In her defense, she was simply trying to rationally analyze a problem.

“What do we accomplish in meetings? I could have used that time more productively to actually get something done.”

But then again, corporate bloat requires meetings.

Here’s how it actually works: the entire structure rewards people who can sit in a room and have takes. That means spitball, weigh in, “what if we,” push back, add their voice - while the actual making happens somewhere below them, by people whose names they may not even know.

And listen, I get it. Try building a company from scratch and micromanaging every aspect of it. The odds of a premature heart attack skyrocket.

Yet it does not make the issue any less annoying.

A close friend once told me (via someone else): “If you want something done, go ask a busy person.”

That was the eternal conundrum I existed in. On one hand, I was the person with the big title who actually knew how to structurally build and operate what I ran.

If Josie the social admin called out sick, I can go create an asset, make sure all the metadata is sound, and get the post up at the right time. If James the paid media buyer had to take off to attend his kid’s preschool graduation, I can hop into Google Ads and launch the campaign - fancy targeting, optimized CPV.

But I’m also a tinkerer. Ever since I was a kid I loved learning and understanding the how’s and the why’s. One of my favorite things to read was one of those 1,000-entry “did you know X was because of Y” encyclopedias that dominated my bookshelf, right next to my comics and choose-your-own-adventure paperbacks.

Old habits die hard, even when you’ve earned the right to be Captain Delegator.

But in my current state, as I work tirelessly to shed the identity of a corporate shill that I had to adopt to earn passage into more management responsibilities, one of the most triggering events is whenever I still work adjacently with people who live in the world of maybes, what-if’s, and circle-backs.

You know those types. They live for meetings.

The control freak types have to own the calendar invites.

Others nudge to be added to meetings for visibility.

Like I said to my better half: the meeting is the work.

The decks. The posturing. The ideas that get delegated to the elves in some nondescript workshop below them.

But there are forces and tools evolving that are quickly rendering these bureaucrats obsolete. And believe me, these people are afraid. Just look at the intensity of the idea spitballing. The frequency of the backstabbing and gatekeeping.

And oh yes, the volume of meetings.

That’s one of 100 reasons why the corporate exit, ironically, was the only way I could survive.

Use the time to build what’s mine - or be a spectator in the feral survival game, and worse off, be the one who has to make a half-assed, lukewarm compromise idea come to life?

Someone else will do the work?

Yeah, right. I’ll be over here building mine.

Today, it’s about simply documenting a phenomenon where reality finally outran brute force grit, and why I feel better off about it.

After a year and change of purposefully embracing the grind to build for myself and my offspring, rather than continuing a 25-year cycle of breaking my back to enrich a corporation, one of the biggest adjustments was to silence the ever-present voices in my head that always said “prove your worth today.”

Proving my worth was also embedded in output. Maybe it was rooted in my childhood, where good grades and being a student athlete, student body leader, and active in the music scene was still not enough for parents with high standards who didn’t know how to communicate their pride.

Or maybe it was initially working for boomer-generation bosses with the ever-present mindset of “do as I say, not as I do” that was practically etched on their foreheads. As your typical Gen-X inner rebel with a perpetual eyeroll fossilized on my generally glum face, soaking in adversity like a pain sponge and rationalizing it as character building became a normalized ritual that was uninterrupted for a quarter century.

That is, until last year, when everything cracked and fell apart.

By that point, the senior-level jobs and titles were achieved.

The big paycheck, after years of fighting nepotism to achieve that pinnacle, had been finally secured.

But you’ve all seen this movie before. More money and more responsibilities don’t equate to higher satisfaction. The higher you climb, the more you have to cover for any ineptitude above you, and C-suite execs tend to be a lot more demanding than your run-of-the-mill middle manager who just needs to get by with the illusion of efficacy.

Covering for someone who has actual revenue targets tied to their livelihood tends to level up the intensity of expectations for those of us just under the line but with real stakes in realizing their vision.

So yes, big title and big paychecks were there. But so were the stress-inducing moments of pure panic at 11pm. The late nights where an idea or a whim had to be answered. The weekends where a moment of hard-earned peace with the children spiraled into a panic-filled phone call with someone who didn’t bother to read a deck when it was sent to them on Wednesday, only to demand changes or reality-bending numbers before the Monday presentation.

All of that was the emotional toxins that had to be ejected from my body.

And now it’s been over a year, where I’ve somehow managed to build and fly my own plane at the same time.

The old cliche of working 80 hours a week for myself so I don’t have to work 40 (or in reality 60) for someone else is real. It’s been one of the most rewarding journeys so far, and the absolute best one that I’ve taken in recent memory.

But beyond the satisfaction that makes the long hours worth the pain, that annoying old voice never really went away. That underlying belief that if I’m not constantly occupied with builder work, even for myself, then I am still not enough.

And this past week, after over a year of the new - but more rewarding - kind of grind, my body finally said, “dude, enough.”

So I listened. After over a year with no breaks to this cadence, I finally stopped checking dashboards at 11pm. I stopped tweaking my website to deal with 100 annoying micro issues that I can’t figure out but refused to give up on. I stopped trying to juggle four different tools to get the digital store up and running.

I just laid down, played a little video games, and watched TV.

It sounds mundane. I don’t remember the last time I did this in recent memory. The voice that said that I was not enough had won the battle.

But after a year, I realized it did not win the war.

And I feel much better. Maybe I’ll get used to this.

I know for sure, there is no way I’m going back to the life I left behind.

It’s hard to when you finally let yourself exhale after 25 years.

But here we are. First entry. Could be the world’s shortest excursion into another random person’s midlife crisis. Or the beginning of something that actually goes somewhere outside the corporate cocoon.

First, a little background.

I was the person who actually listened in meetings. Who actually opened the data and spreadsheets that some underpaid analytics person sent every week because it was their job to keep the execs informed. The same execs who I guarantee never read a single thing but wasted countless hours hosting meetings that could’ve been an email… if they’d simply read the damn email.

But I digress.

My primary role over the past decade was an executive “growth” role. It’s that nebulous title they give to the person who comes in and unpacks all the terrible decisions someone else made and re-architects the whole damn thing so that whatever broken part of the business actually starts functioning again. Ideally generating revenue while it’s at it.

But it’s not some overlord-of-the-business kind of job. It’s dealing with company silos. Dealing with the gatekeeper of each silo and their loyal minions. Overcoming the countless people who spend more energy protecting their bad ideas than embracing good ones, because if they admit a good one isn’t theirs, they might lose their job.

That’s the simplest way to describe what I did.

It was the equivalent of being a pain sponge. With a good title. And good pay. The perks included frequent access to the C-suite, because every intuitive head honcho loves the person who actually knows what’s going on and can give the executive-summary version of the day-to-day BS without the mid-level tactical POV that induces seizures in highly distracted leaders.

But for every perk, there’s a price.

A few stress-induced hospital visits later, including one full day attached to machines, staring at the ceiling of a cold hospital room, and the obvious need to reevaluate one’s life priorities becomes... pretty obvious.

Part of me thought: is it worth enduring the next one and hoping it won’t be the stroke or heart attack that finally puts me down for good?

Even heavily medicated, that wasn’t a hard call.

So a few dramatic months and a somewhat performative corporate exit later, here I am, with nothing but a honey badger mascot, some good stories to tell, and a desire to make merch that helps people chuckle their way through the office-induced existential crises that worm into their brains during an awful useless meeting that didn’t need to happen. Or that rage-inducing email flex from the office bully that’s really a nothing-burger in the grand scheme of things.

So that’s basically the first post.

Why does Nine to Survive need to exist?

Because this was the part of me that had to stay quiet so I could keep my job.

The part that needed to speak up — before it was too late

More to come. Stick around if it sounds like your kind of misery.