Nothing Good Can Come from This

by Kristi Coulter

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.