built around this work, in communities depending on their support, and in the fragile social fabric sustaining humanitarian and development efforts worldwide.