The company fell apart from the top.
Not slowly either. The kind of collapse where you walk in on a Monday and the people who built the thing are gone by Wednesday, and the people left are standing around wondering who’s supposed to be in charge.
I’d known it was coming. I’d known for a while, honestly. But I let myself stay because I was learning, and the learning was real. I could sell. I could build. I could hold a room. And I told myself that was enough.
It wasn’t.
Because when the company let me go, I had nothing. No pipeline. No network that was mine, not the company’s. I’d spent multiple years building value for someone else’s dream, and when that dream fell apart I was standing in the wreckage with a CV and a feeling I never want you to feel.
Useless.
And it’s only recently I’ve been able to say this next part out loud. And the more I say it, the more I realise I’m not the only man my age in this situation.
I traded the first part of my daughter’s childhood for that company.
Not because I didn’t love her. Not because I didn’t want to be there with her. Because I was behind a desk I hated, doing work that served someone else’s vision, and I told myself it was the right thing to do.
“This is what cards we were dealt.”
I said that. My dad said that. His generation said that, growing up working class, the whole culture basically shut up and get on with being a good worker.
The Great British Brainwashing “Keep Calm and Carry On”
It’s fucking hilarious how much of a joke that actually is.
Anyway...I love my dad, I love him dearly. But that line got passed down, and it landed on me, and I lived it.
And then, while I was off work, I watched my wife carry everything. The money. The worry. The weight of it. And I felt like the most useless man and husband alive. I wasn’t giving anything back. Not to her, not to anyone. I sat there knowing I’d spent my best years on a thing that didn’t care about me, and I’d been told my whole life that this was just how it is.
Time is precious and it gets wasted for literally nothing. It really taught me that. And I never want another man to feel what I felt on that floor.
What Actually Happened
Nobody sat us down and spelled out the deal. That’s the clever bit. We absorbed it, one year at a time, so quietly we never noticed.
School. University. First job. Each one smoothing the rough edges off you. Teaching you to copy instead of think. To keep your head down. To wait for permission.
And underneath all of it, the message nobody says out loud but everyone lives by. Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and the system will look after you.
Except it won’t.
Look around. Look at the men in their forties and fifties who did everything they were told. They did the years, made the sacrifices, never caused trouble. And now they’re looking around wondering what happened. Too old to start over, too tired to carry on. They never learned how to look after people or manage them, because being good at the thing was meant to be enough, and it turns out being good at the thing gets you promoted to a ledge just high enough that you’re scared to jump.
I’ve been that man. I am that man some days, if I’m honest. So let me name what’s been working against you, because you can feel it even if you can’t say it. There are three of them.
The first one is the system itself.
It’s the deal that was never meant to keep its end. It wants you tired, distracted, asleep, because a man who can’t name what’s holding him can’t ever leave it.
This is the “cards we were dealt” line, and I need you to hear it for what it is. That’s not wisdom. That’s the cage telling you the floor is the ceiling and calling it gratitude.
The second one is your own flesh.
The part of you that reaches for the easy thing. You know the feeling. It’s eleven at night and you’ve already said you’d be in bed an hour ago, but the phone’s in your hand and your thumb’s moving before you’ve decided to move it. It’s the pint when you told yourself it’d be one. It’s the quick yes when you knew the hard answer was right.
Easy now. Hard later
That part of you chose the desk too, once. Because the desk felt safe. Even while it was costing you your daughter’s childhood.
Your flesh isn’t you. But it runs you until you learn to watch it.
The third one is the lie.
The one that says none of it matters anyway. It’s all just material. There’s no God, no design, no reason you were made the way you were. The one that points at the Christianity you’ve seen, the rules and the people doing it badly, and says that’s the whole thing, so why bother.
Read one gospel. Seriously. Just one. And watch Christ spend his whole ministry telling the rule-keepers they’ve missed the point. He’s not selling rules... He’s the way out.
That’s what nobody told you. The system, your own impulses, and the lie that there is no God. Those three are the whole enemy. And the way you’ve been living wasn’t neutral. It was their route.
The Door
So what changes? For me it changed slowly, and I didn’t do it cleanly.
I stopped waiting for permission.
And I started relearning the things school and the office had trained out of me. How to actually listen to someone. How to ask a question and wait for the answer. How to care what the other person needs before I pitch them anything. How to say what I see in a way that helps them see it too.
Because here’s the secret the whole thing rests on, and it took me twenty years across five industries to find it, and it ruined every cheap trick I’d ever learned.
It all comes back to loving the person in front of you. Not the fluffy “nice” love. Not the Beatles in the 60’s love. That’s bollocks.
If you are a parent, you’ll know that loving someone is also telling them no. It’s also the “willy wonka” message. Don’t give everyone everything they want.
It’s kind of that love. It’s loving someone enough to actually understand them and stop thinking about yourself all the time. The irony is, that leads to you getting your goal too.
Listening works because it’s love. The open question works because it’s love. Asking for what you’re worth works when you’re serving, not taking. Every skill the system never taught you turns out to be the same thing wearing different clothes. And that thing has a name. It’s always had a name.
That’s the code. The code is knowable. And when you know it, you stop asking whether you’re allowed to be free, and you remember who made you and what you were made for. You were never meant to be owned by a system that only ever wanted your obedience.
You were never dealt these cards. You were born free and then sold a smaller life one year at a time.
So here’s the question I had to sit with, and I’m asking you straight.
If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, where do you actually end up? In five years. In ten. What does it look like from where you’re sitting right now?
Because if the answer makes you tired, that’s not you being lazy. That’s the part of you that still knows it was made for something more, trying to get your attention before the years run out.
Don’t miss it again.