Looking in the Wrong Direction

On work, identity, fairy tales, and twenty years of wrong turns

The Question

Everyone I know has asked it at some point.

What do I want to do with my life? Or some version of it — what am I meant for, what is my purpose, what is the work that will finally feel like mine. We ask it at eighteen and at thirty and at forty-five. We ask it in the middle of jobs we hate and in the middle of jobs we thought we loved. We ask it quietly, in the dark, when the work we chose has stopped feeling like a choice.

I asked for it for twenty years.

What I didn't understand, for most of those twenty years, was that I was asking the wrong question. Not because the question was bad. Because I was listening for the wrong answer. I thought the answer was a place — a job, a project, a structure — that I would recognise when I arrived. What I kept finding was that every place I arrived turned into somewhere else entirely. The work wasn't the problem.

The fairy tale was the problem.

The Fairy Tale

The Bar

Before I opened the sofa bar, I had a very clear picture of what it would be.

Summers full of surfers, tanned and easy, stopping in after the water. Winters full of people from the city who brought intellectual humour and warm conversation. I imagined myself arriving on Friday evenings — sometimes behind the decks choosing music, sometimes just sitting at the bar among people I liked, in a place I had built. I imagined long summers, an open-top car, hiking, wandering. A life that felt chosen rather than assigned.

The reality was almost exactly the opposite.

The people I had imagined — the ones I had built the place for — came once or twice in summer, maybe a few times in winter. The bar survived on alcohol. Not fine cocktails. The cheapest, most ordinary alcohol, consumed by people who arrived already halfway gone, who spent little and needed much. People who were, in their way, running. From their lives, their decisions, their own particular demons. They came to my bar to disappear for a weekend. I had imagined a place of arrival. I had built a place of escape.

By the third year I was doing almost everything myself. Bookkeeping, invoices, payroll, bar shifts. Some nights I was DJ, bouncer, and cleaner in the same evening. One Friday night — or maybe Saturday, they blurred together by then — a man with glazed eyes came up to the decks to request a song. The particular way he looked at me. The particular way I looked back.

I felt something I hadn't expected: disgust. Not at him. At the distance between what I had imagined and what I was standing inside.

The Biography

The bar closed. A low point followed — not the lowest I would reach, but low enough.

I didn't know what to do next. So I did what I had always done: I started looking for the next thing. A new project, a new mission, a reason to move forward. I was looking for another fairy tale. I just didn't know it yet.

I stopped looking forward and started looking inward instead. I was reading everything I could find. Meditating. Walking barefoot. Sitting outside in the early mornings, reading until the sun got too bright to continue, then walking for hours, turning over what I had read. One morning I picked up the Steve Jobs biography and didn't put it down for weeks.

The biography absorbed me completely. His stubbornness. His refusal to separate beauty from function. His absolute certainty that the objects around us shape the lives we live.

But what held me was something more personal. Somewhere inside that story I recognised a small boy who had felt things very precisely and had been told, in various ways, that precision was not enough. I saw his obsessiveness. His eye for what was wrong before he could explain why. I recognised myself — or at least the version of myself I wanted to believe existed.

I borrowed his qualities. Sitting in that chair in the early mornings, I decided I was the kind of person who saw what others couldn't, who felt what wasn't working before anyone else noticed, who could build something that would change how people lived. I don't know how much of that was true and how much was a story I needed at that particular moment.

What I know is that I went looking for the work to match the story. And I found design.

Not graphic design — product design. The work of deciding how something should feel, how it should move, what it says to the person who touches it. I stumbled into it through a start-up, and I discovered that I could do it — genuinely, intuitively, in a way that felt less like learning and more like recognition. I had been thinking this way my whole life. I just hadn't known it had a name.

I built a new fairy tale around it: I am a designer. This is my craft. This is mine.

The Last Project

The last project arrived as confirmation.

I was invited in — specifically, directly — because of what I had built. It felt like recognition. I went in believing I was the father of something. I had shaped its form, its identity, its direction. I could see where it needed to go. I had the vision if not yet the authority, and I told myself the authority would follow.

It didn't.

The company had a board. The board had the owners' interests. The leadership had to sell every decision upward before anything moved. The budget was fixed, the developers were stretched, and nothing happened at the speed I had imagined in my head. I was responsible for everything. I was authorised for very little.

The board wanted a product they couldn't describe, built at a speed that wasn't possible, by a team they weren't willing to grow. They knew they wanted something. They could not say what. They were certain someone else should figure it out.

What had felt like fatherhood turned out to be something closer to guardianship — temporary, conditional, subject to review. Other people were deciding how my child would grow. I watched it become something I hadn't designed and hadn't chosen.

Three fairy tales. Three collisions with reality. The same moment of recognition each time, arriving too late: the story I told myself was not the place I was standing in.

The Reckoning

For a long time, I thought the problem was the work.

Wrong company. Wrong structure. Wrong project. If I could just find the right arrangement — the right level of ownership, the right partner, the right amount of control — the fairy tale would finally match the reality. I kept moving. I kept building new stories. I kept arriving somewhere and discovering that the place was not the picture.

What I understand now, and could not see then, is that the problem was never the work.

The problem was what I asked the work to be.

I asked it to give me an identity. To answer the question of who I was and what I was worth. I asked it to be a mission, an arrival point, a place where I could finally say this is mine and mean it completely. Work cannot carry that weight. No job can. The meaning was never inside the project — I brought it with me, I poured it in, and when the project couldn't hold it I called the project a failure.

The sofa bar was not a failure. It was a bar. My fantasy about what a bar could be was the problem.

The last project was not a betrayal. It was a company with a board and a budget and competing interests. My fantasy about what co-founding could mean was the problem.

I remember the moment it became clear — not gradually, but suddenly, the way an illusion doesn't fade but shatters. I had been hired as a professional, not invited as a partner. The role I had imagined and the role I was given were not the same thing. What I felt wasn't betrayal exactly. It was the specific embarrassment of realising you have been living inside a story no one else was in.

The fairy tale was always mine. So was the disappointment.

The Journey

I am still in the last project. I did not leave.

I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. In the end I made a different decision — not to stay and suffer, and not to go, but to stay and see differently.

What I cannot control is real and worth naming. I cannot decide the budget. I cannot hire new developers when we need them. I cannot move faster than the structure allows. I cannot change what the board wants or how the leadership decides. These are facts. For a long time I called them failures — mine, or theirs, or the project's. I built a fairy tale about what this work should be and then catalogued everything that fell short of it.

What I can control is also real, and I had stopped noticing it entirely.

I decide how the product looks and feels to the person using it. I decide where I work — from home, 130 kilometres from the office, in another city. I decide when I work, whether that is three days this week or four, whether I work a Saturday to free a Wednesday for something that matters more. I decide when I take the dog for a long walk. I decide when I close the laptop and write.

This is not a consolation prize. This is a different question — what does this actually offer? — instead of why doesn't it offer everything?

The sofa bar offered me something real. So did design. So did every project I have walked away from. I was too busy mourning the fairy tale to notice what was actually there.

I'm just starting to recognise it.

What Belongs to No One Else

I started writing in the lowest month in recent memory.

There was no decision. No plan. No story I told myself about what it would become. I simply started, the way you start breathing again after holding your breath without realising it.

For the first time, I did not build a fairy tale first.

Or so I thought. It is entirely possible that I am, at this very moment, sitting inside a new one — dreaming about the writer I might become, the readers who might find this, the version of myself who finally figured it out. It would not be the first time I mistook a fantasy for a direction.

But here is what is also true: I go in completely. I always do. Some nights I am tired and my eyes are heavy and I write anyway — not because I have to, but because something in me cannot not. I have missed dinners for this. I have stayed up past the point of sense. I have, on more than one occasion, been so far inside a sentence that I forgot to notice the room I was sitting in.

This is the pattern. I know it well by now.

The difference, this time, is that there is no one waiting to tell me what it should become. No board, no brief, no manager with a different vision. Whatever fairy tale I am building here — and I probably am — it belongs entirely to me.

For twenty years I asked the wrong question and built stories around whatever answer I needed. I think the right question is quieter. Not what am I meant for? But: what is here, right now, if I stop long enough to see it?

I'm still learning to ask it. But at least I'm asking it in my own words.

This is No-Mad Max. The author spent twenty years looking for the right answer. He is learning, slowly, to sit with the question.
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