She’d spent twenty years at a company most people would recognize. She led teams, built things that mattered, and stopped a few things that shouldn’t have happened.
Then she left voluntarily, financially secure at fifty years old.
And now she was stuck.
She wasn’t stuck in the way people usually mean—she had options… too many, actually. She’d made lists. She’d organized them by category. She’d considered academic positions, consulting, nonprofit work, local government. She could articulate the pros and cons of each.
What she couldn’t do was move.
When she first described her situation, she used a telling phrase: she’d “laid herself off.” Not that the company had laid her off—she’d chosen to leave. But the passive construction was doing something. It acknowledged agency while softening it. As if the decision had happened to her as much as she’d made it.
So I asked a different version of the question she’d already answered: “What were you leaving?”
The surface answer came quickly—the institution was imploding, the politics had become unbearable, she couldn’t get interesting work done anymore. All of this was true. But then something else emerged:
“This level of seniority is not sustainable. The person they wanted me to be was always a ticking time bomb.”
We sat with that—the version of herself the institution required; the one who chaired every meeting, carried everyone’s well-being, showed up for eight hours of calls starting at 7am and ending with Asia at midnight; the one who’d lost her ability to be creative, and who could only make sarcastic comments & protect the people she cared about.
“Those were the two good things by the end,” she said.
I spent years studying people who’d achieved what their culture promised would bring satisfaction—advanced degrees, prestigious positions, institutional authority—and found themselves grappling with (or, just as often, avoiding) existential questions about meaning and direction. The pattern I documented was consistent: they weren’t stuck because they didn’t know what to do… they were stuck because they weren’t giving themselves permission to want what they wanted.
The frameworks they’d been living inside—about success, about what counts as meaningful work, about what’s appropriate at their age or stage—were operating invisibly, constraining what felt possible. What I learned through that fieldwork was that people weren’t paralyzed by lack of answers. They were paralyzed because they couldn’t see the walls around what felt possible—some they’d built themselves, some that institutions had built for them, some that were genuinely immovable. The work isn’t pretending those walls don’t exist. It’s learning which ones are load-bearing and which ones are just drywall.
Scholars call this ‘horizons of possibility’—the recognition that what people perceive as natural limitations are often constructed sight-lines from their current positioning. Once you can see the framework, you can decide whether to stay inside it or build something different.
Midway through our conversation, she was talking about two former colleagues—people who’d built public profiles, sought visibility, made themselves the center of their own narratives. Her contempt was clear. “Preening prima donnas.” People who used others as assets to be discarded.
“What I want is to be the opposite of those people,” she said.
“So what’s the opposite?”
She paused. “Well, I think that’s the problem. Because there are pieces of that I clearly also want. A public voice.”
There it was. The bind. She wanted visibility—but she’d witnessed visibility corrupted. She’d built her identity around being the opposite of the people who sought the thing she also wanted. So she couldn’t want it. Not without becoming them.
I asked if she could think of anyone doing good work, visibly, with integrity.
She had to think. “I’ve been obsessed with the folks I take issue with.” But then she found one—a journalist she’d worked with, someone who’d had a public moment and knew it, but who’d run their operation ethically. It was proof the thing was possible, that there was a model that wasn’t the binary she’d constructed.
Later, we tried another angle: “Imagine you’re 85. Looking back at this moment—fifty, just left the career, paralyzed about what’s next. Your 85-year-old self knows how it all turned out. What does she wish you’d known? What does she wish you’d given yourself permission to do?”
Long silence.
“I am genuinely stumped,” she said. “And moved at the same time. I don’t know what you poked at.”
More silence.
“It’s gonna go by really fucking fast. Or not go by at all. Maybe I don’t reach 55.”
She told me about a former colleague she’d just seen—his wife with severe medical needs, him place-bound and desperate for work. “I came back and I was like, damn, we gotta live now. I think it’s time to eat dessert first.”
“Anything besides dessert she’d wish you’d give yourself permission to do?”
“Open my fucking mouth.”
The thing about permission is that no one else can give it to you. Not really. What we can do is help someone see clearly what’s been stopping them—the cultural scripts, the old wounds, the identities they’ve built in opposition to things they actually want.
This is what philosophical investigation looks like. It’s about asking questions that make visible what was operating invisibly. The work is creating enough space that people can see their frameworks clearly enough to decide for themselves whether those frameworks are actually serving them.
Near the end, I offered a synthesis. Tentatively, because I’d only known her for ninety minutes.
“It really seems like you’re not paralyzed because you don’t know what to do. It really seems like you’re not giving yourself permission to want what you want.”
She teared up. “If you were wrong, I wouldn’t have tears.”
I asked her to imagine a year from now. She described a woman who has figured it out—not everything, just what’s right now. She’s doing something that feels meaningful. Maybe most importantly, she’s not judging herself for wanting it.
“What are you doing?”
She looked past her computer at the window behind it. “The leaves are yellow. I think I’m putting a garden to bed for the year. Building up the mulch. Getting the last of the harvest out. Probably eating a great deal. I think I’m being like a squirrel.”
“And if you’re not judging yourself for that being the thing you’re doing—what gave you permission?”
Longest silence of the session.
“I think in that moment, I didn’t think I needed any.”
That’s often where the work lands. Not in answers. Not in plans. In the recognition that the permission was never someone else’s to grant.
A few weeks later, she sent me a note. She’d written two essays that had been stuck for months. Something had come unblocked.
I don’t take any kind of credit for that, of course. She did the work. I asked questions that helped her see what she already knew but hadn’t given herself permission to acknowledge. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes making visible what was operating invisibly creates just enough space for someone to choose differently.
Most of the time, the frameworks aren’t the problem. They’re just visible now in ways they weren’t before. And once you can see them, you can decide whether to stay inside them or build something different.
That’s the work.
George Laufenberg is a cultural anthropologist and existential consultant. His practice, The Principal Uncertainty, offers philosophical investigation for accomplished professionals navigating questions about inherited frameworks and chosen paths. Learn more at theprincipaluncertainty.com
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