Have you seen this desperate face in the mirror?

Imagine you run a Starbucks. You manage a moderately busy branch with a typical traffic pattern, and your single most impactful control is in building a good team. Making your location clean, attractive, and smoothly efficient not only provides you a paycheck and benefits, but proves your value as a professional. You keep the customers coming in and the coffee flowing. On the floor, you lead as an exemplar of the profession (at least, that’s what you try to do).

To you, who got into the job when you sold your own little cafe, this felt like a step down at first, and you somewhat resent that you ever needed to trade the independence of business ownership for the relative stability of this low-level management position. But today, three years in, you all but live and die for the feeling when you walk in and see everything in order, working smoothly, reminding you that so many hundreds of people choose here to get their coffee because of your efforts. It’s no fluke; it’s the result of your experience and your hard work — and it matters. The soothing caffeine that gets people going acts as a very real staple in the economic diet.

But there’s a part of you that wonders — why am I doing this?

And it’s just one of the reasons, but a big one, that you quit not one year later and try again in running your own cafe.

Enough imagining. If you don’t drink coffee, this whole thing matters less than not at all — except in the very distant sense that coffee is a minor staple of the economy. If this story doesn’t ring true for coffee, you can trade it out for just about any job, career, business, or other professional domain — the fundamental reality of it all remains: Few of us spend our working years quite how we expect. As a coping mechanism, we build a level of satisfaction as a story, a comfort. The guise of day-to-day success takes on a meaning we don’t implicitly feel, but we teach it to ourselves. Sometimes, it even sticks.

But as cruel as this fraud can be to ourselves, it’s not necessarily bad. In fact, it’s not too difficult to make the case that it’s overwhelmingly positive. It’s all a matter of intent, of making a conscious decision.

*   *   *

Most of us land in our job primarily to make ends meet, to pay the bills. If we’re very lucky and careful, sometimes we have the foresight to acquire a job that meets our actual human interest. Eventually, if we are sufficiently interested in making money and gaining more flexibility, more freedom, more control over our own lives, we push forward toward the next step in the career ladder, or expand the business, or work to find more clients, or whatever else will push that working status to the next level. Suddenly, that job is a niche job. As one example, maybe you work in event planning because you love making people happy with your organizational skills — then you wanted more clients, more stability, so you followed the trends, and now you’re a niche wedding planner helping to find the perfect rustic location for couples to tie the knot — it’s just about all you do, now.

Maybe this still aligns with your original interests; in many cases the alignment is nominal.

Or perhaps you got into coffee roasting because you loved the pursuit of just the right cup of coffee, and now you are stumbling through uncomfortable calls with plantation owners in Columbia because you’re in charge of sourcing for a large coffee bean importer. You’re well paid and have lots of control and clout in the coffee industry and you absolutely hate 90% of your job. Wait, how did that happen?

It’s a familiar story. If it’s not coffee, it’s accounting, and if it’s not accounting, it’s plumbing, and so on. And this is if you’re lucky and get ahead well enough to avoid the very real, eternally looming struggle of stumbling from job to job, paycheck to paycheck, with no space in your life to think about what you’d like to be doing.

But say your stars aligned, and you’re in the field you wanted. Maybe even the job you wanted. But what you’re doing now, somehow, just isn’t it. It’s all wrong. Managing produce inspections, instead of creating beautiful farm-to-table meals. Running the books for a large, faceless firm. Maintaining a product line for some inane children’s toy. Coordinating the distribution of material for a metals and plastics conglomerate.

Keep doing it for a while, and as you know — somewhere along the way, something interesting and reasonable but also a little bit disturbing happens: you find yourself deeply invested in this thing you can’t stand. It’s magic — a justification out of nothing, seemingly irrational. “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal,” says Heinlein, and here we see it strong enough to fool one’s own better judgement.

The reason it works is because in every rationale there lies a kernel of truth, and humans are masters at manipulating symbols. That bland job of conducting inspection after routine inspection is lived and re-lived in your own head until you are the cornerstone of the local agricultural economy — and maybe it’s a little bit true, just enough to justify the story.

And the dry, endless accounting of some acquisition corporation, so vast and contorted you can’t make heads or tails of what it’s mission is, now represents your morale — just look at you, keeping countless workers employed through your careful examination of the records. It’s real, but only real enough to make a justification. That’s all it needs to be, and your own mind knows it.

So that stupid, loud, crude little toy sitting among hundreds on the shelf — a product you scorned just a few years ago (“I buy better toys for my children”) you will make a stout defense for now. It is, after all, both entertaining and educational, not to mention low-cost (thanks in large part to your valiant efforts at making the thing affordable!)

And that job moving raw materials around, supervising the administration behind the slurries that eventually meet client demand to manufacture who knows what — well, where would the world be without manufacturing? The modern economy relies on mass manufacturing, and you hold in your hands a key component of that process. Plastics and metals are at the core of the most important applications on earth. You are important, and so is your job!

It’s all true, just as much as it is a lie. It’s a justification we provide ourselves to avoid or replace the work of change, which after all is a very hard thing.

*   *   *

When you wake up one day, five or ten or thirty years into your career, to realize the thing you love is the thing you hate — how do you admit that to yourself?

This internal lie operates on the same mechanism that keeps failed marriages afloat — which I’m not at all implying is necessarily bad — and it reflects a key aspect of the human experience.

The truth of the statement, “What I’m doing is worth it,” is something we all know — that all these little parts of the world economy are not only necessary to our communal survival, but often improve our state. Doing your part in the overall human effort of civilization, and doing it well, and doing it so that things get better, and better, and better, is laudable — especially compared to what you could be doing, which is nothing, or even damaging the world the people around you and making things worse. There are plenty enough of these people, so it’s well to be proud of not only not being one of them, but actually contributing to something larger than yourself. And if you feel like it’s not meeting your ambition, not meeting your true passion, not the thing at which you most excel — well, then, congratulations, you’ve allowed yourself to tell the truth many people never do — at least loud enough to hear it inside their own heads — that the place you end up might not be the place you want to be.

Thus the justification. Want to make a move? Want to sacrifice what you’ve built on the risk of building something greater? Go for it! You have done the hard part already, in recognizing, truthfully, what you have now, and what its quality is. Whether it should be kept or replaced is a decision that this recognition allows. Now you have a chance to make that decision well, with a chance of getting it right.

Just as that shaky marriage often comes out the better for the two individuals putting their interests aside in pursuit of a shared goal (sometimes), here too your pursuit of mightiness in your career, of accomplishing at the limits of your capacity to accomplish, can be worthwhile (sometimes).

“Sometimes.” I’m not trying to tell you what to do, or what decision is right. How would I know what decision is right? But asking the question of yourself is a powerful start. It’s also most helpful when asked constructively, rather than berating yourself for having gotten this far blindly and ended up someplace you didn’t think you’d ever be, and which you now find yourself defending, for some reason. Well, that’s the reason. The reason is good. The reason is you found your way to being productive, useful, and successful. What comes next is all you.