JULY 30, 2026

Neither hustle nor rest fixes this

A friend of mine quit her job eighteen months ago. She decided to leave on her own terms, with a plan to start enjoying her life again, rather than postpone it for some future version of herself that might not arrive.

But when we recently caught up, she confided in me that all wasn’t perfect. Not because she regretted her decision to leave the rat race. In fact, she found herself more present with family and friends and was happy and healthy.

But as she put it, there was this low “hum” that followed her around every day and she couldn’t quite get away from it. It was as if something was unresolved underneath the calm.

“I did everything they said after taking the break” she told me. “I’m supposedly living the life everyone says they want. Yet for some reasons I feel like I’m waiting for something else I should be doing.”

For so long our society has been inundated with the “hustle and grind” culture that promotes one path to success. Work hard, play hard; follow this morning routine, and so on.

And at the same time, there has been a movement against this philosophy, which exalts a life of rest and renewal, setting more boundaries, saying no more often and protecting yourself from burnout.

Still, underneath the relief of breaking away from the grind, the same issue that was always there quietly resurfaces. I think that's what my friend was actually finding out, without quite having the words for it yet.

Here's what I don't think anyone's told her: slowing down isn't the opposite of the problem. It's the same problem, walking at a different pace.

Two ways to avoid the same question

In the “hustle bro” or “girl boss” culture, improving your station in life organizes your day. There’s always a next version of you that feels just out of reach. It’s the “future you” who is richer, more accomplished, leaner, more efficient, etc.

The routine of your morning, afternoon and night gets built around closing that gap. To many, this sounds exhausting but also, attractive because of its simplicity. Day by day, you always know what you should be doing, because you’re always supposed to be becoming better.

Whereas the above movement emphasizes constant improvement, the anti-hustle response emphasizes protection. Protect your time, your boundaries, your energy and your peace.

And while this may appear to be the opposite of hustling and grinding, they both share something in common: neither considers who you actually are, underneath the improving or the protecting. It just changes which action verb organizes your identity.

This is why my friend, who by all accounts succeeded both in her job and after leaving it, still felt this unresolved “hum” all along. I think it was because she hadn’t solved the identity questions; she just found another place from which to keep not asking it.

What that “hum” means

I think if you’re feeling unsettled in some way, when you’re in the grind or in the resting stage, that hum is asking this question about identity: who am I when nothing is organizing me and my day?

Who am I when I have no goal to change and no boundary to protect; in other words, nothing to improve nor defend?

I don’t know about you, but it’s often a struggle to sit still long enough to find out. Because in their own way, both hustling and resting are forms of staying busy when you don’t really feel settled in who you are.

For me, working on my business is a form of busy-ness, but so is the insistence on “not-being-busy” when I finally set the boundaries because I still can’t be certain I’m relaxing for real!

I do have some examples to look to among clients who have sat with this issue at length. And I think the shifts are interesting.

One executive who took a break thought he would naturally pick up activities that were simply a new version of ambition, like sitting on a board or getting involved with a highly visible cause. But what he found was that he was someone who liked making things with his hands and had wanted to do that for decades, regardless of title or compensation.

Another person I worked with thought she would find some deep, unmet purpose after taking a break from work to be a stay-at-home mother. But actually she realized she wasn’t far off from what she was meant to be doing. She did, however, recognize that she needed to organize her life by being around new people because she was so energized by that and hadn’t really prioritized that before in her life - whether she was working in the office or running the household.

And when I reflect on my own story, I came upon the work of executive coaching 20 years ago only after having an honest reflection that the work I went to school to do just wasn’t feeding my soul. And I remember thinking, maybe I’d be crazy for pivoting to a brand new craft but I’d rather do that with no promise of success than pretend to like what I was doing for the rest of my career.

None of these answers came from deciding in advance what we would find.

My executive client didn't set out looking for carpentry. My other client didn't know she needed more people in her days until she actually sat still long enough to notice the shape of what she was missing. I certainly didn't do an MBA two decades ago expecting to end up here.

What all three of us have in common isn't the answer; it's that none of us got to some new insight by strategizing our way toward it. I think we got there by staying with the discomfort a while past the point where it would've been easier to manage it away with a new goal or a new boundary.

The part where I don’t have the solution for you

I don't think the fix between the hustle and improve or rest and protect approaches is a third strategy, as in a better balance or a more “mindful” hustle.

I think the actual work is sitting with the question underneath what my friend was experiencing with the “hum” and resisting the urge to immediately reach for a new system. In other words, it’s not about “how do I structure my life better,” but “who am I when nothing is asking anything of me at all?”

I don't have a clean answer to that, and I'd probably be skeptical of anyone who does. What I’ve noticed is that people who eventually find something real underneath the hum aren't the ones who found some magical pace or method. They're the ones who stopped treating the hum as a problem to be structured away. And instead, they treated it as the one honest signal in their life.

They saw it as evidence that they were finally close to something true for themselves. And that signal is hard to notice when so much advice and content and other people’s formulas for happiness fill our daily feeds. The fact that there isn’t some magic one-size-fits-all answer is the beauty of it. It’s not generic and universal, but rather it’s your personal truth.

And it’s not something you likely expected going in; like the executive uncovering his love for craft, or me realizing a career was built on the wrong reasons. But the insight sitting with this reveals, manages to be steadier than the prior thinking it replaces.

Tell me if this resonates for you. Have you found yourself in between the hustle and rest stages, and if so, did you find peace in either one, or perhaps uncover a personal truth along the way?

Until next week, all my best,

Nihar