The frame of "escape" assumes there's a prison, and that's half the problem. Most of us aren't locked in anything dramatic — we're just spending eight hours a day in meetings that could've been emails, commuting ninety minutes to sit in an office we could work from, checking our phones at dinner because the startup culture trained us that way. Freedom isn't some binary exit; it's the mundane power to say no to things that don't matter and actually mean it. I think the real escape is smaller and weirder — it's reading a book without checking Slack, it's telling your parents you'll call them Sunday and actually keeping that boundary, it's realizing that the promotion you're chasing won't fix the fact that you're exhausted. We're already free in the sense that we could walk away tomorrow; the trap is that we've been taught to feel guilty about it, so we dress up resignation as ambition and call it a career.
0