I Can't Switch Off
On the identity we build alongside our work, and what it quietly costs us.
She’s talking and I’m listening. Or I’m doing the thing that looks like listening.
Ten days. She has ten days of life to share with me; small things, important things, the kind of details that only matter to someone who loves you. And of course I’m nodding and agreeing. Asking the right questions. My eyes are on her face.
But I know, even as I’m nodding, that I’m not really there. You can feel that about yourself. The gap between your face and your actual attention.
I’ve been a founder for close to ten years. First A—SPACE. Then Open. Now gentle—noise. And somewhere, gradually across those years, without really noticing it, I stopped being a person who builds things and became the thing I was building. The founder. Always on. Always available. Always one email away from dropping everything. Urgh.
Every founder says they struggle to switch off. I’ve said it too, probably in interviews, probably with a weird kinda pride disguised as complaint. But I’m trying to do it differently this time. Genuinely trying. And right now, honestly, it’s hard.
What I’ve noticed most isn’t the exhaustion. It’s the attention. The way it fragments. An urgent message from a designer mid-dinner. A prospective investor who wants a call at 7pm. Small interruptions that don’t feel like much in the moment but leave something behind. A residue. The conversation you were in before the phone lit up doesn’t fully return when you put it down. You’re there, but part of you is still somewhere else, managing something, solving something, being the person the company needs you to be.
