Life after big tech.

It was a Wednesday morning, I was sitting in a corner of a little bakery, coffee in hand.

A couple, both in their 80s, easy. She had this laugh that filled the whole room. He leaned in every time she spoke, like whatever she was saying was the most interesting thing he'd heard all week. Sixty years of marriage, and he was still leaning in.

The woman caught my eye and said, "I hope we haven't been too loud and disturbed your reading."

I told her honestly: not at all. That their energy was exactly what I needed that morning.

She smiled and pointed to the tall man across the table, someone I'd assumed was a son or a nephew. Not a relative, she said. A tennis buddy of over 30 years. He treated them to coffee and pastries here every single Wednesday.

They paid their bill, waved goodbye, and were gone. And I just sat there.

I didn't open my book. I opened a blank note on my phone and started writing a new vision for my life. Not a five-year plan. Not a revenue target. A picture of my future.

When I'm in my 80s, I want to be like them. Still married and leaning in. A friend of 30 years who shows up every week with coffee. Good health. A small table at a good bakery. That's it. That's the whole vision.

And then I thought: why am I waiting until my 80s to start building this?

For years, I worked in Big Tech. And I was excelling. But if I'm being honest, I wasn't building a life during those years. I was building a résumé. Chasing a brand name I could attach to my identity. Filling my calendar so I'd feel important enough, busy enough, purposeful enough.

I was optimizing for a version of success that looked great from the outside and felt depleted on the inside.

When I left, the first thing I noticed wasn't the freedom. It was the peace I once had. I slowly started to see everything I'd been too "busy" to notice — old friendships I'd let drift, hobbies I'd shelved, my own health sitting somewhere at the bottom of a very long to-do list.

I'd been so focused on building toward some future version of my career that I forgot to actually live the life I had.

Can you relate to this?

Here's what I've noticed about many of the accomplished, impact-driven women I know and hear from. They're not lazy. They're not unfocused. They are, in fact, extraordinarily good at achieving goals. That's almost the problem.

Corporate life trained us well. Yearly targets. Quarterly OKRs. Monthly check-ins. Weekly priorities. We became world-class goal-achieving machines. And for a long time, that felt like purpose.

But there's a weight underneath all of it that we don't talk about enough. The caregiving. The mortgage. The feeling of being the person everyone depends on, in every direction, all at once. The sandwich generation carries a particular kind of exhaustion, the kind that doesn't show up in a performance review.

And somewhere in the middle of all that achieving and carrying, we lose track of the simple things. A slow morning. A long walk. A friendship that doesn't need an agenda.

I've been rethinking my relationship with goals.

Not abandoning them; but questioning whether every season of life calls for the same relentless, metric-driven approach. Because the couple in the bakery didn't build their life by hitting quarterly targets. They built it by showing up, consistently, for the things and people that actually mattered.

What I'm learning, slowly, imperfectly, is that the life I actually want requires a different kind of foundation. Not more ambition. More intention. Not more goals. More clarity about what I'm even building toward, and why.

And practically? It requires financial breathing room. A cushion that gives us the freedom to slow down before we're forced to. To take the Wednesday morning in the bakery. To say no to the work that pays well but costs too much. To invest in the friendships that might, one day, become a 30-year coffee ritual.

I've started calling this a freedom fund, not retirement savings, not an emergency fund, but money specifically set aside to buy back your choices. The freedom to work differently, live more fully, and stop postponing the life you actually want.

I still think about that couple. The way they laughed. The way their friend just showed up, week after week, for over three decades.

Nobody planned that kind of life in a spreadsheet. But somebody, somewhere along the way, decided that those relationships and those mornings were worth protecting.

I want to make that decision too. And I think you might be ready to as well.

We’ve spent years hitting goals for everyone else. It’s time to build a foundation that protects your mornings and your relationships.

P.S. If you’re wondering what a Freedom Fund looks like in practice, hit reply and let me know. If enough of you raise your hand, my next piece will break down exactly how to build the financial breathing room to support your next career transition without overhauling your life overnight.

P.P.S. Let’s keep the conversation going. You can find me sharing regular insights on navigating tech industry shifts and building a career with intention over on LinkedIn — let’s connect there!​