I’m not sure how to start writing this, except to fumble toward an idea that I’m loosely carrying around in my mind. 

Recently I went to England on my own for a week. It’s hard to describe my internal experience of this trip. If you see the pictures I posted on Instagram, it just looks like a collection of sights-seen. I know many people have never travelled on their own, or if they have it’s been for business, or when they were young and filled their days with group adventures while sleeping dorm-style in a hostel. 

There’s a different type of solo travel that I’ve come to love, but it’s almost impossible to describe to those who are strangers to it, and perhaps don’t have the personality type for it anyway, so even the most eloquent description would likely fall on deaf ears. But I’ll give it a go. 

For me there’s something profoundly healing and enriching about travelling to a place alone where you aren’t compelled to speak, to consider the conversational or emotional or physical needs of others around you, or to do anything except that which compels you. But deeper than that: if done right, if you really stay alone, and you spend a lot of time in silence, and you resist the urge to work, you’re almost totally released from inhabiting the version of you that others expect you to be. This may sound trivial but it can in fact be monumental, particularly for those of us who are prone to people-pleasing. 

My understanding of myself often evolves in fits and starts, and is slow to catch up and catch on when it comes to taking the form of action in the world. At first an opportunity to evolve is like a whisper that you can barely hear, and maybe if you listen you can start to grasp it, and then you have to jump onto a Zoom call and put on your Work Voice and all is lost to the wind. Maybe you spend a quiet night in and start to grow a sense of it again, but then you attend a family dinner, you snap back into the familiar form you’re used to inhabiting, and off it goes again. 

Travelling alone – mindfully, really alone – actually allows you to build traction. If you let it.

England delivered me a lot of this internal progress in spades. I left for the journey with absolutely no idea of what change may or may not be in store for me, but I tried to keep an open mind and create the space to allow it to manifest. 

What proceeded was so beautiful and subtle that I’m scared to even look it in the eye, lest it flee. But the best way I can explain it is that I experienced a profound softening into a far gentler, more timeless version of myself. 

I’ve been experiencing (and fighting) some version of this change for years. At first it manifested in the usual ways: I did a lot of yoga, and got into meditating and reading new-age spiritual books, and reading plenty of inspirational quotes on Instagram and Pinterest. I started to spend more time thinking about ‘energy’ and ‘healing.’ It says a lot that so many people in Western society have trod that familiar path into reading Buddhism and buying hunks of rose quartz. It’s a helpful step along the way, I suppose, but clichés start to feel cliché for a reason. (I have plenty more to say about this, but that’s for another time.)

From there, I read a little more deeply from different traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, philosophy, plenty of rationalist atheism. My experience with religion and spirituality is messy, but significant to me – having faced my mortality so directly while undergoing cancer treatment, I found spirituality to be a balm but also a greater source of confusion than ever. I’m convinced that there are a handful of fundamental truths that underlie all these man-made attempts to construct religious doctrine on top of them, and much of that above-ground stuff is useless artifice. The fundamental truths are useful, they’re water from an eternal spring for your soul. The man-made faffery really gets in the way.

And anyway, spirituality only takes us so far. At the end of the day, while we’re here on Earth we are present and have to act. We have choices to make. 

I can somewhat understand the appeal of becoming a nun or monk, retreating from the physical world into a blissed out religious cave in order to try to rise above the banal realities of the sad mortal human form. But that hardly seems useful or enjoyable to me, someone with a streak of hedonism who enjoys owning a PS5 and doesn’t want to miss a Formula 1 race or forgo a nice dinner. And anyway, after cancer treatment I was so worn out from thinking about my soul and meditating for peace that I didn’t want to so much as hear an inspirational quote for months. The world is terrible and limited and frustrating, but it is the reality in which we live, and I very much want to live in it.

So, what then? Well, we have our work. Our relationships. Our choices and actions. The things we do that make us who we are. 

I’ve been privileged to work in the tech industry for a number of years, and for better or worse have come to internalize the ideas upon which it’s built: appreciation for rationality and order, a love of free market competition, the puritanical work ethic. These things have served me well, and I continue to hold a lot of the same values I always have. Though capitalism is fraught, it’s generally far better than the alternatives. I have a great deal of optimism and belief in human ingenuity. I credit much of the improvement in the average human condition over recent centuries to achievements made in STEM fields, in particular. I celebrate the people who work hard and take risks to help us progress as a society. I was a vociferous advocate of hustle culture when I started in the field years ago, and I have worked countless hours trying (and sometimes succeeding) in helping to build up businesses and create genuine growth. 

But now, I’m stuck.

I’ve been through profound burnout. Worse still, I’ve been through cancer treatment. I’ve faced other difficulties in life aside from those, the sort that most people would be quick to label ‘trauma’. (I’m not particularly inclined to cast myself as a victim quite so easily). Each of these has, to varying degrees, shaken me and caused me to question my approach to life. I know who I admire, and what I celebrate, but what is my role in all of this? Am I doing what I really ought to be doing? Or am I pushing myself to take a different form than I was meant to take?

Seeing my path in a new light, I find myself caught between a bit of a rock and a hard place. I love so many things about this industry. But the more I work to reconnect with who I really am, the more I realize I might be someone softer and gentler than I’ve forced myself to become.

In my effort to push and grow and succeed, I’ve hardened myself. You can trace the subconscious of my internal state in my aesthetic choices – for a while I had a choppy ice blonde bob, long black nails, and wore all black, all the time. I physically hardened myself against the world, as though I were donning armor to go to work every day. In more recent years, I’ve softened. I grew out my hair, and started dressing more casually – but still in that sort of kid-sister androgynous way that women in the industry so often do. I’ve always said that my experience in the tech industry “as a woman” (eye roll) has been largely positive, and I’ve rarely felt discriminated against. But I can’t deny that I have become a bit of an expert at dialing back my femininity in order to smooth the path.

What I’m describing is shallow and cosmetic, sure. But in hindsight, it’s a proxy for an internal state that I have been barely even aware of. I felt the foundations of my feigned hardness start to crumble during cancer treatment. I had zero – and I mean zero – interest in business and technology during the worst of it. I needed art, literature, music and comedy to get me through. During chemo, I had these perfect little dreams where I’d be reading in a moving train, with sunbeams flitting in and out of the window, or wandering through an old library. Jacked up on steroids, my vision blurry, my mind foggy, overcome by nausea and discomfort, I wanted nothing more than to be able to sit still and read a longform article about some silly, delicious little subject. The first time I was able to sit and read The New Yorker, I just about wept with joy.

And then the moment I was well, I dove back into work. 

Months later, when I was laid off, I waited about fifteen minutes before diving into action to set up my next thing. I’m single, which means I haven’t got anyone else to rely on financially. I didn’t complain, I just set to work. Within days I had landed enough consulting work to get me going, and I’ve never looked back.

But before long, I found myself hustling a little too hard. Probably out of habit. I hired great people to help, which has made the world of difference. But my habits remain the same. I almost feel trapped in a prison of my own making: what I’m good at is growing startups. Financially stricken, resource stressed, nose-to-the-grindstone, runway evaporating – no problem. But a calm, thriving, peaceful little business? What do they need a growth person for?

And being ‘good’ at this means constantly carrying (and updating) this vitally current sense of both the micro and the macro. Tactics that work today, tactics that fell off yesterday. What consumers like and what they don’t, what’s cool and what isn’t, what’s happening in the markets, what language to use where. It’s next to impossible to unplug from the internet firehose and still excel at this job.

But I’m railing at this now. I can barely stand to open Twitter lately. I can’t read any more incitation to hustle, my soul wants a break from talk of interest rates. I’m even tired of memes. Meme culture! Enough. I have nothing against all these people – in fact, I celebrate what they’re doing. But I need to unplug, I’m craving a different form factor and expression of my work, and I’m not sure how to even begin to approach it.  

So, I’m unsure. I’ve begun to remember who I am underneath twenty years of striving-as-a-coping-mechanism. I love books, and animals, and writing, and history, and old buildings and timeless things, and wildflowers and quiet afternoons. I remembered this with every fibre of my being while wandering around ancient chapels in England, Kindle in tow. But the way I’ve presented myself online, the career I’ve built, the way I’m able to provide for myself (and provide I must): it’s all based on a hyper-rationalist, hustlecore tech foundation that I’m really starting to chafe at.

And now to get to the root of it: there’s a book I’m desperate to read, that doesn’t seem to exist. 

People seem to take a couple of paths from here. 

Maybe they get very, very “spiritual.” They Oprah their way out of the problem. They talk about how we’re all love and light. They start to seek to “dismantle systems of oppression” and they rail against the free market technocapitalism that, in my view, really is the foundation of what safety and prosperity we have. Probably, they become yoga teachers. This path almost feels like an MLM to me, aesthetically, spiritually, and economically. So many people walk it, but so few have anything much to say. 

The more masculine approach, more common in tech, is to meditate a lot and get into Buddhism. Inevitably, these people become coaches. I think this is all well and good, but it’s missing something meaningful and recognizable to me as a woman. A generalization you often hear is that men seek to meditate to move toward nothingness, while women seek to meditate to move towards something beautiful. That feels directionally correct, if you’ll forgive the oversimplification. 

There’s a bit of a well-worn path out of a life of workaholism, into blissful “nothingness.” (We’ll call it, “solo creator zen coach guy.”) But I don’t see a clear path into humanities and art and beauty.

I’ve yet to encounter anyone writing deeply about this third way, this path from hyper-rational puritanism back into beauty. (Please direct me if you know of a good example).

If one can’t or doesn’t want to opt out entirely and become a “down with the system!” yoga-teacher-coach, and one doesn’t want to continue as is – if one seeks to recalibrate their attitudes toward work, time, delight, enjoyment, creativity, and expression – what then?

Crucially, how do you approach this if you don’t have a spouse to bankroll you, or you aren’t an exited founder with millions in the bank to finance your existential malaise?

If you’re a recovering overachiever who wants to reorient toward creativity and delight and peace, without rage or complaint, what then? What do you move toward, not away from? What do you create?

I suppose these are the questions I mean to try to answer.