Is time linear in your company or going in circle?
This is something I’ve been circling for weeks and wanted to put in front of people who lead.
As someone who work with a lot of leaders who, from the outside, have no reason to be tired. Successful. Competent. Autonomous. More options than their parents or grandparents ever had.
Still tired.
I’m increasingly convinced we misread burnout when we treat it purely as too much work. Maybe we aren’t simply working more. Maybe we’re managing more, inside ourselves and around ourselves, all the time.
The world our grandparents came from holds up an interesting mirror here. Not because it was better. It wasn’t. It was harder, more unjust and in many ways crueler. Memory just flatters the past.
But that life ran on a few operating principles we threw out along with its dark side. Maybe it’s worth separating those threads again.
Time used to go in circles. Now it only goes forward.
The peasant year came back around. Sowing, harvest, grape picking, Christmas, Easter. Strawberries end, raspberries arrive, cucumbers next to them, then blackberries. Just when you think it’s over: the vintage, walnuts, corn, beets. Something was always coming.
Good years and bad years alternated. Modern organizational time is linear. Last year’s result becomes this year’s baseline. This year’s performance becomes next year’s minimum expectation. Always a little further ahead than yesterday.
There’s a rarely discussed consequence: in circular time it’s hard to fall behind. In linear time, every day you didn’t advance can feel like a loss.
Christmas comes back next year. Q3 never will.
Maybe that’s why real rest is so hard for a performance-driven leader. In linear time, rest feels like someone else is moving while you’re being useless.Work didn’t have to fulfill you.
My grandfather never asked himself whether his work was authentic to who he was. Work wasn’t identity. It was a given. Something that had to be done.
Meaning was looked for elsewhere: family, faith, community, holidays, the next generation.
We moved self-realization into the workplace. Find your passion. Do what you love.
That has real upsides. It also has a price. Now I don’t just have to work well, my work has to give my life meaning. And if it doesn’t, I don’t simply have a bad job. Maybe I’m the problem? It’s easy to start feeling I’m living a bad life.
Maybe someone who doesn’t ask their work to redeem them can’t be betrayed by it quite as badly.The body used to be a tool. Now it’s a project.
Modern people don’t just work. They optimizqe themselves. Training, nutrition, step count, sleep, heart rate, recovery, meditation, productivity, mental health, personal development. Many of these genuinely improve and extend life.
But something else appeared that we rarely name: the work of working on yourself. We became a management task.
So when an exhausted leader hears they should sleep more, exercise, meditate, eat better, be present with their family and set healthier boundaries, recovery quietly turns into another KPI. I see it constantly. Even rest has to be delivered now.Community didn’t have to be built.
Work parties, extended family, neighbors, godparents. These weren’t necessarily communities of love. People were simply dependent on each other. Whoever had a horse plowed with a horse. Whoever didn’t worked six days in the fields to pay it back. You helped because next time you’d need help.
We build chosen relationships instead. Enormous freedom. Also fragility. For a lot of people the support network is now one more thing to consciously create and maintain.
I know we can’t bring the old version back. The real question is how you keep mutual dependence without the coercion. So that we do things not out of obligation, but because giving actually feels good.
That’s not only a social question. It’s a leadership one.Acceptance isn’t necessarily passivity. It can be technology.
“God’s will.” “It was meant to be.”
To a modern ear that sounds like religious fatalism. But it has a psychological function: it closes what can no longer be changed. We say it differently today. Learn to tell apart what’s inside your circle of influence and what’s outside it.
If hail destroyed the crop, past a certain point there was nothing left to analyze. Tomorrow you looked at what could still be saved. Spray the damaged parts so the fungus doesn’t take them.
The modern world traces almost everything back to a decision. What should I have done differently? What did I miss? Why didn’t I react sooner? What can I learn from this?
Extremely useful. Right up until there’s no stop button.
Because if I can shape everything, I can find my own failure in every bad outcome. That’s how infinite self-reflection is born.
Working with leaders, I think the important question isn’t only “What did you learn from this?” It’s also: “When do we stop analyzing?”
Acceptance doesn’t mean refusing responsibility. It means telling apart what can still be shaped from what has already happened.Old people had a role.
In a traditional economy the old man didn’t simply exit production. He stored knowledge. Remembered. Watched the kids. Repaired things. Gave advice. He knew what happened thirty years ago and what they did about it.
He wasn’t respected because they were more enlightened than us. He was respected because experiential knowledge was needed, at least as much as physical strength.
Modern organizations treat a career like a rising curve that suddenly breaks off. More responsibility, more impact, then retirement. Maybe we’re not just taking the work away from someone.
We’re taking the role.
That question gets sharper in societies and companies where people live longer while organizations still think in short career arcs.There was no work-life balance.
Because there weren’t two separate lives. There was one. Work, family, community and celebration were parts of a single whole.
That didn’t make it easier. But nobody had to constantly reconcile two artificially separated worlds. We cut life in half first, into “work” and “life.” Then we invented a concept for gluing it back together.
Maybe the next question isn’t how to balance the two. Maybe it’s how to rebuild one coherent life.And maybe the most important one: there was such a thing as enough.
Full pantry. Paid what had to be paid. Kids grown, working, housed.
There were states you could call finished.
In a modern performance economy “enough” is far harder to define. There’s always more revenue. A bigger company. A higher position. A better body. More followers. More impact. A more conscious life. A better version of me. And if “enough” is never defined, there’s no natural point where I’m allowed to stop.
So maybe the most important strategic question for a leader isn’t “What’s your next goal?”
It’s “How will you know when this is enough?”
All of this needs care, though. The old world is easy to romanticize when you don’t have to live in it.
That’s where I draw one of my most important lines as a coach. Our job isn’t to solve every difficulty with resilience.
Some things just have to be carried.
Some things have to be let go.
Some things have to be changed.
And some things have to be walked away from.
Wisdom isn’t only endurance. It’s recognizing which one you’re facing.
So the lesson isn’t “they knew, and we forgot.”
We were right to throw plenty out. The silence. The fatalism. The coercion. The shame. But along with them we partly lost the ability to close things. The cycles. Mutual dependence. A role for the old. And the concept of enough.
The task isn’t to go back. It’s to separate what worked humanly from what was inhuman.
And maybe that’s one of the more interesting leadership jobs we have: not learning one more method for carrying more weight, but rebuilding the points where something ends. Where you don’t have to optimize further. Where a loss doesn’t have to be re-analyzed. Where performance isn’t identity. Where the older person isn’t expired, just in a different role.
And where you can say:
this is enough.
