Contemporary career theory remains shaped by an inherited imaginary of paths, ladders, and levels, a symbolic architecture that presupposes linearity, hierarchy, stability and predictable ascent, even though current labour markets increasingly contradict this model. Recent empirical analyses (Krzywdzinski et al. 2025; Baruch 2025; Rabenu & Baruch 2025) show that careers now unfold as contingent, hybrid and fragile assemblages shaped by volatile ecologies of skills, technologies and organizational policies. Under such conditions, the traditional career imaginary becomes a 'forma formata' (Cassirer, 1930), a crystallized schema that restricts perception, narrows horizons of possibility and reinforces inequalities. Drawing on Spinoza, the paper argues that this imaginary can function as a superstition that produces 'sad passions', states of diminished agency in which individuals become dependent on external causes. To counter this, the paper advances a reframing grounded in Bergson’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of becoming, multiplicity and immanent possibility. Bergson’s images of duration (spool, elastic band, spectrum) illustrate how futures emerge from the present through continuous differentiation rather than prediction. Deleuze’s concept of 'asignifying' rupture further shows how careers can sustain interruptions and recompositions without collapse, generating 'new lines of flight'. Finally, the paper introduces the notion of 'responsive careers' (Post & Woldendorp 2026): trajectories shaped by the capacity to read signals, navigate moral tensions, and experiment within shifting ecologies. Career guidance, therefore, must cultivate practices that expand potency, such as experimentation, reciprocity, strategic refusal and non‑accelerated rhythms, while countering the 'sad passions' that diminish agency.

--

• Psicologia - Ciências Sociais
• Economia e Gestão - Ciências Sociais
• Sociologia - Ciências Sociais
• Filosofia, Ética e Religião - Humanidades