Most of us have come to accept that our career takes priority over our personal life. What we rarely question is when that happened, or why we ever agreed to it.
Over the holidays, we had family visiting from out of town. Things were hectic leading up to the season, so I decided I would put work aside and be fully present while they were here.
Initially, I felt myself resisting it — my inner critic trying to convince me I was being irresponsible for taking my focus off my business. That I would somehow fall behind.
For the first time since I started working for myself, I didn't listen.
And in doing so, I was reminded of how much time with loved ones matters.
Like many of us, I've been living as though my career is my primary role in life. Time for myself and my family has become something to fit in around it. Weekends. Holidays. Vacations.
That arrangement has always felt acceptable because it seemed like the best you could hope for.
It wasn't until I stepped away — first from my employer and then from my own business — that I began to see the assumption embedded in modern work culture.
We're expected to do something impossible — to be fully responsible for a life and a family while being functionally owned during the best hours of the day. Five days a week. For decades.
Working for myself gave me control over my time in a way I'd never experienced before. But I'd internalized the same urgency and drove myself harder than any employer ever had.
Over the last two years, I've slowly unlearned that. I realized I actually had ownership of my time. I could make a nutritious breakfast every morning. Exercise when my body is awake and work when my mind is — instead of the other way around. Take my dog for a walk in the middle of the day. Have an afternoon nap. Sit quietly and think.
That's when it became clear that none of this is indulgence.
It's essential.
When the rhythms of our bodies and the people who depend on us get shoved into early mornings, lunch breaks, and exhausted evenings, something alarming happens. Our lives — the things we value — get shoved into the margins. And work expands to fill everything else.
That's when the inversion becomes clear.
Work is no longer part of your life. It outranks it.
You have become the side project.
Having young nephews stay with us was a reminder of something else: if I felt this way about my own life, how must parents feel?
Children don't operate on office calendars. They need presence. The math doesn't just get harder with kids — it becomes impossible.
The mindset shift, for me, hasn't been simply changing how or when I work. It has been reclaiming something most people never fully recover in adulthood.
I have become the primary stakeholder in my own life again.
Not my employer.
Not my business.
Me.
Once you reclaim that, you can't help but see how unnatural the alternative is.
I used to accept this was just how adulthood worked. That eventually you figured out how to make it tolerable. But it isn't. We're all just too busy competing — for jobs, for income, for status — to question whether it even makes sense.
Lately, I've stopped asking how people manage to do it all.
And started asking how long people can be expected to live as secondary figures in their own lives before something has to give.
