I wasn’t looking for anything that afternoon. I was sitting on my sofa, resting, when I came across an interview on YouTube. I didn’t know it would lead me to ask a question I’d been avoiding for years — whose dream are you living? Because what I saw in that veteran’s eyes was something I recognized. Something that performance culture doesn’t have language for and that depression quietly confirms — that somewhere along the way, many of us stopped living from the inside out and started performing for a life that was never really ours.
A veteran was talking. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I remember his eyes. There was something in them — a wanting to believe something he was hearing, and a terror of letting himself. It wasn’t weakness. I knew that immediately. This man had been brave in ways most of us will never be asked to be.
He had served. He had fought alongside others for something that felt like it mattered, because it was a matter of life and death. And then he came home. And home was a place where people were surviving but pretending everything was fine, where nobody seemed to need what he had given, where the only expectation was that he return to normal — as if normal was still a place he could find.
He ended up on a park bench. Not because he was broken. Because the systems that were supposed to catch him couldn’t slow down long enough to actually see him.
I sat on my sofa, and I recognized something in his eyes.
I had seen it in myself.
The Park Bench Is Closer Than You Think
His story is dramatic. Most of ours aren’t. But I want you to consider that the same thing happening to him is happening quietly to a lot of us — in kitchens and office buildings and church pews and university libraries — and we don’t have language for it because it doesn’t look like crisis from the outside.
Maybe it looks like a mother picking up after her children for the millionth time, giving everything she has, and still carrying a low hum of failure because she isn’t earning six figures or thin enough or admired for the right things. Maybe she’d rather read a book in the bathtub than be seen driving a fancy car — but somewhere along the way she absorbed the message that what she actually wants doesn’t count as success.
Maybe it’s the man who worked hard to provide for his family, who went out into his community because his faith told him that’s what you do — and then the institution he gave himself to turned on him in ways he never expected. He had defended people who needed defending because that’s what he believed Jesus did. And the church said that wasn’t the point. The point was how the church looked on the outside.
Maybe it’s the young person who worked themselves to exhaustion earning good grades because they were told it would matter. That they would make a difference. That the American dream was available to them if they just worked hard enough. And now they’re picking up flexible work wherever they can find it — or submitting hundreds of job applications and hearing nothing back. A recent BBC report found that one in six young people in the UK will be out of work, education, or training within five years, describing this generation as facing a perfect storm where the old contract has been broken — you put in the effort, you get the reward — and it simply no longer holds. They watch the older generation — the ones who got the houses and the cars and the private schools — and see the same exhaustion in their eyes. The same quiet question underneath everything: Is this what it was all for? We are all, in our different ways, reaching for an anchor.
An old song from my church days comes back to me sometimes: Every little baby comes into the world, reaching for an anchor, fingers tightly curled. Grasping for a reason without knowing why. We will cling to anything til the day we die.
Back then, I thought the anchor the song was pointing to was what the church was selling. I knocked on doors on Friday nights, asking people what they understood it took to get to heaven. We weren’t selling meaning. We were selling fear — fire insurance to keep people out of hell and get them into the building. The anchor we were offering wasn’t an anchor at all. It was a hook.
The bigger the promise, the harder the fall. And I have seen people fall very hard.
The Anchors That Are Sinking Our Boats
My friend Rae said something once that has stayed with me. She said we spend all our time watching commercials selling us things we know won’t deliver what they’re promising. A man driving a Land Rover up to his enormous castle, beautiful wife waiting, dog bringing back his ball. They’re selling an experience on steroids. What you actually get is a car payment. But we watch, and we dream, and sometimes we buy — because in the moment it feels like it’s meeting something real in us. Some deep need we can’t quite name.
Because we are reaching for an anchor.
The problem isn’t that we need something to hold onto. That’s human. That’s not weakness. The problem is that so many of the anchors we’ve been handed are sinking our boats. And reckoning with that — when you’ve built your life around one of them — is one of the hardest things a person can do.
The veteran on the park bench had built his life around service and the promise that it would matter. The church member had built their life around an institution that promised to reflect the divine. The graduate had built their life around a system that promised merit would be rewarded. And each of them, in their own way, discovered the contract wasn’t real.
That’s not personal failure. That’s a culture that has been handing people other people’s dreams and calling them their own.
Whose Dream Are You Living?
So whose dream are you living?
I came to this question not through a breakthrough moment but through paying closer attention to my own life. Two things happened recently that shifted something in me.
The first was being hired as a research assistant for a documentary film about what the younger generation can actually hold onto when the belief systems they inherited stop delivering on their promises. I had to read slowly. Take notes. Sit with the words. Write down what I was actually observing rather than what I expected to find. The book I was reading was written by a priest in a tradition I don’t know what to do with anymore — but sitting with my confusion, noticing where I agreed and where I didn’t, letting it stretch me without forcing a verdict — that process gave me more insight than a dozen books I had consumed looking for answers.
I had to slow down enough for something to actually land in me.
The second thing was a Department of Labor summit I almost didn’t attend. I expected the usual — workforce performance, productivity metrics, how to earn more, do more, and become more competitive. What I found instead surprised me. The people in that room were asking a different question. They had visited schools in Switzerland where children are shown themselves in different occupations from an early age — not told what to be, but given mirrors. Allowed to try things on and watch their own response. Does this feel like me? The outcome, decades later, is communities where people are working because the work means something. Healthcare workers who actually want to be there. People whose work meets real needs because they chose it from the inside out.
It was such a small shift in approach. The outcomes were entirely different.
I sat in that room and thought: this is what it looks like when a system is built to nourish rather than consume.
When Performance Culture Feeds Depression
That’s the distinction I keep coming back to.
Consumption is taking in without absorbing. You can consume endlessly and still be starving. We move from one self-help book to the next, one podcast to the next, one modality to the next — getting a temporary hit of energy or hope or clarity — and then needing the next one. Not because we’re weak or undisciplined. Because we never slowed down enough for any of it to actually become part of us.
Finding meaning in your work — real meaning, not the performed version — requires the same thing nourishment does. Stillness. Asking yourself what is actually landing, what is actually resonating, what in you is responding, and why.
Consumption Is Not The Same As Nourishment
The veteran didn’t need another program. He needed someone who would stay. Someone who saw him clearly and didn’t leave. That’s not a service you can scale, package, or sell at a conference. It’s a human being willing to slow down long enough to actually be present with another human being.
That’s nourishment. And we are starving for it.
Finding Meaning In Your Work
I want to be honest with you about something before I close.
I have been struggling for a long time with finding meaning in my work and in what I am doing with what I know. The church built me up to believe that my life mattered and that what I was doing for the kingdom of God mattered. Then I learned in therapy that my story mattered and could help others. Then I learned as a coach that I could use what I had been through to walk alongside people who were finding their way through similar terrain. And I am still sitting here five years later without a sustainable income to show for any of it.
By conventional measures, I have failed at what I set out to do.
The people who were pushing me to put myself out there more — to build a platform, get visible, do the things successful coaches do — they weren’t wrong to have their dreams. Their dreams worked for them. But they were projecting those dreams onto me without knowing it. They couldn’t see how much I was already putting myself out there because what I was doing didn’t look like what they would have done. And their measuring stick wasn’t mine.
My dream was not their dream. And that’s not a failure. That’s just the truth.
Because dreams were never meant to create silos where everyone believes the same things, does the same things, and follows the same path to the same destination. Dreams are what happen when we stop being so relentlessly individualistic and start asking where my dream meets yours — and what we might build together at that intersection.
That’s what the DOL summit showed me. Not a workforce strategy. A vision of what becomes possible when people are known well enough to contribute from the inside out rather than performing from the outside in.
Look at the sources in this post. A mental health professional. A priest. A film director. A Department of Labor summit. By any conventional logic, they don’t belong in the same conversation. But each one contributed something real to where I am standing right now. Each one met me at a different intersection and left me with something I couldn’t have found alone.
That’s not a system. That’s not a program. That’s what it looks like when human beings slow down enough to actually see each other and build something together from what’s real.
The Canaries
Someone said to me once, while working at a residential treatment center for adolescents, that the young people growing up in our world are the canaries coming out of the coal mines. They are showing us what the air quality is like down here before the rest of us have fully registered it. Their depression, their lack of motivation, their inability to find meaning in the systems handed to them — that’s not weakness. That’s information.
But I want to add another canary to that image.
A veteran who fought for this country, who gave years of his life believing it meant something, who came home and ended up on a park bench — he is a canary too. When someone gives everything for a system, and that system cannot slow down long enough to see him when he returns, something is being revealed about the air we are all breathing.
We are all breathing it. Red and blue. Christian, agnostic, atheist. Veteran and civilian. Mother, graduate, and churchgoer, and coach, still trying to figure out how to make her work sustainable five years in.
We Can Only Do It Together
Underneath all of it, we are looking for the same things. A life that matters. Finding meaning in our work rather than being consumed by it. The sense that who we are — not just what we produce — has value in this world.
We cannot find that alone. We were never meant to.
We can only find it together.
Your dream is in there. It may not look like anyone else’s. It may not be producing income yet, or recognition, or the markers the culture uses to confirm that what you’re doing matters.
But it matters.
Slow down enough to find it. And then look for the table where it meets someone else’s.
That’s the anchor that holds.
Self-Reflection Exercise
Sit quietly for ten minutes. Write down three moments in your life — big or small — when you felt most like yourself. Not most successful. Most yourself. What were you doing? Who were you with? What did it ask of you?
A Note on How This Post Was Written
I want to be transparent with you. I used AI in the writing process for this post. But I want to explain what that actually looked like because I think it matters. Every idea in this piece came from me. The veteran whose eyes stopped me mid-scroll. The anger at systems built to consume rather than nourish. The five years of trying to make meaningful work sustainable. The DOL summit that surprised me. The canary image. The question underneath all of it — whose dream are you living. None of that came from AI. What AI did was what a good editor does. I brought the raw material — unpolished, sometimes rambling, full of tangents and unfinished thoughts — and it helped me find the shape of what I was already trying to say. Think of it like putting a rock through a tumbler. The rock goes in rough. It comes out revealing what was always there. The tumbler didn’t create the rock. I’m naming this because we live in a culture that is using AI the same way it uses everything else — to perform a version of ourselves that looks more polished, more certain, more together than we actually are. That’s just the performance trap wearing new clothes. You are allowed to use tools that help you show up more fully as yourself. That’s different from using tools to show up as someone you’re not. The goal is always to get closer to what’s real in you. Not further from it.
Resources:
Unless a Seed Falls to the Ground: Welcoming the Death of the Whiteness Gospel by D.T. Bryant (Author), David Dark (Foreword)
What Lies Inside Original title: What Lies Inside: Healing in the Face of Trauma
Opportunities shrinking for too many young people, says major report on ‘lost generation’