There’s a particular feeling that settles in during the first week back after a holiday break. The calendar fills up faster than your nervous system can catch up. Slack wakes up like it never slept. Everyone is “re-aligning,” which mostly means pretending the last few months weren’t exhausting.
Coming back to work in this moment — in tech, in leadership, in a world that feels perpetually overwhelming — tends to surface an uncomfortable question: Are we actually building anything sustainable, or are we just resuming the churn?
That question has been sitting with me.
Over the past year, I’ve written about ikigai — purpose as something lived, not optimized — and omoiyari — empathy not as sentiment, but as action. I keep circling the same tension: modern leadership frameworks assume stability, rational actors, and infinite attention. None of those things exist anymore. Especially not for neurodivergent leaders and teams navigating systems that were never designed with us in mind.
So over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing through a set of ideas that help me orient myself when the noise comes rushing back. They’re old ideas. Older than management theory. Older than Silicon Valley. Ideas that emerged from people who lived through instability, scarcity, empire, and collapse — and still had to figure out how to lead without losing their humanity.
Some of these ideas come from Japanese philosophy. Some come from Stoicism — from people like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, who were trying to hold together fractured worlds with little more than clarity and restraint. All of them share a common assumption: the world is imperfect, and leadership is how we choose to meet it anyway.
I’ll be writing about embracing imperfection rather than hiding it. About incremental change instead of heroic reinvention. About endurance that’s rooted in purpose, not grind culture. About gratitude as a strategic practice, not a feel-good afterthought. About the necessity of space — real, protected mental space — in systems that treat attention as an extractive resource.
I’m not offering a new productivity framework. I’m trying to articulate a leadership pattern — one that assumes cognitive diversity, emotional complexity, and political reality. One that understands that people are not interchangeable components, and that institutions fail when they forget this.
This is also, unavoidably, a political stance. Not in the partisan sense, but in the older meaning of the word: how we organize ourselves, how power moves, and whose humanity is considered worth protecting. A leadership philosophy that centers purpose, empathy, restraint, and reflection is inherently resistant to systems that value speed over care and efficiency over people.
Coming back from the holidays is always a moment of choice. We can rush back into the same habits, the same meetings, the same quiet erosion of attention and meaning. Or we can pause — just enough — to decide how we want to show up this year. What kind of leaders we’re willing to be. What kind of systems we’re willing to uphold.
The posts that follow are me thinking this through in public. Not as a guru. Not as someone who has it figured out. But as a neurodivergent leader trying to build human-centered systems inside institutions that often forget what humans need.
If you’re feeling the whiplash of returning to work and wondering whether there’s another way to lead — slower, kinder, more durable — this series is for you.
