Nobody Chooses The Conveyor Belt
It's not your fault you ended up on it, but it's your responsibility to get off.
You didn’t choose your career.
Somewhere between 17-19, you chose a major based on someone else’s advice.
You didn’t choose where you live, either.
You chose proximity to one of the jobs in the career you didn’t choose, in a city filtered for cost of living and commute time.
You didn’t even choose your schedule.
You chose to be responsive, to say yes, to be someone people could count on.
None of these were bad decisions. They were just decisions made inside a system that individually gave you choices while collectively giving you none.
Yes, the university let you pick the major. The market for your services gave you choices of an employer. You could pick the lifestyle you wanted, how much money you wanted to make, and the amount of work you were willing to put in to hit those targets.
But when you step back, you see the shape is the same for everyone.
Graduate. Job. Marriage. Kids. Forty or fifty years of work. Retire. Die.
That’s the conveyor belt. You’ve been on it your whole life.
Looking at the belt usually elicits some kind of physical response:
A tightening in your chest glancing at a calendar filled with events you don’t want to attend.
The knot in your gut when the work travel now means you’re missing a kid's playoff game.
The hot blood during another goddamn traffic jam that’s going to make you late for dinner (again).
With a sigh or a scream, you end up asking yourself:
“How the fuck is this my life?”
It’s not your fault (though it is your responsibility, but we’ll get to that later). Society has a default path, and when you were born, you were dropped onto it along with the rest of us.
Since then, you’ve been making choices within the system. The choice to opt out of the system altogether is kind of like unplugging from the Matrix: you need a Morpheus to show you that you’re even plugged in.
Well, my name starts with an M, so close enough.
By the end of this letter, you’ll know if you’re still on the belt (and yeah, you probably are), what it’s costing you, and how to get off.
I. What The Conveyor Belt Looks Like
If you’re successful, the most dangerous thing you can do is think this doesn’t apply to you.
The belt doesn’t trap people who are failing. The better you are at execution, the less likely you are to notice that the track you’re on was designed by someone else.
The belt operates through a series of movements that all feel like individual choices.
You pick a major from a limited menu of “things that I want to be when I grow up” before you’re old enough to (legally) drink a beer.
The major picks your first job. The job picks the city. The city picks your social circle, maybe even your partner. Your social circle shapes what feels normal and influences what you want. What you want shapes the next job, the next city, the next decade.
Technically, every choice was yours, but they were choices made from a narrowing set of options, which were themselves produced from a previous choice.
You were never handed a menu that gave you a real decision to make.
Here is the real menu:
Option A: Continue on the belt.
Option B: Get the hell off and do something else entirely.
So far, you’ve been making Option A choices, and they’ve kept you on the belt.
What makes this really dangerous: the belt looks like success. It’s what everyone else is doing.
You don’t even see it as a limitation while it quietly becomes the size of your world.
II. What The Belt Is Costing You
The conveyor belt doesn’t hate you.
It’s indifferent to your existence.
It doesn’t need you.
And while you’re making decisions in a constrained environment, the belt is costing you in meaningful ways:
Capped Upside: The belt has a trajectory. You can put in as much effort as you want, but it’s only going to help you hit the default milestones a little faster.
Agency Atrophy: every institution on the belt rewards compliance. Show up on time. Follow the rubric. Meet or exceed expectations. Don’t break shit. After 20 years, your ability to choose for yourself has atrophied. You don’t know what you want because you’ve never had to know. The belt fed you easy-baked answers.
The Architecture Is Crumbling: The idea of working for a company for a 40-year career and getting a pension worked fine, back when a company wouldn’t shitcan you after a down quarter, and pensions hadn’t yet been taken away and replaced by 401Ks. The belt is the byproducts of a postwar economic set-up that no longer exists. Your whole economic foundation rests on a system assembled by people who are all dead, designed for problems that have all changed.
So long as we remain on the belt, we have systemic limitations without being able to make our own decisions, all built on a foundation that is starting to register on the Richter scale.
Fucking sweet.
And it’s not like this path is actually comfortable, right?
You hide on the toilet at work to kill an extra 10 minutes of your day.
You get in a fight with your boss and pull up LinkedIn to check on what the market will pay for your skills.
If you’re misaligned, meaning you’re not doing work that’s meaningful to you, the symptoms are evident.
You’re anxious. You’re checked-out. You want things to be different than the way they are. It’s a period of drift.
And while the belt carries you along, it makes one thing obvious: the belt is profitable for everyone except you.
Your employer has figured out how to monetize your skills better than you have.
The banks profit from your attempts to purchase your way to meaningful change.
The algorithm profits by draining your attention and, as a result, keeping your ass parked on the belt.
Your view of success was shaped on the ride. Status, money, house, perfect family, whatever you want, the belt showed you a preview.
The scary part of all of this: if you ignore it, nothing dramatic happens.
The belt keeps moving. It carries you along whether you’re excited or dead inside.
Every passing moment, your potential quietly expires.
It’s a smooth escalator ride into an active volcano.
III. Get Clear About What’s Important
Stepping off the belt doesn’t mean quitting your job tomorrow (as liberating as that might feel).
You don’t have to blow up your life. There’s a grown-up version of this exit, and it starts with getting clear about what you actually want.
A lot of people think clarity is a feeling when it’s actually a byproduct of a process. You’re not getting there by sitting around, waiting for The Muse to fire a shot of inspiration into your skull.
You force clarity through structured reflection.
If you just ask yourself, “What do I want?” you’re going to get a variation of an answer that was programmed by the belt.
Here are three steps to find clarity:
Make the cost of inaction visceral. Most people live in a comfortable fog about where they’re headed. You need to burn that off. Project your current trajectory forward 10 years. Not just your job. Look at work, relationships, health, and inner life. If nothing changes, what’s your life look like a decade from now? How exciting is that picture? The cost of staying on the belt needs to stop being an abstract fear and become something you can see. (Note: if you fucking hate the answer, you’re doing it right.)
Excavate what you already have. You don’t need a market-shifting idea. You’ve been collecting intellectual raw material for years by living your life - kicking ass at work, solving problems for yourself and others, books you’ve read, podcasts you’ve loved. The challenge: it’s all buried. You’re not thinking about this stuff on a random Wednesday. You need to surface it. What do you believe? Which ideas are hills you’d die on? What’s obvious to you that everybody else seems to miss?
Make staying scarier than leaving. The belt programs us to look at the risks of making a change. You need to invert that: what are the risks of staying? How much longer are you living out parts of your life that drive you fucking crazy? What opportunities are you not hearing about because you’re in the wrong rooms? How much time are you spending with the wrong people?
When you start viewing time as the most valuable resource, you realize how much capital you’re pissing away by staying comfortable.
Start with the trajectory projection. If you run the next 10 years like you ran the last 10, how do you feel?
(If you want a prompt I designed to help you run this exercise, you can get it for free here.)
IV. Get Clear About What Actions To Take
Clarity is one thing. Execution is something else entirely.
Don’t get stuck in the gap between knowing and doing.
Here’s how you avoid the purgatory of inaction:
Step 1: Map your constraints. Before you do anything, take stock of your reality. What actual hours do you have to build? What’s your current financial picture? What are your existing commitments: family, social, community? What’s your risk appetite? “If I had more savings, I’d quit and go all-in on my dream,” is very different from, “I have 90 minutes a day to build before the house wakes up.” Plan in a way that survives your daily reality.
Step 2: Find / Validate your direction. Two paths:
If you don’t have a direction: Run your skills and interests through four lenses:
Expertise: what are you good at? This is usually close to what people already pay you for.
Energy: what do you legit have fun doing? When are you in flow?
Unfair advantage: where does your brain see things differently?
What you’d do for free: if money was no object, how are you spending your days?
Look for overlaps. Those collision points could be the start of your new path.
If you already have a direction: Validate it through the same four lenses, plus a reality check. Do you have the relevant experience? Does it fit within your real constraints? Might there be genuine interest or market demand? You don’t want to be downstream and thinking about these for the first time. Minor tweaks to your approach now can save you months later (he said, from plenty of experience).
You don’t step off the belt because you had an epiphany. It requires building a new default. You need new infrastructure. The new system has to become as automatic as the one it’s replacing.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
- Courtney C. Stevens
V. Start Before You’re Ready
The final boss of getting off the belt is a familiar foe:
It’s you.
The voice that says “not yet” or “I’m too busy right now” or “I’m not good enough” or “nobody’s gonna pay me for that” or any of the other hundred excuses your subconscious feeds you.
It’s all to keep you locked in place. Comfortable. Numb.
The voice telling you “not yet” is the residue of being compliant for multiple decades.
Raise your hand to be excused from class for the bathroom. Have the assistant professor proof-read your paper. Send the deck to your boss before presenting. Am I safe to book travel to this conference? To make this decision?
You are waiting for permission.
Nobody is coming to give you permission.
There’s no heavens-opening voice from above that says, “You’re ready, my son.”
There’s just taking the smallest first step you possibly can today, then taking another one tomorrow.
You’re gonna be embarrassed, make dumb-shit mistakes, and waste time, money, and energy.
This is what starting looks like. An informed step in a general direction. Another step tomorrow. Another step the day after that. Two rules:
When the world gives you feedback, adapt and pivot. This is how you find the road you’re supposed to take.
Don’t stop walking. This is how you actually end up at your destination.
The belt wins by default. The only counter is motion. The first step doesn’t have to be the right step. It just has to be a step. You need to be in the arena long enough for the belt’s programming to get replaced by real-world feedback.
If you don’t quit, you might make it. And if you quit, you definitely won’t.
- Seth Rogen
Now, you might not have chosen your career, partner, kids, or anything else in your life (he said, tongue in cheek), but going forward, you know there’s another menu to start selecting from. You don’t need permission. You just need:
Self-reflection
A direction
A decision
The balls to take the first step
You can do this all in an open afternoon if you’re serious about it.
My unsolicited advice:
Get serious about it.
Thanks for reading. These are still early days for me, so every time someone makes it all the way down here, I’m grateful.
As mentioned above, the easiest first step to clarity is the Golden Handcuff Diagnostic. It’s free, 60 minutes long, and will get you closer to clarity than you’ve been in a long time.
If you’re beyond diagnosing and ready to build your own thing, I built the 2nd Act Launchpad for you. The founding cohort is just about full, and these last few slots are the cheapest it’s ever going to be. After that, as Marlow Stanfield would say, “Price of the brick goin’ up.”