The Only Thing That Was Ever Yours to Carry
Why real leadership starts with what you refuse to carry
Where does the need for leadership sit in a world that keeps getting smaller, more divisive, and morally bankrupt?
I grew up in a volatile home, with someone who lived every day in the shadow of his own narcissism, and was prone to child-like tantrums. I’ve always had to work out what’s right and wrong, what’s good and destructive, mostly on my own.
Now I wake up every morning without social media, focused on my own life, with the healthiest self-image I’ve ever had, and I’m still confused, concerned, and a little scared.
That familiar feeling of not being able to see a way forward isn’t just a reflection of my own reality. It’s the circumstance that’s been thrust upon us.
The world feels faceless. People get angry about things they can’t control because it’s easy and a distraction. We find worth in whatever gets a reaction. When we hurt a family member, a friend, a coworker, someone close to us or even a stranger, we feel the impact, and we adjust.
Remorse leads to forgiveness, and self-reflection leads to change. Is it always productive? No. But, it’s an impact we can control.
When that change is seen and felt by those we love, support, and respect, the ripple effects can be impactful. Only if we stay morally accountable and aligned.
On the flip side, when we observe an event on the other side of the world, something with no personal connection, why do we feel the need to respond with destruction and vitriol?
Is it because it’s easy? Is it the short-term shot of worth and impact? The need for validation? Is it control? Control is a tangible thing. It has to be felt, sensed, and decided from a moral center, one that actually has weight.
At every level, when leadership is morally bankrupt, short-sighted, and a slave to the moment, we have a problem. Combine that with a news cycle that’s pessimistic, destructive, and itself morally bankrupt, and you have our current, collective reality.
Weak, destructive leaders lose their power the moment we choose to stay aligned with our own moral center and stop reinforcing their behavior. Collectively, we're in the middle of an identity crisis, because the world asking for our attention has gotten large and ambiguous while the life we actually live has stayed small and specific. The answer is aligned with looking inward and controlling what's within arm's reach.
All of us can relate through leadership in the professional world. A third of the global workforce, 34 percent according to Randstad’s 2024 Workmonitor survey of 27,000 workers, say they never want to take on a managerial role. Nearly half, 47 percent, report no focus on career progression at all.
Why? A major part of the answer lies in the tension already laid out. We don’t focus enough on the impact of our own lived experience, but we spend plenty of energy yelling into the void at things we can’t control.
Take government leadership. Too much of our energy goes toward it. Some, especially at the top, are morally bankrupt, and all the information we need is sitting right in their social media posts.
Someone creates content responding to it and people comment and complain. The top continues its moral slide, and the cycle repeats.
The news is the perfect anchor for this. It’s a reflection of the world we can’t control, and also a living record of how we decide what matters in our own life.
A living record riddled with existential ambiguity and fear, where maybe 98 percent of it doesn’t even matter. We can’t control what caused it, how it lands, or where it goes next.
Nine percent of Americans read the news because they want to. Twenty-four percent do it because they feel they have to. Pew Research Center measured that gap in December 2025, and it is worth sitting with now. A quarter of the country is compulsively consuming things they have no power to change, out of nothing but a sense that looking away would somehow be worse.
Social media did not invent that. It just gave it somewhere to go.
Here’s where the two numbers meet. A third of the workforce walking away from a manager title, and a quarter of the country reading news it doesn’t want. These are not two stories. They’re the same instinct, split into two different outcomes. One is walking toward alignment.
The other is walking away from it, and calling it engagement.
Is turning down a role that makes you answerable for outcomes you can’t actually shape disengagement?
No. It’s discernment.
It’s the moral center doing exactly what it’s supposed to, refusing weight that was never really yours to carry in the first place.
Scrolling through headlines you have no power to change because looking away feels like a moral failure is the same refusal, just in reverse. It feels like responsibility. It isn’t. It’s proximity to noise, mistaken for conscience.
The difference was never whether we engage. It’s what we get to choose. When someone turns down the title because the role carries no real authority to match its accountability, that’s control speaking, and it’s earned. When someone can’t put the phone down because turning it off feels like abandoning the world, that’s guilt speaking, wearing conscience as a costume.
Both look like the same thing from the outside, a person choosing not to act. Only one of them is coming from somewhere we actually own.
If leadership is going to mean anything again, at any level, in a conference room or a living room, it starts there. Not with more titles, more platforms, more people performing accountability for an audience that’ll forget by morning. It starts with deciding, one choice within arm’s reach at a time, what’s actually ours to answer for, and building the discipline to leave the rest where it lives.
It’s the only leadership left worth trusting, because it’s the only kind anyone actually chose.
I still wake up some mornings a little uneasy. That hasn’t gone away, and I don’t think it’s supposed to. Some things were never mine to carry, and pretending otherwise never made me more capable of carrying them. It just made me tired, and a little less myself.
I learned a long time ago, in a house where the weather changed without warning, that you can’t reason someone’s chaos into calmness. You can only decide what you’re going to do with your own hands.
That’s not resignation. It’s the only kind of control that was ever real to begin with.
So maybe that’s the whole answer? Just people, one at a time, choosing to stand fully in the small circle that’s actually theirs and calling that enough.
Because, in the end, it is.