Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

2:00 a.m., he sees the line between skeevy and criminal and stays on the right side of it. It’s a line you’ll learn well this last summer at home: where it lives, where it blurs, and who decides.

“You are perilously close to having the life you’ve always wanted,” she says. “It’s not surprising to me that you would panic.”

It’s just that the scope of the company’s ambitions far outstripped the resources available to achieve them, and that was mostly on purpose. It was assumed that each employee could do the work of two or three people via “ruthless prioritizing” or “smart trade-offs” or other rational-sounding methods that in reality panned out more as working through weekends and answering e-mails at midnight knowing you’d wake up at 6:00 a.m. to a flood of new ones. It was possible to hold it together for a while if you were young and adrenalized with ambition, or if the only person in your life to let down was you. But as people got older (for example, over thirty) and especially as they started families, some of them looked around, decided that feeding themselves into a meat grinder every day was no longer bearable, and hit the road.

It doesn’t take willpower to avoid the thing that is sure to ruin my life; it just takes a fierce, overriding desire to not ruin my life.