How We Landed Here: Optimising for a Future That Doesn’t Exist
It happened in a corridor after a meeting. A colleague, now friend, pulled me aside. Someone I respect, someone
It happened in a corridor after a meeting. A colleague, now friend, pulled me aside. Someone I respect, someone brilliant in and outside of work, someone who has it all mapped out. Except she didn’t anymore.
“This makes me wonder how I landed here,” she said. “What the fuck am I doing with myself?”
The question wasn’t rhetorical. It was exhausted. Resigned. Like she’d been asking it for months and had finally just said it out loud, not because she’d found an answer, but because the question had become too heavy to carry alone.
She’s a millennial. A mother. A high performer. She’s objectively better off than her parents were at the same age. Better health, more opportunities, more access to nearly everything that was supposed to make life easier. And yet there it was, in the corridor, the resignation of someone who couldn’t trace the path that brought her here.
The disorientation of not knowing how you landed somewhere is different from regret. Regret assumes you made a choice. This was something else. This was realising you’d been moved by systems so large, so fast, that you couldn’t point to the moment you stopped choosing and started just moving.
I thought about something Mo Gawdat said in an interview. He was talking about the future (AI of course, duh), about resilience, about who survives what’s coming. He said: “Those who make it to 2038 will enjoy it.” Then he paused. “But ask those who went through World War II.”
Not because the world ends. But because surviving something and living through it are different things. The people who survived WWII got to see what came after. But they never got their lives back during it. The cost isn’t in the ending. It’s in every single day in the middle.
That’s what my colleague was naming in that corridor. She didn’t fail at life. She landed exactly where the system had been moving her. And she was just now realising she couldn’t remember choosing any of it.
She’s not alone in this. I’ve started noticing it everywhere. People who have succeeded by every conventional measure, yet feel like they’re failing at living. People optimising everything, yet feeling less optimised by the day.
The generational stacking is real. And it’s what’s creating this exhaustion that no amount of wellness apps can fix.
Gen X learned that loyalty wasn’t reciprocal. They watched their parents’ decades of institutional commitment get repaid with redundancy. So they abandoned stability and made a trade. They said: if the institution won’t protect you, protect yourself. Get out before you get burned. Build your own thing. Don’t trust the system. It was rational. It made sense. But it meant they had to figure out their own path, their own support structure, their own retirement.
Millennials watched Gen X navigate that uncertainty and learned something different. They said: if the world isn’t stable, then what matters is optionality. Access to experience. They optimised for choice. Go to university. Build a network. Travel. Gain credentials. Be flexible. Keep your options open. It was the perfect trade for a world that promised infinite possibility.
Except possibility isn’t abundance. It’s a spreadsheet. Every choice you make is a door you’re not walking through.
Gen Z came next. They watched both previous generations chase stability and opportunity, and they watched both come up short. By the time Gen Z was old enough to care about these things, the world felt fractured. Privacy was gone. Institutions were less trustworthy. But connection had become a currency. So they made their trade. They traded privacy for belonging. Authenticity for community. They put their real selves online because at least someone would see them, even if that someone was a database and an algorithm.
Three generations. Three rational trades. All made with the information they had at the time.
Compound trades don’t just add. They multiply.
Gen X’s response to broken loyalty created the instability. Millennials tried to solve it by creating optionality. Gen Z inherited a world that had both broken systems and infinite choices, but no framework to choose between them. They inherited the cost of two generations’ trades on top of their own.
And now, all three are trying to live in the same moment. The same workplace. The same economic system.
My colleague isn’t exhausted because she’s not resilient. She’s exhausted because the pace of change itself has become the baseline. Technology transformed her field. Work culture shifted. Economic models rewired. Her role evolved. Her family responsibilities changed. And then a pandemic. And then another economic shift. And meanwhile she’s supposed to have a career trajectory, a mortgage, a relationship, and a sense of purpose.
That’s not a decade of change. That’s normal now.
The issue isn’t the change itself. It’s that generations adapted to change at a pace that allowed time to adjust. You had five years to understand how the internet worked before it rewired your job. You had a decade to adapt to a new economic model before another one arrived. You had space to metabolise, to fail, to recalibrate.
But now the windows have collapsed. A technological revolution. A pandemic. An economic restructuring. Climate anxiety. Social upheaval. A career model that used to last 40 years now lasting four. All happening at the same time, to the same people, in their 20s and 30s and 40s.
That’s not resilience testing. That’s a pace that outpaces human adaptation.
And the worst part is that everyone interprets it as personal failure. You feel exhausted, so you must not be trying hard enough. You feel disoriented, so you must not be organised enough. You feel lost, so you must be missing something. You optimise harder. You add more systems. You try to compress more into less time.
I caught myself thinking about what it would mean if my partner and I had a child. Not planning, just thinking. And in that thinking, I realised something: we’d be optimising for someone else’s future while we can’t even predict our own. We’d be making long-term decisions in a system that rewrites itself every eighteen months. We’d be supposed to choose a school, a neighbourhood, a life trajectory, for a person whose world will look nothing like ours.
That’s when the real disorientation hit. It’s not “how do we optimise?” It’s “what does optimisation even mean if the future is moving faster than I can plan for?”
That’s when I realised what my colleague was actually saying. She wasn’t giving up. She was seeing the system she’d been running inside.
The rationality of her question “what the fuck am I doing with myself” is this: she’s been optimising for a world that keeps changing the rules before she can finish playing.
And she’s not the only one.
This is what the next 13 years leading to 2038 actually demand of us. Not more productivity. Not better systems. Not another life hack. But the ability to live inside uncertainty without needing to solve it. To make choices without needing to be right. To adapt without needing to have a five year plan.
Because the people who make it to 2038 won’t be the ones who had everything figured out. They’ll be the ones who figured out how to live while figuring it out. How to have ambition without needing certainty. How to build something while knowing the ground is shifting.
The exhaustion isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re doing something real in a system that’s moving faster than humans were designed to move.
Here’s what I want to ask you. Not to fix anything. Not to solve anything. But to see it.
What are you resigning yourself to right now? Not in the grand sense. But in the small sense. The daily sense. What version of success have you stopped questioning because it’s too late to question it? What trade have you made without naming it? What are you optimising for, and does the timeline you’re optimising for even exist anymore?
Because that’s where the real answer lives. Not in finding a better system. But in naming which system you’re already inside, and deciding consciously whether that’s where you want to be.
My colleague finally said it out loud. “What the fuck am I doing with myself?”
Maybe it’s time you asked too.
