What You’re Sacrificing for Security
There’s a kind of work you do that isn’t measurable.
It’s work that’s not building toward your next promotion or setting you up for a future move. It’s not trying to impress anyone. It’s not even productive in any way you could point to in a performance review.
It’s work you do when you’re just trying to soothe your angst.
You open your laptop on a Saturday morning and clear out emails that realistically could wait until Monday (yes, I know they’ll pile up!). You accept the time-consuming project that’s below your pay grade. You send your EVP a “quick update” over the weekend to signal how hard you’re working. You review and refine the deck one more time, even though it doesn’t need the edits, but because leaving it alone makes your chest tight.
None of this is making a meaningful difference, and you know that, but you need to stay busy.
The Story That Was Holding You Together
When the job market started getting tighter, something inside you shifted with it. You used to be able to sit with a bad day at work and think, It’s not so bad. I can leave whenever I want. I’ll just do this until I find something better.
And that thought was doing real psychological work.
It converted your long hours from something you endured into something you chose, and it made your over-preparation feel like an investment rather than a sign of desperation. It helped you tolerate the unreasonable asks, the meetings where your expertise was dismissed, and the feedback that felt unfairly harsh. You could tell yourself that it was temporary and that all these unreasonable things would eventually carry you up the ladder or set you up to take a better role somewhere else.
This exit plan gave you options, and it also gave your suffering a purpose. And with that purpose, you could absorb almost anything.
You could stay late by telling yourself you were sharpening your resume. You could take on the thankless project because it would give you experience and outcomes that would sound great in interviews. You could swallow the frustration of being left off meeting invites because you weren’t really invested; you were just passing through.
That narrative made you feel like a person with agency, not a person being ground down.
What Shifts When the Door Closes
Now the market is tighter; layoffs are constant in the headlines. Hiring has slowed across your industry, and your story doesn’t work the same way anymore.
You still tell it to yourself sometimes. I could update my resume. I could start networking. But the words have lost their weight. You know what’s out there. You’ve seen colleagues spend months looking. You’ve watched people with stronger profiles settle for lateral moves, or worse.
So your exit plan sits there, inert. And without it, something in your body changes.
The same work you were doing six months ago feels different now. Not harder, exactly. Heavier. The Sunday-night dread starts earlier. The resentment you used to manage with I won’t be here much longer now sits in your chest, like a heavy, undigested meal, with nowhere to go.
You notice it most in the small moments. The tone of an email that would have rolled off you before now makes your jaw clench. The all-hands meeting that used to feel like theater now feels blatantly dishonest. Your manager’s vague feedback, which you used to file under won’t matter soon, now lands with some violence that you have to metabolize.
Because you do. You’re not passing through anymore. You’re here, or will be as long as they will have you. And if you admitted that reality out loud, it would terrify you.
The Only Lever You Have
So, of course you do the only thing you know how to do. You work harder.
You put in more hours. You make yourself more visible. You arrive early and respond to messages at 10 p.m.
This effort doesn’t feel like ambition anymore. It feels like desperation.
And underneath the desperation, there’s a quiet resentment you’re scared to look at directly. Because you already know how this will go. You’ve seen it before. Your organization won’t recognize your extra effort as extraordinary. They’ll absorb it. They’ll recalibrate around your emergency output and treat it as your new normal. Then they’ll wait for more.
You know this, and you keep pushing through anyway. Because the alternative, slowing down in a market where you can’t leave, would mean confronting feelings you’ve been trying to outrun for years.
What the People Around You Can Feel
Your partner notices before you do. Not the hours, necessarily. You’ve always worked long hours. What’s different is the quality of your presence when you stop.
You’re home, but you’re not home. You’re sitting at dinner, but you’re reviewing tomorrow’s meeting in your head. Your kid tells you something about their day, and you hear yourself say “that’s great” in a voice that has no weight behind it. You catch the look on your partner’s face, not anger, something flatter than that, and you feel a flash of shame that you push down immediately because you can’t afford to feel it right now.
The weekends you used to protect have gotten thinner. No one demanded it exactly, but your work has become the thing that regulates you, and without it, you don’t know what to do with the feelings underneath.
You used to come home and leave work at work. Now you come home and bring the dread with you. And the people who love you can feel the difference between someone who’s busy and someone who’s afraid. Even if no one says it.
The Trap
Here’s what makes this so hard to see from inside: your organization doesn’t distinguish between effort that comes from ambition and effort that comes from fear. Both produce the same output. Both fill the same gaps. Both make you reliable and visible and indispensable.
The system doesn’t care why you’re working this hard. It only cares that you are. And it will absorb everything you give it — your evenings, your weekends, your presence with your family, the energy you used to spend on things that had nothing to do with work — without ever asking whether you can sustain it. Because that’s not the system’s problem.
Which means you can’t solve this by working harder, and you can’t solve it by working smarter, and you can’t solve it by reading about boundaries or downloading a meditation app. The market is what it is. Your organization is what it is. And the pattern that kept you going — the story that made all of this feel temporary and chosen — is gone.
You’re not going to think your way out of this. The dread, the resentment, the flatness at home. These aren’t problems your mind created. They’re your body’s response to working under conditions your nervous system has correctly identified as a trap
Which means more motivation or a better mindset won’t change it. Only the terms of engagement will.
This is the kind of work I do. You can learn more about how I approach this here.
