Last week we spent a few days in Rancho Santa Fe. Our first trip as a family of three. Less restful than getaways before kids, I won't lie. But still the kind of trip with stillness built in. No calendar, no Slack, a phone you can put down. Mornings were solo walks, slow ones, while the family slept in a little.
My shoulders dropped on day one. By day two my chest was tight and I couldn't have told you why. By day three my mind was running the same loops it runs at home, pipeline, money, what I should be doing right now, except now there was no work to absorb the running.
It took me longer than I want to admit to see what was happening.
I was anxious because nothing was wrong.
I was unsettled because now, with someone depending on me, I couldn't give myself permission to rest.
Underneath that is a fallacy I keep catching myself running. If I just had enough (whatever number you tell yourself feels safe) then I could rest.
Then I could be present. Then the permission would arrive. It's the ‘I'll be happy when’ trap with a new costume on. I know this. I've written about it. I still catch myself running it.
The pattern is older than the work. I had a great childhood, but money was tight. We took road trips, not flights, and afterward my parents would be stressed for weeks about the credit cards. I wasn't hard done by, not even close. But money and stress arrived together early, and that pairing makes its own kind of imprint. Layer on Catholic school, where teachers named your gifts out loud and wasted talent was treated like a kind of sin. Wanting to honor your parents’ hard work and sacrifices. These wirings have multiple sources. You likely know many of your own.
By university the imprint had work to do. Student loans of my own now. Tuition bills with a name on them. School was hyper-competitive in the way pre-med undergrad was in the early 2000s. You got a 96, and the person beside you got a 98, and the gap mattered, or felt like it did. The fear was part of the engine, but so were the work ethic and determination. Every outcome rewarded the same thing. Graduate with distinction. Land the good job. Be the one who knew everyone and everything. The signals all said: the wiring is working, keep going.
I have tried to slow down before. A long stretch backpacking after undergrad. A one-way ticket somewhere farther a few years later that I cut short for a grad school acceptance. Every attempt had a shelf life. I'd get good at stillness for a stretch and then something would pull me back. I got better at it over time, but I never got past it.
By the time I started in professional services, the wiring wasn't just tuned, it had been validated by every outcome that mattered. Then more than a decade in environments where the only safe state was producing. Strategy consulting, up-or-out, the next case always coming. Growth leadership at a startup (through COVID) where every quarter was existential. A miss meant dozens of people would have lost their jobs alongside me. Every minute scored. Every quarter a fresh review of whether you'd earned your spot. Some of this is inner narratives. Some is the actual structure of American work, where the distance from secure to f*cked can be very short and the ground hits hard.
All these high-pressure systems make you faster, sharper, more capable. They also rewire you. Worth gets tied to output. Stillness feels like a leak, or falling behind.
Underneath all of it, the fallacy I've been running on ever since: if you just earn enough, the worry goes away.
I worked on this for many years. Valuing recovery. Protecting idleness. Treating stillness as load-bearing instead of a leak. The benefits are real and it held, until it didn't.
Becoming a father broke it.
My son is almost four months old. My wife is at home with him, in the deep physical labor of mothering a newborn. I'm the main one earning. We have savings and opportunities, which I only include to say, the math is fine, but the pattern is not. Every morning it tells me what I have isn't enough, or might not be enough (because who knows what could happen). It’s hard to be present when you have new, unfamiliar concerns for your kids’ future. Sure enough, it triggers the old familiar wirings, perhaps even deeper than before.
Coming off paternity time where life had one shape, picking the work back up from a cold start is messy by definition. Everything is familiar and different at once. More options than you'll keep. More ideas than you'll commit to. Some weeks the wiring fires and the circuit breaks before you catch it. This was one of them.
I am blessed with a wife who chose me. A son who's healthy. A network built across almost two decades. Savings that cover us. An abundance of opportunities to explore. On paper, fine. Most days, happy. Every now and then, still a misfire.
Sometimes the problem is the math. Sometimes the problem is the relationship with the math.
I know leaders who got the exit, people who got the title, executives who walked away with more than they'd ever need, and the compulsion didn't quit when the number changed. Maybe the number went up, or the focus shifted. The compulsion stayed. The relief they were expecting at the finish line didn't arrive, because the finish line wasn't where the wiring lived.
I know I'm okay. I know life is good. I know nothing is permanent, and presence is most of the answer. I know all of it. And sometimes the wiring overrides it anyway. That's what I haven't been saying out loud. Not that I'm not okay. That knowing isn't enough.
The work continues. Now I rebuild the muscle with a new set of worries to embrace.
Until next Sunday,
Eric
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Eric Tribe
Strategist, operator, and occasional writer
Writes Infinite Momentum each Sunday.
Canadian based in Los Angeles.
More writing here