The fluorescent light above Maya’s desk flickers at a frequency only a migraine could love, a rhythmic twitch that pulses against the back of her retinas while she stares at cell G165 of the Q3 projections. It is her 15th spreadsheet of the morning, and it is only 11:35. Five months ago, Maya was a legend in the architecture of data, a woman who could weave 2005 lines of elegant, load-bearing code without breaking a sweat or her focus. Now, she is a Senior Director of Strategic Implementation, which is a fancy way of saying she spends 45 hours a week in meetings she doesn’t understand, managing 15 people she barely sees, and making decisions about budgets that feel as abstract as a child’s drawing of a ghost.

She hasn’t opened an IDE in 125 days. Every time she tries, a calendar notification for a ‘Sync-Up’ or a ‘Discovery Call’ pops up like a digital weed, strangling her creative impulse before it can even take root. She is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle, that dark joke of corporate sociology which suggests every employee rises to the level of their own incompetence. But for Maya, it doesn’t feel like a joke. It feels like a fraud. She was promoted because she was the best at what she did, and the reward for being the best was being told she could never do it again.

The Post-Mortem of Ambition

Emma N.S., a bankruptcy attorney I know who has spent 35 years watching empires collapse, once told me that the most honest documents in the world are insolvency filings. They are the post-mortems of ambition. Emma has this way of looking at a stack of legal papers like she’s reading a person’s soul. She’s seen it all-the 15-million-dollar tech firms that forgot how to build their own product because the founders were too busy playing CEO, and the brilliant engineers who ended up in her office because they tried to ‘scale’ their lives into a shape that didn’t fit them.

Most people don’t go bankrupt because they’re bad at their jobs; they go bankrupt because they stopped doing the job they were good at to do a job they thought they should want.

There is a profound tragedy in that. We have built a world where ‘up’ is the only direction of travel, a vertical cage where the only way to earn more respect, more money, or more security is to abandon the very skills that made you valuable in the first place.

Maya sits in her 5th budget meeting of the day and realizes she is actually bad at this. She’s not bad at her work; she’s bad at this specific, manufactured version of work. She’s bad at the politics, she’s bad at the 15-minute intervals of context switching, and she’s bad at the performative enthusiasm required to ‘align stakeholders.’ She is an expert being treated like a novice in a field she never asked to enter. And the worst part? She can’t go back. In the modern corporate hierarchy, moving from management back to individual contribution is seen as a ‘demotion’ or a ‘failure to scale.’ It’s a one-way valve that traps talent in a vacuum of misery.

I’m sitting here, still thinking about that croissant I can’t have, and I realize that the corporate world is also on a diet-a diet of substance. We are trimming away the actual doers to make room for the watchers.

When you reach this point-the point where your calendar is a solid block of grey and your soul is a flickering fluorescent light-you have to find a way to break the circuit. For some, it’s a radical career shift. For others, it’s about finding a space where the ‘management tax’ isn’t the primary currency. Sometimes, the only way to save the expert is to take them out of the office entirely, to a place where the hierarchy dissolves and the human being can reappear. This is why team-building has such a bad reputation; it’s usually just more of the same fluorescent-lit nonsense. But when you get it right-when you take a team to a place like Viravira and put them on the water-the roles start to peel away. The manager remembers they are a person, and the engineer remembers why they loved to build things in the first place. You need that reset. You need to remind the system that the people are more than their titles.

I’ve made the mistake of thinking that ‘more’ always meant ‘better.’ I once took on a project with 45 different deliverables just because I thought I should be the kind of person who could handle it. I couldn’t. I was miserable, I was short with my family, and the work was mediocre. I had promoted myself into a state of constant, low-grade panic. I had to learn, painfully, that my value wasn’t in the volume of my output but in the depth of my craft. It’s a lesson that most of us are forced to learn eventually, usually after the first 15 years of our careers.

The happiest he had been in a decade was the day he had to go down to a job site and personally operate a backhoe because his operator was sick. For 5 hours, he was just a man moving dirt, and it was the only time he felt like himself. He wasn’t a CEO then; he was a craftsman.

He eventually lost the company, started over as a solo contractor, and has never been happier. He didn’t fail at business; he succeeded at escaping a promotion that was killing him.

Valuing the Doer

If you find yourself staring at a spreadsheet and feeling like a ghost, you aren’t the problem. The system that told you this was the only way to succeed is the problem. We have to create paths for experts to remain experts. We have to value the person who can solve the 1005-line bug as much as the person who manages the team that found it. Until we do, we will continue to have a layer of management that is both ineffective and deeply unhappy, a collective of ‘Senior Directors’ who are really just engineers in mourning.

Rebuilding the Foundation

We spend so much time worrying about the bottom line that we forget the foundation. If you remove the joy of the work from the people doing it, the whole structure becomes insolvent. You can only borrow against your passion for so long before the interest kills you. Emma N.S. would tell you that the best way to avoid her office isn’t to make more money, but to make sure you’re still doing the thing that made you want to work in the first place.

I’m going to go have a glass of water now and try not to think about bread. I’m failing at my diet, but at least I’m being honest about it. We should all be a little more honest about the things we’re starving for.