Every parent wants to walk through the door at the end of the day ready to connect with their kids. But when work stress follows you home, your family may not be getting the best version of you. What happens at the office doesn’t always stay at the office, especially when frayed nerves are involved. So it’s important to understand how work stress can impact your parenting.
The toxicity you can name
Sometimes a toxic workplace is painfully obvious. It looks like a boss who flies into a rage at the littlest thing and uses humiliation as a training tactic. Or it’s the coworker who asks everyone to after-work drinks except you.
That kind of cruelty may be hard to deal with, but it’s easy to name. What about the sneakier types of workplace toxicity?
How to spot subtle sabotage
A couple of years ago, I interviewed a media executive I will call Kelly about her work-life balance. Spoiler alert: She had none. In fact, she was miserable at the office, but she wondered if she was being overly sensitive or even manufacturing drama.
Her colleague had always been friendly. They were at the same level, and both were interested in moving up in the company. Sometimes this coworker would “forget” to include Kelly on email chains and gave her the wrong project deadline on two occasions. She would apologize for the “honest mistake.”
And maybe it was the first time. Maybe even a second. But when the same mistake keeps finding the same target, it stops being accidental.
Another woman who worked in financial services confided that her boss “had it out for her.” Her proof that this wasn’t hyperbole: She was praised in private but questioned in front of the company’s senior executives. Her boss gave her vague instructions, then criticized her for not meeting expectations that were never clearly explained, and she was excluded from meetings tied directly to her projects.
When concern is weaponized
Then there is the nice toxic colleague. This one is especially confusing because he uses concern as a weapon. Within earshot of others, they may say things like “I just worry you may be taking on too much.”
“You seemed stretched, so I didn’t want to bother you with that meeting.”
“I know you’re dealing with a lot at home.”
Those words may sound supportive, but they have the potential to make others see you as overwhelmed, fragile, and difficult. The problem is, nice toxicity is hard to call out because the person can always feign innocence, insisting they’re “just concerned.”
That’s the genius of subtle sabotage. It can leave you asking, “Am I imagining this?” And in some cases, you might be. Work environments can make us paranoid. The icy coworker may be preoccupied with her own mountain of work, and perhaps Amy from accounting really did forget to attach the file to the email.
Pay attention to patterns
It’s only a red flag if it keeps happening. Take note if the same person repeatedly leaves you out, embarrasses you, withholds information, or creates confusion around your work. That kind of repeated behavior can make you doubt yourself or dread what should be normal interactions. So the question isn’t “Was this one moment toxic?” but rather “Is this a pattern?”
Toxic workplaces don’t stay at work
Research backs this up. The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America Survey found that 19% of workers described their workplace as somewhat or very toxic. And those workers were more than twice as likely to say their overall mental health was fair or poor compared with those in healthier workplaces.
Parents I spoke to say that a toxic work environment eroded their confidence and left them on edge. By the time they got home, their nerves were frayed and they found themselves snapping at the kids for small things and withdrawing from their partners.
This is known as stress spillover: Daily job stress affects how you interact with your family. So your child may not know Amy from accounting, but she’s the reason you are more aggressive than usual at home.
This is why toxic work culture isn’t just an HR issue. It’s a family issue too. It affects marriages, parenting, sleep, patience, health, and your emotional well-being. It’s tough for working parents to have their defensive armor up all day and then be magically soft and calm the minute they walk through the front door.
What parents can do
1. Create a real transition between work and home.
Moving from one high-demand situation (“Where is that report?”) to another (“Where is dinner?”) frays the nerves. You need a signal to let your nervous system know the workday is over. Take 20 minutes to listen to a podcast, rock out to ’90s jams (my personal go-to), or walk through the park before heading home. The goal is to create a tiny ritual that lets you reset.
2. Track patterns, not just incidents.
One time can be explained away, but patterns tell the real story. If the same person keeps mistreating you, write it down. Log dates, times, what happened, who was there, what was said, and how it affected your work. This will help if you ever need to have a discussion with HR.
3. Find one reality-check person.
Toxic workplaces are isolating. You start wondering if you’re too sensitive or too dramatic. Parents are especially vulnerable to this because they already carry a lot of guilt about balancing family needs. Find a trusted person who can help you discern between normal friction and actual dysfunction. This could be a mentor, a former colleague, a therapist, or a friend.
4. Set boundaries in the moment.
You don’t have to take humiliation as part of your job. If someone gives harsh criticism to you in front of others, calmly (and publicly) say something like, “I’m happy to discuss feedback, but this would be more productive one-on-one.”
If a “concerned” colleague tries to make you appear overwhelmed or unreliable, respond with, “I appreciate the concern, but I’m fully capable of handling this project. Please include me in meetings and on emails related to my work.”
And if you received a vague assignment over email, respond confirming the priorities, deadline, and expectations.
5. Know when the cost is too high.
There is a difference between a hard environment and a harmful one. Every job has stress, annoying people, and a boss with flaws, but if you’re crying in a bathroom stall, snapping at your kid, and losing sleep, it may be time to reevaluate your situation.
I’m not suggesting you quit tomorrow, but you can start building an exit strategy. Update your résumé, reconnect with former colleagues, and explore other companies.
Remember, leaving a toxic workplace isn’t failure or weakness. You’re choosing not to sacrifice your health (emotional and physical) over a place that doesn’t appreciate you.
When you’re bombarded with AI slop, humble bragging, and a general sense that everyone is achieving bigger and better things in their careers than you are, it’s easy to get the LinkedIn ick. So, many professionals looking to advance their careers—espe…
Entrepreneurs are famously driven by a love of what they do, and a determination to make their efforts in business flourish for themselves, their employees, and clients. Still, at times additional motivation can be derived from knowing how much the mo…
For years, living paycheck to paycheck was viewed primarily as a low-income problem. But new data suggests financial instability is expanding into the middle class as rising costs continue to outpace Americans’ ability to save.
According to the&nbs…
When I was a wee little boy growing up, I wanted to be a fireman. It seemed considerably more achievable than becoming a ThunderCat or Batman, which were my other career choices when I was 8 years old.
At school I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do as a career. Potentially something arty or sporty, but back in the ’90s I was told neither of those were moneymakers, so I had to think about getting a proper job.
Today I would classify myself as a designer and educator helping the next generation of creatives build more opportunity for themselves. That feels very aligned with who I am now. But I’ve also been a barman, factory worker, waiter, tattoo apprentice, window cleaner, failed businessman, unemployable bum, and many other things on the journey to finding this particular version of me.
And that is one of the wonderful things about being a human: Nobody really freaking knows who they’re going to become.
The person you are today is probably very different from the person you were five years ago, and if you’re doing this thing called life properly, there’s a good chance the person you’ll become five years from now will look different again.
And from what my mum tells me, that’s completely normal.
Most of us are making it up as we go, collecting experiences and continuously falling forward into newer versions of ourselves. We’re supposed to evolve.
So in this little article I want to share my perspective on a topic that I think deserves a little more questioning: personal branding.
More specifically, I want to explore why I don’t think humans should think of themselves as brands, and why applying brand logic to a human being can potentially do more harm than good.
Brand logic vs. human logic
Now, I’m not here to suggest that personal branding doesn’t exist. That would cause a riot. Instead, I’d like to challenge some of the advice being peddled around willy-nilly on the dopamine drug train that is social media.
To do that, I think we first need to agree on the difference between brand logic and human logic.
A brand’s job is to reduce complexity.
Brands are trying to be recognized at scale, and for that to happen they need to simplify things. They need to make themselves easier to understand, remember, and choose. They do that better when they’re associated with a couple of very clear ideas.
Humans, on the other hand, operate very differently, my friends.
We change our minds all the time. We become interested in new things. We learn stuff, we grow our minds, and then we see the world differently because of it. And an important thing to add is that humans don’t naturally operate at scale. We evolved in small communities and tribes, not in front of thousands of random people online.
So if brands become stronger through consistency and humans become stronger through change, are we really sure those two things belong together?
That’s why I find phrases like “You are your brand” and “Everyone has a personal brand” a little, well, problematic.
Being known for something and being a brand are not the same thing.
I understand that these phrases are often being used as shortcuts, but even when I account for that nuance, I still think they fundamentally misunderstand what a brand is—and what a human needs.
People should know you exist
I don’t want this to come across as a rant or a black-and-white argument, as some of the advice coming out of the personal brand camp is incredibly useful.
Visibility matters, for sure, because if nobody knows what the heck you do, how on earth are they supposed to hire you? Other people need to know you exist, people.
I absolutely believe humans should become known.
Known for doing good work, having interesting ideas, standing for something, and making a positive impact on the people around them.
But becoming known and becoming a product are not the same thing.
Being known, or what most would simply call a reputation, is something people gift you over time. It forms through your behavior and the way you consistently show up for yourself. You don’t have to manufacture it, force it, or spend every waking minute trying to manage how you’re perceived by others.
A reputation happens naturally as you continue growing into the person you’re becoming.
A dangerous shift
And this is where I think we can run into trouble. Because the moment we start thinking of ourselves as a brand, our focus can shift. Instead of asking, “Who am I becoming?” we start asking, “How will this look to other people?”
The danger is that we start viewing ourselves through the eyes of an audience before we’ve had a chance to fully understand ourselves. We start looking at ourselves from the outside in.
At first, that might not sound like too much of a problem. In fact, it actually sounds pretty bloody sensible. If you’re running a business, surely you should care how people feel when they see you.
But I don’t believe growth and perception always want the same thing.
The thing about growth is that it can look a bit messy from the outside. You change your mind, let go of old ideas, and, more often than we’d like to admit, realize you got something wrong. That’s all part of the process.
And brand logic doesn’t particularly reward that kind of thinking.
Brands gain strength through their consistency. They keep showing up in roughly the same way until people know exactly what to expect from them.
And I think that’s where a lot of people can run into a bit of an issue. The more successful a personal brand becomes, the more pressure there can be to keep being the person your audience already knows—to keep talking about the same things, showing up in the same way, and feeding the machine that made people pay attention in the first place.
That’s the personal brand trap.
The human becomes responsible for holding on to a version of themselves they may have already outgrown. And as we see more people choosing freelance careers, building solo businesses, and creating opportunities for themselves online, I think this becomes an increasingly important conversation to navigate.
I know that perception matters, visibility matters, being known matters, and creating opportunity matters. But so does growth as a human being.
Perhaps the challenge isn’t figuring out how to turn people into brands. Instead, it’s figuring out how to help people become known without trapping them.
Someone worth paying attention to
I’d hate to think that personal branding, the very thing so many people turn to in search of more opportunity, could end up becoming the thing that stops them from becoming who they’re supposed to be.
So if I can leave you with a little bit of advice here it would be this: Focus on the things you want to be known for, but don’t lose sight of the person you’re becoming along the way.
Maybe the goal isn’t to manage perception at all. Perhaps it’s simply to become someone worth paying attention to.
Humans are supposed to evolve.
Brands are supposed to repeat.
The problems arise when we start applying the rules of one to the other. So don’t flatten yourself into a product mindset just because the internet tells you that’s the secret to success.
Focus on becoming known for your craft, your kindness, and your character. Keep sharing what matters to you, because opportunity has a funny way of finding people who do.
Just please remember to sprinkle a little patience on yourself along the way.
Gloria Steinem is ensconced in a plush red armchair in her living room. On her right is Louise McDonald Herne, a Mohawk Bear Clan Mother, dressed in white linen with burgundy and purple ribbons. On her left is Michelle Schenandoah from the Oneida Nati…
Just two months after Meta announced plans to track employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train its AI models, the company said it would pause the program after an alleged internal leak.
According to a screenshot obtained by Business Insider, …
Spinoza, never one for flattery, defined ambition as the immoderate desire to make others approve of what we love and hate—in essence, an insatiable craving for other people’s validation. Today, that sounds like a brutal takedown of one of our most celebrated virtues. Ambition has become a word we wear proudly, the engine of LinkedIn bios and graduation speeches, the quality every hiring manager claims to want and every self-help book promises to unlock. And yet Spinoza, writing in the 17th century, was onto something that modern psychology has spent considerable effort confirming: Ambition, at its root, may be less about drive than about anxiety. Less about what we want to achieve, and more about what we fear people will think of us if we don’t.
This is not merely a philosophical provocation. It is, I would argue, a genuinely useful lens for understanding one of the most consequential and underexamined forces in human achievement. Because if Spinoza framed ambition as a pathological yearning for approval, Alfred Adler went further still, locating its engine in the inferiority complex—the idea that our relentless striving for superiority and recognition is fundamentally compensatory, a response to the nagging inner suspicion that we are not quite enough. The more we doubt ourselves, Adler argued, the more urgently we must persuade others—and ourselves—that we are smart, successful, admirable, worthy. Ambition, on this reading, is not a strength of character but a symptom of insecurity.
What if that’s precisely what makes it so productive?
Never satisfied
Consider the evidence. Ambition—defined in personality research as the dispositional tendency to set challenging goals, persist in their pursuit, and derive identity from achievement—is one of the most robust predictors of career success, income, organizational attainment, and creative output across the life span. More so, in fact, than raw intelligence, technical skill, or even conscientiousness in many domains. If we are looking for the single psychological variable that most reliably separates those who leave a mark from those who do not, ambition is a strong candidate. And yet it is, by design, never fully satisfied. That is precisely the point.
Think of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, two athletes who have, by any rational calculus, already won everything worth winning several times over. They are still competing. Still chasing something that, from the outside, looks entirely unnecessary. One could say the same of Lady Gaga reinventing herself for a third decade, of Elon Musk building rockets after already becoming the world’s first trillionaire, of Madonna still touring in her sixties, of Warren Buffett still working at 93.
Barbara Kellerman and Todd Pittinsky, in their fascinating study of leaders who lust, documented this pattern systematically: Among the most consequential figures in business, politics, and public life, what drives continued striving is rarely a rational calculation of reward. It is something closer to compulsion—an inability to tolerate the silence that follows sufficient achievement. Ambition, in other words, may be structurally incapable of being satisfied because its function is not the achievement itself but the temporary relief it provides from an underlying anxiety about status and worth.
This is not unique to the famous. It describes a large swath of ordinary ambitious people: the partner who needs one more promotion, the academic who needs one more publication, the entrepreneur who needs one more exit. The achievement is never the point. The point is the temporary quieting of a voice that asks: But are you really good enough?
The case for status anxiety
Given all this, it is tempting to pathologize status anxiety and be done with it. Therapists do. Philosophers do. But that conclusion is too quick, and it ignores the extraordinary amount of human value that status anxiety has generated throughout history. Let me make the case for it.
First, it motivates. Status anxiety is, functionally, one of the most reliable engines of prosocial achievement our species has produced. The desire for recognition—for external validation that one’s work matters, that one’s contribution is seen—is a powerful motivator that goes far beyond self-interest. It is why medieval architects designed cathedrals they would never live to see completed, why composers wrote concertos they would never hear performed, why scientists pursue decades-long research programs with no guarantee of recognition. The anthropologist’s question—why do humans create things of extraordinary complexity and beauty that go far beyond any practical survival need—has, I suspect, a large component of status anxiety in its answer. We make things because we need them to be seen, and seen as exceptional. That is not ignoble. It is, arguably, the foundation of civilization.
Second, caring what others think of you is not a pathology—it is a social adaptation. The desire for other people’s approval and the anxiety about their disapproval is, in evolutionary terms, a feature rather than a bug. Human survival has always depended on group membership, and group membership has always depended on reputation. The capacity to monitor, anticipate, and respond to social evaluation—to feel something when people form a negative impression of you—is what we call empathy in its broader sense, and research consistently shows it is associated with prosocial behavior, ethical conduct, and effective collaboration. It is, in fact, precisely the absence of this sensitivity that characterizes the most dangerous personalities we encounter in organizational and public life: the psychopath, the severe narcissist, the individual who genuinely does not care what others think. Status anxiety keeps most of us in the social contract. Its complete absence is far more alarming than its presence.
Third, perfectionism—the often-maligned cousin of status anxiety—is inseparable from great work. The obsessive attention to detail, the inability to let good enough be good enough, the driven self-criticism that refuses to accept an imperfect output—these are not signs of psychological health in the conventional therapeutic sense. But they are, empirically, associated with high-quality output in creative, intellectual, and professional domains. The superego that never lets you off the hook, that tells you this draft needs another pass and that performance needed more preparation, stems directly from internalized social standards—from an anxiety about how one’s work will be received, how one will be judged, whether one will be found wanting. The artist who is perfectly content with their first draft is rarely producing exceptional work. The anxiety is the mechanism.
The case against
And yet. For all its productive power, status anxiety exacts real costs, and it is worth being honest about them.
It is, first and foremost, a miserable condition. There is an irony at the heart of ambition: The people who achieve the most are often the least able to enjoy what they have achieved. The hedonic treadmill—the psychological tendency to return to a baseline of dissatisfaction regardless of external gains—is particularly cruel for the highly status-anxious, because each new achievement provides only temporary relief before the anxiety reasserts itself. The person who genuinely does not care about status, who has the equanimity to be content with their accomplishments, is in many ways living a more pleasant life than the restlessly ambitious individual who, by Adlerian logic, is running from an inner voice that never goes quiet. Delusion, in this specific sense, has its advantages. Research on subjective well-being consistently shows that moderate self-enhancement—a mildly inflated view of one’s own worth and prospects—is associated with better mental health outcomes than perfectly calibrated self-assessment. The anxiety of accurate self-awareness is its own burden.
Status anxiety can curdle into a particularly unattractive form of narcissism. Here it is worth distinguishing carefully between the two forms the clinical literature identifies. Grandiose narcissism—the loud, entitled, self-aggrandizing variety—is in many ways the resolution of status anxiety: the individual who has solved the problem by simply deciding they are better than everyone else, and who no longer experiences significant anxiety about their standing because they have preemptively awarded themselves the highest possible status. Vulnerable narcissism is something more disturbing: the individual who is intensely preoccupied with status, desperately needs admiration, but lacks the psychological resources to feel secure in it. The vulnerable narcissist is thin-skinned, easily slighted, prone to shame spirals and defensive rage when their self-image is threatened. They are not, in any meaningful sense, enjoying their ambition. They are hostage to it. Research by Mahadevan and colleagues maps this distinction onto status-seeking strategies, showing that vulnerable narcissism is associated with depression, anxiety, and shame—the precise experiences status anxiety was meant to relieve. The cure, in other words, has become the disease.
Perhaps most insidiously, status anxiety can distort reality. The person whose self-worth depends heavily on social approval will, over time, curate their social environment to provide it. They will surround themselves with admirers, avoid critics, disengage from relationships that offer honest feedback, and interpret ambiguous social signals in their own favor. The result is a feedback loop that feels like security but is in fact a progressive detachment from accurate social information. This is not merely a psychological observation—it has direct consequences for decision quality. Leaders who are status-anxious and have successfully insulated themselves from negative feedback are making consequential decisions based on systematically distorted information. The organization tells them what they want to hear. The data that reaches them has been filtered. Their model of reality is increasingly a flattering fiction. This is how capable people end up in spectacular public failures; not because they became incompetent, but because their status anxiety drove them to construct a world in which their competence was never seriously tested.
Where that leaves us
The honest conclusion is that status anxiety is neither virtue nor pathology. It is a motivational architecture with significant upsides and significant costs, and the ratio between them depends less on the anxiety itself than on what the individual does with it. At its best, it is rocket fuel—the force that drives people to produce work they would never have attempted if they were genuinely comfortable. At its worst, it is a closed loop, driving increasingly defensive behavior, diminishing self-awareness, and a growing gap between how the world sees us and how we need to see ourselves.
What distinguishes the two outcomes is, I think, a specific psychological capacity: the ability to use external feedback as information rather than verdict. The status-anxious person who can remain open to criticism—who can hear “that wasn’t good enough” without it triggering existential collapse—can harness the motivational power of their anxiety without being consumed by it. The status-anxious person who cannot is increasingly at the mercy of a force they cannot afford to examine too closely.
Spinoza called ambition a kind of madness. He was not entirely wrong. But some of our greatest achievements have been the product of exactly that madness—and recognizing it for what it is may be the only way to use it well.
An important job in the two or so years leading up to retirement—right up there with figuring out your healthcare coverage and winding down your work activities—is building up a cash cushion. In addition to being there as a source of funding when you …
Not having a clear plan can feel irresponsible.
We’re taught that successful people map everything out before they begin. That they have a five-year strategy, a perfectly timed roadmap, and certainty about what comes next.
But most people don’t …
