On the three lies we’re sold about work, and what’s true instead.

A woman sat across from me on a video call a few months ago, holding a coffee mug with her company’s logo on it up near her kitchen counter, turning it slowly between her palms the way you turn something you’re not sure you still want to hold. She had just been promoted into the title she had organized her twenties and thirties around — corner office, signing authority, her name under a slightly bigger headshot on the company website than the year before. She set the mug down on the counter next to her laptop and told me the day of her promotion had been the saddest day of her professional life. Not because anything had gone wrong. Because everything had gone exactly as promised, and she felt nothing.

I have sat across from that kind of silence more times than I can count over the years — the silence that comes after someone gets the thing they were told to want and discovers the want was never really theirs. It usually arrives with a kind of quiet bewilderment, because nobody warned them this was a possible outcome. The story they were handed, somewhere around a commencement stage in a cap and gown, did not include a chapter where the dream job arrives on schedule and turns out to be the wrong dream.

This is, I suspect, a good part of what’s behind the wave of people quietly leaving or quietly checking out of corporate life right now, the wave that gets a new headline every few months — quiet quitting, quiet burnout, whatever comes next. It is tempting to read all of that concept as a generation gone soft, unwilling to put in the hours their parents did. I don’t think that’s it, or not mostly. I think a great many people are noticing, roughly around the same time, the same gap between a promise made to them early and a result delivered to them later, and discovering they were never told the promise came with an asterisk.

That story has a traceable origin. Standing at a Stanford commencement in 2005, Steve Jobs told the graduating class, “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” and the line has been framed on office walls and printed on coffee mugs ever since — including, probably, some very near where my directee set hers down. The writer Miya Tokumitsu, in her 2014 Jacobin essay “In the Name of Love,” traced exactly this lineage and pointed out something uncomfortable: the people most able to afford the leap into work they love are usually the people who already had the most cushion underneath them. For everyone else, the mantra quietly does something less generous than inspire. It turns a structural problem — not enough good jobs, not enough room to take risks — into a personal one. If you don’t love your work, the story implies, you simply haven’t looked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or been brave enough to go get it.

The second half of that same story usually arrives a little later in the curriculum — a guest entrepreneur clicking through a slide deck in a packed lecture hall, telling the room that with enough grit, any one of them could be the next name on a building. Anyone can build something of their own, the story goes, if they just work hard enough — and here I must be careful, because for a season of my life I was the proof people pointed to. My business partner Mike and I spent eight months preparing before we opened Varment Guard, the pest and wildlife management company we built from nothing into a business that eventually employed hundreds of people. We hung a sign over our own door — Failure was not an option — and meant it the way you mean something you have staked your mortgage on. It worked. I am not interested in pretending otherwise, or in false modesty about something I am genuinely proud of. But it worked because of a long list of things that had very little to do with how hard we wanted it: the specific economy of that particular year, a partner whose strengths were exactly the inverse of mine, a tolerance for risk that is not evenly distributed across human temperaments and never has been. I don’t want to make it sound costless, either. I had small children at home through those eight months and the years right after, and I missed real time with them I can’t get back — which is its own kind of bill, one that never shows up on anyone’s balance sheet but gets paid all the same. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly half of new businesses don’t make it to their fifth year, and the ones that do are not simply the ones who wanted it most. Holding up survivors as proof that anyone can do this if they just try hard enough is a little like holding up a lottery winner as proof that anyone can get rich if they just buy a ticket.

What worries me more than the failure rate itself is what people do with it afterward. I have sat with more than one person who closed a business within those first hard years and absorbed it as a verdict on their character rather than what it mostly was — a coin flip with worse odds than anyone told them going in. The story promised something close to a meritocracy. The data describes something closer to weather.

Underneath both of those lies sits a third, quieter one: that money and position are the correct measure of a life well spent, and that everyone, deep down, wants more of both. Some people do, and there is nothing wrong with that — ambition is not a character flaw, and plenty of people are genuinely called toward building, leading, and accumulating in ways that serve others well. But plenty of other people are wired toward something else entirely: depth over breadth, the same craft practiced quietly for thirty years, a small life held close rather than a large one held loosely. I think of the kind of person who has spent three decades fixing pipe organs in the same three counties, with no interest in a bigger territory or a louder reputation, who is, by every measure I trust, thoroughly fulfilled. Emotional intelligence, at its most basic, includes the unglamorous skill of knowing accurately which one of those people you are, rather than which one you were told to become. The Enneagram, in its better uses, exists for exactly this kind of clarity — not to sort people into better and worse categories, but to help each of us recognize the shape of aliveness we were built for, which is rarely identical to our neighbor’s. Mistaking the second kind of person for a failed version of the first kind is not a small error. It is the engine behind an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering, including, I suspect, the kind my directee was sitting in when she set down her mug.

Was It Ever Yours To Want Reflection Sheet

I didn’t ask her what she wanted to do next. I asked her something slower: whether the job she’d just arrived at had ever been hers to want, or whether she had simply been collecting, for twenty years, on a promise someone else made on her behalf at a podium she barely remembers. She picked the mug back up while she thought about it, turned it over once more, and read her own company’s name on the side of it like she was seeing it for the first time. She didn’t have an answer that day. But she left the call holding the mug instead of setting it back down on the counter, which felt, to both of us, like the truer ending to that sentence.

If this stirred something up, I made a short reflection sheet to go with it — you can find it, along with more like it, at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

mysticalseeker.substack.com & spiritofeq.com/blog