By Daniel

Putting his beer down, my mentor changed his tone to something a little more serious.

“Corporate loves guys like you; young, ambitious, driven, and…. impressionable. They pull you in and place the whole world on front of you. You don’t realize this yet, but it becomes a shackle, a sort of ball and chain”

He brought his hands up to my neckline and closed an imaginary shackle around my throat. I looked down and envisioned an iron chain that connected to a small cannon ball on the floor.

“As time goes on they throw in some nice promotions, pay increases, bonuses. You feel good and you want more. So they give it to you. Soon, you’re married and have kids so you need to throw that into the mix as well. You have obligations, responsibility and it begins to weigh heavy on your shoulders. You don’t notice it at first, but your ball and chain begins to grow…

It gets bigger (wow, I can afford that Lexus I’ve always wanted)…

and bigger (my wife wants to move into a four bedroom house)…

and bigger (the VP position is open and they’re considering my name)…

Before you know it you’re grasping with your arms and legs, you’re holding onto this gigantic ball for dear life, and you’re praying to god no one takes it away from you.”

Driving home I couldn’t stop thinking about how that ball and chain manifested itself in me. Yes, the Mavericks tickets were great. The spot bonus was even better. I felt like a king when the VP slid a blank piece of paper across my desk and asked “How much to stay?”. The lure of power and money was apparent. I can’t say that in this conversation all my experiences reached a tipping point of self discovery, but it opened my eyes.

The more I thought about it, the corporate perks were actually feeding something else. The pursuit of wealth and power was not specifically for those things, but how it played into the bigger picture. The chain that was slowly wrapping itself around my neck was a mindset that I had been suffering from since middle school.

I grew up with popularity issues. A character flaw that had me climbing up the ladder, reaching a certain point, and finding myself wanting more. There was this desire in me to be viewed as one of the few on the inside with everyone on the outside looking in. In the corporate world there are multiple ladders and inner circles. As you work your way into one inner ring you find that it’s in fact the fringe of something even bigger, something even better, and you want in. I realized this was my reality.

In his Memorial Lecture at King’s College, C.S. Lewis described this as the phenomenon of the inner ring.

To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of Insides, full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

Chasing the inner ring is a toxic mindset that forces your thoughts to continually drive into the future, and at the same time, dwell on the past. This mental gauntlet stops you from fully engaging with the relationships you have in the present and therefore obstructs you from appreciating life as it is.

In a corporate environment, or even in our culture itself, is it ever possible to be satisfied and content? Our economy took a slide partially because of a growing community of $30,000 millionaires that over-extended themselves to create a façade of being rich and successful. In the words of Deepak Chopra ” We live in a culture where we spend what we haven’t earned, to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t even like”. Their motives for leveraging their way to the American Dream was the same path my mind was begining to spiral down.

I was never going to be satisfied chasing something that had no end. Life was not meant to be lived this way. Sitting on my bedroom floor, the question I was now trying to answer was could I be content with who I am now? I wasn’t sure what that even looked like or felt like. But, it was something I needed to figure out.

This post is the second of a three part series. 

Part One: What Should I do With My Life Now?

Part Three: Our Quarter Life Crisis and the Life we Dream Of