A More Durable Question

A little while ago, I found myself at a garden party with former colleagues who had become friends — smart, accomplished people, the kind who had thrived in the meritocracies of consulting and large corporate life.

The company was good. The food was good. The wine was good. And the stories were quietly disquieting.

Not dramatic — nobody was in crisis. But underneath the wit and the warmth, there was a recognisable undercurrent: failed projects, corporate politics, unexpectedly cut careers, and the particular exhaustion of having given a great deal to institutions that had, in the end, simply moved on.

We found the funny angle on all of it. But I kept thinking about it afterwards.

Have We Accepted an Inversion Without Examining It?

For most of recorded history, economic freedom meant freedom from work. The goal of accumulating wealth was, at least in part, to escape the necessity of labour. Leisure, relationships, intellectual life, artistic pursuits, and civic engagement were considered the ends. Work was the means.

Somewhere in the last century, particularly among the professional classes, that relationship quietly flipped. Today, the most successful people — by common definition — are typically those who are permanently reachable, who travel constantly, who answer messages late at night, and who remain under continuous performance pressure.

A Roman citizen in the first century or a nineteenth-century aristocrat, transported into the life of a modern executive, would likely find this disorientating. "You gain status," they might observe, "for having no time to yourself?" It is a question worth sitting with.

The Institutions We Idolise Are Not Built to Carry Us

The environments that society most associates with success — elite universities, MBA programmes, consulting firms, investment banks, high-growth technology companies, life science giants — share something worth noting. They are not designed around human flourishing. They are designed around value creation and competitive differentiation. That is not a criticism. It is simply what they are there for.

The problem is the story we tell on top of that reality. The narrative handed to young professionals remains remarkably linear: study hard, work hard, get promoted, keep climbing, success awaits. It persists because it is partly true. For a while, and for some people, it works.

But a great deal is left unsaid. What happens when the climb slows? What happens when family responsibilities increase? What happens when the organisation restructures and simply no longer has a place for you? What happens when age or illness becomes a factor?

These are not edge cases. They are the normal trajectory of most careers, including the careers of highly capable people.

How Do We End Up Here?

We do not usually set out to build a dominant personal identity centred on work. It happens gradually. Education rewards early performance. Work rewards sustained performance. Status becomes visible, comparable, and cumulative. Over time, these signals reinforce each other until one domain quietly becomes the primary measure of worth.

In that sense, over-investment in career identity is a predictable outcome of systems that repeatedly signal that worth is earned, success is ranked, and visibility matters. We become fluent in the language of economic value and status, and slowly lose others.

The Real Danger Is What We Build Around Work

Of course, there is nothing wrong with expecting work to provide income. Nor is it unreasonable to expect purpose, challenge, structure, community, and status. These are real things that careers can offer. I genuinely value what work has given and continues to give me: intellectual challenge, exposure to new ideas, opportunities to create, and friendships that outlast every job.

The danger arrives when work becomes the primary source of identity and when achievement stops being something we do and becomes who we are. When a linear success logic only creates binary outcomes of winners and losers. At that point:

• A professional setback is not a system's outcome. It becomes a personal failure.

• A missed promotion is no longer a competitive result. It becomes a verdict.

• A redundancy is no longer just a job loss. It becomes a loss of self.

• A career plateau no longer affects only earnings. It destabilises the story we tell ourselves about who we are and where our lives are going.

The ancient Greeks could scarcely imagine a meaningful life outside the polis (city). I believe that modern high achievers can not practically imagine a life outside the corporation. However, organisations are not equipped to become the primary identity structure of a human life, and when the moment of reckoning arrives, it becomes psychologically destabilising, if not devastating.

What Actually Endures — And What That Doesn't Mean

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Shelley wrote those words imagining an inscription on a shattered statue, half-buried in desert sand. The empire of Ozymandias — Ramesses II — had gone. What remains is a poem about the hubris of it all.

It is a provocative but useful mirror to hold up against modern professional life. When we look back across history, what actually survives? The things that reach beyond economic utility: architecture, literature, music, philosophy, science, beauty, and ideas.

This is not an argument against economic activity. Markets create wealth. Wealth funds institutions. Institutions make great works of civilisation possible. But when centuries pass, it is rarely the economic activity itself that people remember. We remember the cathedral, not the medieval accounts ledger; the symphony, not the financing structure; the scientific insight, not the budget that funded it.

The honest caveat is that the people who built those cathedrals often worked under brutal conditions, with little autonomy and no expectation of legacy. They are not a model for how we should work. But they point to something true nonetheless: The things human beings have consistently found meaningful over time are beauty, connection, craft, understanding, and wisdom. They require deliberate attention — and a focus that the logic of high-achievement culture steers us away from.

A More Durable Question

I am not arguing against ambition, achievement, or professional pride. These things matter, and they matter to me. But I keep wondering about their status as ends in themselves. If achievement and wealth become the destination rather than the vehicle, life outside of work can feel depleted of meaning, rather than offering opportunities to enjoy relationships, intellectual life, artistic pursuits, and civic engagement.

So, I have become increasingly drawn to a different question than the one I spent the early part of my career asking.

Not: How do I build a successful career?

But: How do I build a life that remains meaningful beyond career success?

I am curious whether others have wrestled with the same thing. The fact that it feels slightly dangerous to ask — particularly in professional spaces and among high achievers — is itself worth noticing.

References & Further Reading

Christensen, C.M., Allworth, J. and Dillon, K. (2012) How Will You Measure Your Life? New York: HarperCollins.

Perel, E. (2025) 'How to Balance Work, Family, and Fulfillment', Everyday Better with Leah Smart [Podcast], LinkedIn/YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QtbvBm5MdA (accessed 06/06/2026).

Shelley, P.B. (1818) 'Ozymandias', Available at: https://anthologydev.lib.virginia.edu/work/ShelleyP/shelley-ozymandias (accessed 06/06/2026).

Tolstoy, L. (1886) The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Available at: https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/existentialism/materials/tolstoy_death_ilyich.pdf (accessed 06/06/2026).

Schönburg, A. von (2005) Die Kunst des stilvollen Verarmens. Berlin: Rowohlt.