Most people will work their entire life and never enjoy what they do for a living.
This isn’t a snarky meme I saw on X. It’s a modern tragedy that we’ve quietly normalized.
When I turned 40 last year, something shifted in my mind. The thought of another thirty years on the same path — the daily performance, the constant auditioning for approval, the endless jockeying for position — felt unbearable.
I was tired of having to justify my existence at work. Tired of pretending to care about goals that wouldn’t benefit me. Tired of sitting in meetings where we discussed the best ways to increase team productivity.
At first, I thought the answer was simple: escape. Break free from the system entirely. Start my own thing and never look back.
But eighteen months into this journey, I’ve learned something crucial:
Working for yourself doesn’t free you from the system.
It just gives you more control over how you move within it.
For me, that distinction means something. But you’ll have to decide for yourself.
If you choose to take this self-defining journey, I can’t promise you complete freedom.
That’s a fantasy.
What I can offer is something more honest: agency — real authorship over how you spend your days.
I’m talking about the ability to work 20 hours instead of 50.
Not because you’re lazy, but because when you remove the performative nonsense that bloats a corporate week, there’s a lot less “work” left.
You’re left with:
- Time for long conversations with people you love
- Space for projects that light you up instead of drain you
- Work that enriches your community instead of extracting from it
- Enough money to be comfortable — without needing to medicate your unhappiness with purchases
This isn’t about building a eight-figure empire or becoming a digital nomad coding from a hammock.
This is about something more fundamental:
Creating a life that doesn’t feel like a punishment.
The journey here was messier than I expected.
At first, I thought defining what I didn’t want would be enough. But rejection alone isn’t vision. I had to figure out what I was running toward — and nobody teaches us how to do that.
We graduate, grab a job that pays the bills, climb the ladder, and slowly accumulate enough stuff that the idea of losing it becomes terrifying. So we cling to a version of life we never consciously designed.
I needed to break free from that.
And look, I won’t sugarcoat it.
Detaching from paycheck-dependency is like detoxing from a drug you didn’t know you were addicted to.
At first, it’s disorienting. Some mornings, you genuinely wonder if you’re making the biggest mistake of your life.
Your friends think you’ve lost your mind.
Your family starts asking “how’s your business going?” with increasing concern.
You second-guess everything.
But then something shifts.
You remember who you were before you learned to perform for a manager.
You rediscover projects that make you lose track of time.
You remember what it feels like to solve problems because they matter — not because someone told you to.
The work becomes yours again.
I’ve grown more in the last year than I did in the ten before it.
When I started creating content, I was disillusioned by a system that wastes human potential and normalizes burnout and self-medicating. I wanted to call out the executives, shame the billionaires, and tear down the corrupt institutions.
But the longer I looked, the clearer it became:
No one is truly running this.
Even the people at the top are trapped — they just have more comfortable seats.
The VC who hasn’t felt real excitement in years.
The CEO grinding 80-hour weeks to hit targets he knows are meaningless.
The influencer terrified to post anything real because it might hurt her brand.
They’re not free. They’re just better compensated for their misery.
What frustrates me most now is how the entrepreneurship world has started selling a new kind of trap — dressed up like liberation.
- Coaches pitching “escape the matrix” fantasies
- Creators chasing seven-figure launches like it’s salvation
- People trading one form of burnout for another — and promising freedom
They’re still playing Monopoly. They’ve just convinced themselves they’ll be the house this time.
But if we end up chasing the same prizes — the bigger house, the fancier car, the dopamine drip of social proof — then what was the point?
We might as well stay in our corporate jobs and call it a day.
Real freedom isn’t about making more money. It’s about needing less of it.
It’s about building something sustainable, not just scalable.
It’s about creating work that leaves the world better — not just your bank account.
And once you taste that? Once you remember what it feels like to wake up excited — not anxious, not numb — it ruins you for the old way.
Even on the hard days.
Even when the money gets tight.
You can’t unsee the possibility of a different way.
This is what I’m committed to figuring out.
Not just for myself, but for all of us who refuse to accept that meaningful work is a luxury only a few can afford.
I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does.
But I do have a conviction: we can build something better.
We can run businesses that serve something bigger than our own egos.
We can create communities where success is measured by relationships, not reach.
We can prove that making good money and doing meaningful work aren’t mutually exclusive.
But I can’t do this alone. And neither can you.
This is a call to arms for every creative entrepreneur who’s done pretending that burnout is noble.
For anyone who believes that work should add meaning to your life — not subtract years from it.
For those who are done chasing more and ready to start creating better.
We don’t have to accept the culture we were born into.
Even if we can’t escape it entirely, we can decide how we move within it.
So let me ask you:
What does “better” look like in your world?
If you’re building something that matters while trying to live a life that makes sense, I want to hear from you.
Comment below. Tell me what you’re working toward.
Because we’re in this together.
