It’s July and Baltimore is pressed against 100 degrees of heat and smothered beneath a mile of Canadian forest fire smoke. Most of the US seems to be experiencing a similar tire fire of smell and discomfort.

It’s three hours later and I’m on a 9:30am flight to San Diego, sitting next to my partner, pretending not to know her.She’s on a business trip to a conference on “Aging”, I’m not sure what specifically that topic even covers. I wasn’t invited, I saw her itinerary in our shared calendar and I booked the seat next to hers. Her colleagues aren’t only on this flight, but one is sitting directly behind us and I shouldn’t be here, so I’m a living “Incognito Mosquito” as one of the books from my childhood was titled.

I’m supposed to be using this weekend to go back home, to visit family, and to go to a reunion at a summer camp I worked at when I was younger. Unfortunately for those plans, work has had me stressed to the gills and I need a few days of anonymity instead. San Diego sounded nice and since I can’t go to a conference or business dinners that I am not invited to, I’m going to drift around San Diego and try to be a photographer for a few days. At the very least, their air quality is “fair” with no forest smoke, and it will be 75 and sunny the entire visit.

My partner and I have very different careers but nearly identical circumstances. We have both been at our current jobs for nearly 10 years, very quickly risen to the functional tops of our organizations, have nearly eliminated all of our debts, earn more money than we need, and have been wrecking our lives.

We don’t have children, so our time is much more unrestricted than others. We can be there when others have obligations. We’re smart enough to lead our businesses out of crises and have done so repeatedly but at significant cost of personal time and focus. We have so many interests outside of work, and enjoy keeping somewhat stable routines and those are upended usually for half a year at a time.

We break, we gain weight, we drink more, we lose track of friends, we miss social events, we cancel vacations, we’re interrupted at dinner, we get calls in the middle of the night, we read books on improving habits, we get back to the gym, we eat healthy, we stop drinking, we lose weight, we take unexpected trips, we reconnect with family and friends, we recover. While we rebuild, something is quietly slipping, unseen, which will return the moment we feel good.

Physically it’s a cycle that sounds manageable. Temporary ups, temporary downs, averages out to average health. Emotionally I’m not so sure. The cycle runs from back and forth between stress and anxiety. We both deal better with stress as it allows for the relieving action. The cycle itself though leads to a bigger problem, dread. When things are going poorly, we are worried we’ll be fired, when they’re going good, we worry we’ll be replaced, and during both, we worry things will get worse. There is no upside, it’s just dread. All of the time.

We don’t need any of this. We could quit our jobs today and float for a year. We have more liquid money than debt. We don’t own our businesses so while we’re killing ourselves and paid well, it’s not the kind of money one can retire early off of, so we could be doing this for too long of a time. There is a weird obligation to our teams, to the organizations, we push because we care about the outcomes, deeply. We sacrifice our own reputations with our leaders by pushing back and fighting for meaningful improvements to continue the success. We’re great at it. We need to stop doing it.

“It’s lonely at the top” is the cliche a colleague gave me when I told him I was tired of battling leadership, the customer, my peers, and others in my business. He knows this because he’s been doing it longer. He’s in a mirror role in operations where I am in sales. We have the same objectives but we battle different people.

He has more direct control over the people he battles, I can only operate through persuasion. It’s a strange thing “battling’ through persuasion, you spend all of your time framing ideas to make them seductive and then strategizing how to seep them into someone else’s mind so that they believe the idea was theirs from the start.

It’s the film Inception without the science fiction of sneaking into someone’s subconscious through dreams. I knew persuasion was a skill but I didn’t know it was something one could be talented at. I also didn’t know this would be my most valuable skill for my career or that I would be exceptional at it. I didn’t plan to be here, and I don’t want to do this work. It conflicts directly with my desire to help my peers succeed, and that’s maddening.

I grew up in a family of loud talking, debate hungry, intelligent people. Dinners were always saturated in debate, either with a clear split of opinion or hypothetical us vs them group ranting. It is exhausting for strangers, and the level of volume and excessive use of cursing, would only seem normal in a suburb outside of Boston.

Having lived further south, and traveled for decades, I’ve lost the comfort of speaking with obcentities in every sentence, and have drifted into a softer tone of voice as I’ve learned to match other people’s speech patterns, often which are quieter. I’ve also lost the desire to debate as I’ve learned to infect other people’s thoughts with my own ideas.

You don’t change minds with debate, you steer them to better ideas by asking them questions, listening to their responses, analyzing how they arrived at what they believe in, and repeating. You mine their minds, you dig, and dig, and dig, until you burrow their logic all the way to the seed of your idea. Then you explore the differences between the thoughts with them, and then you leave them with that seed to grow. Observational biases, conformational biases, and ego will nourish a great idea for you. All you need is to lead them there and not to any of the other great ideas that would diminish the one you are setting in motion.

I’m not even sure if I’m describing this process clearly now, I only know that the way I speak with people, has this effect, consistently. All of those blended experiences of my family, navigating travel and strangers and a wide range of careers, has resulted in a flexible mind to drive persuasion.

It’s difficult to live in America, realize my primary job is persuasion and not think about the dumbest president we’ve had in a century. A man who has no talents other than persuasion and is extremely effective at controlling people. His strategy does not mirror my own at all. He dictates an idea with blind confidence, and repeats it until weak people parrot it back. He has no dominance over confident people. Lucky for him, they bow out from frustration or fear rather than choose to continue the fight. Partly because 33% of the population are gullible to confident liars and mostly because violent people are not usually very deep thinkers.

Two weeks ago it was the Fourth of July. In a national poll, only 51% or people were able to identify the event that was being celebrated from American history. This was a multiple choice question, and still only 51% of Americans identified that Independence Day was tied to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Even more shocking 23%, nearly 1 in 4 patriotic Americans, did not have the confidence to pick and answer and chose “Not Sure”. The name of the lead character in the film Idiocracy.

I’m getting close to the end of the job I’m in now. I’m burnt out. I don’t want to change peoples’ minds. I don’t want to think about how my work is similar to our dumb president’s. This is why I’m on my way to San Diego. To pretend to be a photographer. To breathe only semi polluted air with a more comfortable temperature, to maybe sneak onto a sailboat, see some botanical gardens, or museum about. When the smoke clears I’ll go visit my friends and family and quit my job, and get back to the gym, and eat healthy, and run a half marathon, and do the work to find the work that makes sense for living.