Earlier this year, I shared an essay about losing my coaching practice as the tech layoffs hollowed out the market I served. I wrote about how my sense of self had eroded because I mistakenly saw structural problems I couldn’t control as a personal failing.

Workers are restless, fed up, and eyeing the door. They no longer believe in the work. They’re burned out from what is (let's be honest) organizational exploitation, and blaming themselves for not coping better.

The narrative that success is purely a matter of effort and ambition is bullshit. It doesn’t account for the unrelenting conditions of the system we’re operating in. When we can't see that clearly, we end up trying to solve a systems problem with personal optimization.

Every Friday afternoon at my last corporate job, I took 10 minutes to summarize everything I had worked on that week, and what I had on my plate moving forward. It kept my boss in the loop, and was a great source of detailed information for annual reviews and future job searches.

Many professors chastise graduates for working in the private sector, specifically in large, wealthy corporations. They view it as a binary choice between academia vs. corporate, good and bad, virtuous and evil, pure and impure, human and anti-human, good for the world and not.