The Decade That Disappeared

Decades, in a senior career, do not disappear all at once. They disappear in increments small enough that the person living them does not, at the time, register the disappearance. The increments are the same shape, repeated across years. A quarter that needed a particular kind of focus. A project that required a stretch of evenings. A team that needed reassurance during a transition. A client whose retention depended, for a while, on availability. Each was, in its moment, the right thing to do. Each was also, cumulatively, a withdrawal from something the person did not have a clear name for.

The thing being withdrawn from, in most senior careers, is not a specific other activity. It is a quality of attention that is not nameable in the way the role's outputs are. The quality of attention that lets a person notice what is happening around them at home. The quality of attention that lets a person notice what is happening within them physically. The quality of attention that lets a person notice what kind of friendship a particular relationship has become, as distinct from what it once was. These qualities of attention do not produce deliverables. They do not appear on any review. They cost nothing to surrender, and the cost of having surrendered them is not visible until enough years have passed for the absence to become its own presence.

What is striking, in conversations with senior people who have just begun to register the disappearance, is how often the conversation arrives at a particular question. Where did the decade go. Asked not rhetorically. Asked literally. The person can account for the role. The role is well-documented. The role's outputs are in the public record. What the person cannot account for is themselves during the decade. The version of themselves that existed at the start of the decade is recognisable in photographs and difficult to access in any other way. The version that exists now is unfamiliar to the version from before in ways the role does not explain.

This is the disappearance the question is naming. Not the time. The self that was running through the time.

The reading of this question that most senior people initially default to is regret. The decade was given to the role. The role did not deserve that much. The person should have done it differently. The regret is real, and is rarely the most accurate reading of what happened.

The more accurate reading, in my view of the pattern, is that the role was an exchange the person entered with most of their attention, and the exchange went as those exchanges generally go. The role gave back what it was structurally able to give back. The income. The recognition. The skill development. The network. The status. These are real returns. They are not, on their own, sufficient to fill what was being exchanged for them, and almost no role is structured in a way that would make them sufficient. The role was honest. It returned what it was equipped to return. The person, in entering the exchange, was the one who underwrote the difference.

The question that follows, for the senior person who has registered the disappearance, is not what they should have done differently in the decade that has gone. The decade is gone. The question is what the next decade does, given what is now visible.

The visibility comes in two parts. The first part is the recognition that the qualities of attention that were withdrawn from did not vanish. They are still available. They have been waiting. The work of recovering them is real work, and it is not nostalgic. It is structural. It is the slow return of attention to parts of the life that were not on the role's reporting structure but were always part of the person's actual life.

The second part of the visibility is the recognition that the next stage of the career, if it is going to be honest, has to be designed around the exchange the person now wants to make, rather than the one that defaulted from the last stage. This sounds simple. It is not. The default exchange is already running. The role, the diary, the obligations are all configured to continue the previous exchange. Changing the exchange means changing the configuration. Changing the configuration is the work of months, sometimes years.

What the disappeared decade can teach, if the senior person is willing to learn from it rather than mourn it, is the shape of an exchange they would not, knowing what they know now, agree to again. The next stage's exchange is, in part, the inverse of that shape.

The Diagnostic is a place to look at what the disappeared decade actually paid for, and what the next one might be configured around. Thirty minutes, free, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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