The Pragmatist

I have a friend. Let’s call her Sarah.

Sarah spent fifteen years at one of those companies whose name functions as a credential. The kind where saying you work there at a dinner party ends a certain type of conversation because they’ve already decided what it means about you. Smart. Successful. Serious.

She was a senior PM and operations person. Strategy and coordination. The work that makes other work possible. She was, by all accounts, very good at it.

She left recently. Or rather, she stopped going. The distinction matters, because leaving implies motion toward something, and Sarah is not moving toward anything. She is, as she puts it, “taking time to be with her kids.” The phrasing is careful. It frames an absence as a presence. It sounds like a choice.

I’ve known Sarah for years, and in that time I’ve watched her construct a life that looks, from the outside, like a series of optimal decisions. The right schools. The right company. The right neighborhood. The right activities for the kids — the ones that signal cultivation without being try-hard, enrichment without being pushy.

Her house is immaculate. Not in the way that suggests someone who loves interior design, but in the way that suggests someone who cannot tolerate disorder. Surfaces are clear. There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. The effect is less “beautiful home” than “visible control.”

When you ask her how she’s doing, she says she’s “crazy busy.” She says it with a laugh, but also with a kind of pride. The busyness is not a complaint. It is a credential.

Here is what I’ve come to understand about Sarah: she does not know what she wants.

This is not an insult. It is the central fact of her life, and everything else flows from it.

She knows what she’s supposed to want. She knows what impressive people want. She knows what wanting the right things looks like. And she has spent her entire adult life executing against that template with extraordinary discipline.

But if you ask her — really ask her, in one of those rare moments when the performance flickers — what she actually desires for herself, independent of external validation, she becomes vague. She wants her kids to be happy. She wants financial security. She wants “balance.” These are not answers. They are the vocabulary of someone who has lost the thread of the question.

The truth, I think, is that she cannot access what’s being asked. The machinery that would process it has been offline for so long she’s forgotten it exists. I say “I think” because I’m guessing. From outside another person’s experience, certainty about their inner life is just another form of the pattern-matching I’m about to criticize. But something is visibly wrong, in the way that something can be wrong and also completely normal.

Sarah thinks of herself as pragmatic. She uses this word often. “I’m not a dreamer,” she says. “I’m practical.”

What she means is: I am a serious person who deals with the world as it is.

What she doesn’t see — what I think she doesn’t see — is that her pragmatism has become the thing it was supposed to protect against. It was a survival tool. It worked. And then it kept working long after the emergency ended, the way a bone heals crooked when nobody sets it, and then you build your whole posture around the crookedness, and after enough years the compensation is indistinguishable from the person.

At some point in her life, Sarah learned that safety came from achievement. That the world was a dangerous place, but if you hit your marks, if you made yourself undeniably impressive, you would be okay. I don’t know when she learned this. I don’t know what taught her. There is probably no single moment, but a long accumulation of rewards for performing and silence for everything else, the way most of us learn most of what governs us.

And so she optimized. School. Career. Marriage. Kids. Every domain approached as a problem to be solved, a set of metrics to be hit. The rewards came: money, status, the respect of people whose respect she’d been taught to value.

But the optimization was always in service of an unexamined goal. She never stopped to ask: what is all of this for? What would be enough? What do I actually want to feel?

She couldn’t ask, because asking would have threatened the whole project. If the answer turned out to be “something other than this,” then what had the last fifteen years been?

I should be honest about something. I’m writing about Sarah with the confidence of someone who has it figured out, and I don’t. My own version of this problem just wears different clothes. I left the optimization track — or I tell myself I did — but the part of me that wants to write a sharp essay diagnosing someone else’s self-deception is not so different from the part of Sarah that makes wry observations about overscheduled families at dinner parties. Insight about the trap is not the same as being free of it. Sometimes it’s just a more sophisticated trap.

So take what follows with that caveat.

I watch Sarah with her kids, and I notice something. All that optimization energy, formerly pointed at corporate strategy, has found new targets. Their schedules are full. Not with idle play, but with activities that develop skills, build futures, and create advantages. There is very little unstructured time. There is very little boredom.

Sarah would say this is good parenting. She would say she’s giving them opportunities she didn’t have. And maybe she’s right. I don’t have her kids. I don’t know what they need. What I notice, from the limited vantage of a family friend, is a familiar architecture being constructed around small people who haven’t yet chosen it. That’s all I can honestly say. Whether it becomes a prison or a foundation is not mine to predict.

The thing about Sarah that keeps me up at night is that she’s not stupid. She is, in fact, genuinely intelligent. She can see the game. She’ll make wry observations about status competition, about the absurdity of the whole performance. She has real critical insight about everyone’s situation but her own.

This is the tell, I think. Whenever someone carves out an exception for themselves while critiquing the general phenomenon, they are very close to seeing something they cannot afford to see. I recognize this move because I make it constantly.

I have tried, over the years, to talk to Sarah about this. Not in a confrontational way. Just in the way that friends sometimes talk when the conversation drifts toward what actually matters.

She listens. She nods. She says things like “I know, I know” and “you’re probably right.”

And then nothing changes. She goes back to the schedule, the optimization, the performance. She goes back to being “crazy busy” and “pragmatic.”

For a long time I thought she wasn’t hearing me. Now I think the problem is different. She hears fine. She agrees, even. But agreement at the level of ideas changes nothing when the pattern lives in the body, when the low hum of anxiety starts, when the calendar has a gap, in the particular nausea of an unstructured afternoon. You don’t think your way out of that. And I don’t know what you do instead. I’m not pretending I have an answer here.

What I think is happening is that there’s a terror at the center of it. The suspicion that if she stopped running, stopped achieving, stopped performing, she would find nothing underneath. That the self she’s been maintaining is not a self at all, but an elaborate coping mechanism grown so thick it passes for personality.

I don’t know if this is true. Maybe underneath all the optimization there is a perfectly intact Sarah who just needs permission to exist. Or maybe the fear is right and the construction is all there is, and dismantling it would be destruction rather than liberation. I don’t think anyone knows this about themselves until they try, and trying is the one thing the whole system is designed to prevent.

I don’t know how this ends for Sarah.

I don’t know how it ends for me, either. My version of running looks different but the engine is familiar enough that writing about it in someone else feels like a confession about myself.

What I want to say, to Sarah and to anyone who recognizes themselves in her, is small and possibly useless: the pragmatic path is not as safe as it looks. There is a risk in never stopping that is harder to see than the risk of stopping, because it accumulates so slowly and looks so much like responsibility. You can lose your whole life this way. You can spend decades in the anteroom of your own existence, preparing for something that never arrives.

But I’m aware that saying this is easy and hearing it is almost impossible when you’re inside it. So maybe all I’m really doing is leaving a marker. Something that might mean nothing now but catches the light at the right angle, on the right day, in a gap between appointments.

If it reaches you, you’ll know.