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When thinking about their future career, not all individuals have a coherent vision of the desired future. Instead, some may imagine incompatible attributes for their future self and feel torn between them. We introduce the interconnectedness between future-oriented self-attributes as a previously overlooked quality of the way individuals think about their future by proposing a network-based approach to future work selves. We distinguish between future work self networks’ positive density, the proportion of mutually facilitative ties between the attributes they contain, and their negative density, the proportion of ties that indicate conflict between attributes. We developed a methodology to capture future work self networks and across a series of studies showed that positive and negative density of future work self networks are distinct from related concepts such as career aspirations and vocational identity, as well as from …