There is a strange pattern I’ve been noticing lately, and I see it almost everywhere.
I see it in founders who just closed a major round of funding. I see it in seasoned executives who have finally reached the top of their industry. I see it in students with perfect grades, and in parents who are managing their households flawlessly.
By every metric society uses to measure success, these people are winning. They have climbed to the exact peak they were told to aim for.
So why do so many of them look like they are struggling for oxygen?
When you ask them, the answers are always surface-level. They blame the market, the workload, or a lack of sleep. They look for new productivity hacks or stress-management tools to help them breathe a little easier. But having spent the last few years looking closely at how humans actually operate, I am starting to believe the problem is much deeper than burnout.
I think something is fundamentally broken in the way we are measuring performance versus authenticity.
I don't have all the answers yet, but this is the problem I am going to spend my time unpacking here. I want to figure out why the peak feels so much like suffocating, and what it actually takes to find our way back to an environment where we can breathe.
I’m starting that research now. I'll share what I find along the way.