High Agency, Blurring Spaces, and the Rise of Adult Anxiety
High agency at work comes at a cost too..
Recommended reading
Before I begin, I wanted to share an interesting article that addresses a very relevant topic to help regain control of building attention. This is a new format I am trying out. Let me know what you think.
High Agency, Blurring Spaces, and the Rise of Adult Anxiety
I am currently reading a fascinating book called Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which recounts her time at Facebook. She was previously a diplomat who fell in love with Facebook’s mission of connecting the world. As the book progresses, Sarah describes increasingly not-so-great experiences with Facebook leadership. Whether or not you believe every detail, it's a compelling read - go check it out. Two main things that I took away from the book:
How employees often stay immersed in a company’s belief system far too long, without recognising the toll it takes on their personal clarity, health, and identity.
The way modern life is structured—with blurry lines between physical and digital workspaces—has deepened what I call the new-age "agency trap."
Drinking the Kool-Aid too much, that is, powering the rocketship
Just as Sarah was swept up by the culture and mission of early Facebook, many have joined great companies like Uber, Google, and Apple. Just look at Uber. In Super Pumped, Mike Isaac describes how Uber's hyper-growth culture, fueled by raw ambition and internal mythology, eventually morphed into chaos. The company moved fast, broke things, and ignored internal guardrails until it all began to implode. Uber wasn't just building a company; it was running a cultural experiment on a grand scale. Whatever was needed to succeed Uber did it, some to the dettrement of its own future, it might be easy to sit and judge their decisions now, but in the context of its mission and how fast they were going up against the traditional taxi’s - everyone internally truly believed in its mission - everyone was drinking up Uber’s Kool aid at that time, blind to a correction compass.
Looking back on my time at Beam, everything seemed urgent and essential - the story felt similar to that of any fast-growing company! We believed deeply in our mission and worked hard to build a business that would outlast us. In doing so, we made mistakes. We took bets on countries we should have approached more cautiously, from both a regulatory and operational standpoint. We spent an entire year trying to open up Taiwan, only to realise it was a time and money sink. We were shut out from our Adelaide operations because we prioritised analytics over simple vehicle upkeep/maintenance. We were remarkably unfazed by our decisions, understanding that we were on the right path, sometimes very costly!
Could we have made some of these decisions differently, when I think about it now? Yes! Would we have seen the challenges better? Possibly not.
Here is the counter-argument to the whole drinking your Kool-Aid: You can't build a bold company without drinking your own Kool-Aid. That belief, that conviction, is what helps startups challenge incumbents and create new value. I don’t have the right answer here, but I do have questions. When does drinking this Kool-Aid become detrimental to one’s growth? The problem arises when belief turns into a form of blindness, something that happened to Sarah.
When Belief Becomes Burnout
There is a lot one could say about Careless People, but the bigger theme that stuck with me was Sarah's inability to unplug from the system that was Facebook. This isn’t just her story. It’s the story of a generation of high-agency professionals in the 2010-2020 era. Sarah’s commitment blurred into something darker. Anxiety, stress, and health issues. Who hasn’t been there?
The Time-Space Collapse of Modern Life
I promise I won’t play nostalgia card too much, but hear me out. Growing up with limited tech, we lived on fixed schedules. School at 6:45 am; Playtime at 4 pm; Homework; Sleep. There were boundaries to time and space. You knew when something began and ended. Anxiety had deadlines. Now? Everything is indefinite.
We want to settle in a new country, but are stuck with visa rules...
We want to buy a home, but the market is volatile...
We want new roles, but the job market is in flux....
Everything is on hold, across screens, geographies, and time zones. Space is fragmented. Time is unbounded. Sarah’s anxiety, as described in the book, was partly due to this blurring of boundaries. She was working until hours before childbirth, an extreme case, yes, but not far from how many of us experience vacations: laptop open, Slack pinging. There's no clean division between work and rest. The deeper issue is this: we are operating in a structureless timeline with no real sense of space. Yes, this fluidity offers an upside—faster promotions and broader opportunities—but it also creates a culture of ambient anxiety. There's no OFF switch.
Founders & Employees: Take Note
For founders building today, there’s a lesson here. The first wave of tech companies was powered by belief. It needed zealots. However, belief without boundaries can lead to burnout. Structure isn’t bureaucracy. It’s scaffolding. It defines time and space so that energy can be directed, not dispersed. The companies of tomorrow will need to protect their people not just from failure, but from boundless success with no brakes.
For employees: It’s okay to want clarity. It’s OK to feel anxious in the face of the indefinite. But maybe the answer isn’t in chasing harder or waiting passively. Perhaps it’s in designing better constraints, such as small rituals, recurring check-ins, and environments that separate work from life. Not to limit us, but to give shape to the swirl. To carve out space, bound some time, and feel whole again.