The Formula Worked. So Why Does It Feel Like This?

A thought I keep coming back to, no matter how many times I try to leave it alone.

I have spent a good portion of my adult life doing what you're supposed to do.

International education. Graduate degree. Multilateral experience. Consulting roles across multiple countries. The kind of CV that, on paper, looks like a person who has it together. And in many ways - measurable ways - I do. I have worked hard. I have earned things. I am genuinely proud of some of it.

But I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable thought, the one that shows up quietly at the end of a long workday or in the middle of a conversation I'm only half present for:

Did I choose this? Or did I just follow the formula?

The Formula Is Real. That's the Problem.

Here's something nobody really says out loud: for a certain subset of people, professional success isn't that remarkable. I don't mean that cruelly. I mean it honestly.

If you were raised in a stable, present, caring family - the kind where someone showed up to things, asked about your day, pushed you toward your potential. If you had access to private education and then an international university. If you played sports, joined clubs, built a CV before you even knew what a CV was. 

If you had a safety net, visible or invisible, that caught you when you stumbled; then the white collar job, the benefits package, the ability to pay rent, the occasional trip abroad - these things were not destiny, exactly, but they were not a miracle either. They were an output of inputs. Follow the formula, and more likely than not, you get the result.

There is nothing extraordinary about arriving at ordinary success when extraordinary resources were there from the beginning.

I say this as someone who had those resources. I say it with gratitude and with discomfort, in equal measure.

But Here Is What the Formula Doesn't Tell You

It doesn't tell you that somewhere along the way, you will start to lose track of yourself.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. It happens slowly - the way a language fades when you stop speaking it. You get busy. You get good at the job. You get recognized for being good at the job, and that recognition feels like something, so you chase more of it. And the thing you actually cared about - the thing that lit you up before anyone was paying you for anything - gets quieter and quieter, until one day you realize you can't quite remember the last time it spoke.

We tell ourselves we'll get back to it. Later. When things calm down. When we hit the next milestone. When we've saved enough. When we've earned the right to want something different.

But the longer we stay in it, the more we convince ourselves that getting out is harder than it actually is. And I've come to think that's not really true. It's not that it gets harder. It's that we've buried the desire for longer. We've gotten better at not listening to it. We've mistaken the noise of the career for the voice of the self.

They are not the same thing. I know this. I forget it regularly.

The Bubble and What It Costs Us

There's something else that happens in the corporate and consulting world that I find harder and harder to ignore.

We lose our empathy muscles. Not entirely - but enough to notice.

When everything is optimized, when every project is evaluated by whether it could have been done faster, cheaper, more efficiently - when the entire frame is return on investment - something quietly gets left out of the equation. The human. The actual person doing the work, and the actual people the work affects.

I think about how rarely volunteering comes up in these environments. Not as a line on a CV, but as something genuinely valued - time given without a measurable output, presence offered without an invoice. It has become almost countercultural in professional spaces to do something simply because it matters, not because it converts.

And then there's this: we have started evaluating people almost entirely by what they can do, not who they are.

I understand the logic. Skills are legible. Experience is quantifiable. A person's curiosity, their resilience, the way they show up for the people around them - these things are harder to put in a column. So we stopped trying. And in doing so, we started building environments that optimize for the extractable parts of a person and ignore the rest.

But here's the irony: a person valued only for their skills will - rationally, correctly - take those skills to whoever pays the most for them. There is no loyalty in a transaction. There was never going to be.

And the people who weren't looking to be transacted with - the ones who wanted to build something, to stay somewhere, to give their time and grow and contribute beyond their job description - those people get overlooked. Because they don't fit the metric. Because their value isn't the kind that shows up in a quarterly report.

We built the system. We are surprised by its outputs. We shouldn't be.

I Don't Have a Clean Ending for This One

I keep returning to these thoughts because I haven't resolved them. I'm not sure they're resolvable, exactly - more like things to stay honest about.

What I know is this: the formula gives you a life. It does not give you your life. Those are different things, and the gap between them is worth paying attention to.

My mother used to say that the most interesting people she knew were the ones who refused to disappear into their résumé. I think about that more now than I did when she said it.

I'm still figuring out what it means for me. But I think the first step is just being willing to say it out loud.

So - here we are.

Does any of this land for you? I'd love to know if you're sitting with something similar. Leave a comment below.