The Drift: The Dangerous Luxury of a Long Life
The danger isn't that we run out of time. It's that we have enough time to get lost.
Since I started The Anchor Report, I have reconnected with many former peers from my corporate life. They often look at me with a mix of curiosity and confusion. “Jacques, how did you end up here?”
They knew me as a TV executive. Now they see me writing about neuroscience, trading markets, and discussing “Identity Architecture.” To them, it looks like a massive, sudden leap. They assume I woke up one day, had a mid-life crisis, and flipped the table.
But my answer is always the same: It wasn’t a leap. It was a drift. Slow as it can be.
I didn’t wake up and decide to change everything. I just slowly stopped correcting my course to fit a map that wasn’t mine, and eventually, I arrived at who I actually was.
But for most of my life, the drift went the other way. For decades, I worked in jobs where I performed well but felt like a tourist. I was a contrarian in a room of conformists and a builder in a room of managers. I wasn’t crashing—I was succeeding—but I was drifting millimeters every day away from my native architecture.
And this is the danger. We assume that if we are on the wrong path, we will feel pain. That it will be obvious. But usually, we don’t feel pain. We just feel... safe.
The Myth of the “Short Life”
We are told constantly that “Life is too short.” It is the oldest cliché in the book. Carpe Diem. Seize the day because you might not be here tomorrow.
I have wondered for a while if the opposite is true. The real danger is not that life is too short. The danger is that life is deeply, deceptively long.
If life were truly short—if we only had 5 years to live—we would never tolerate a job we hated. We would never stay in a relationship that made us small. The urgency would be so loud that we would correct the course immediately. If you knew the plane was landing in 10 minutes, you wouldn’t waste time watching a movie you hate.
But because life is long, we have the luxury of The Drift. We can tolerate a 1-degree deviation today because it feels insignificant.
“I’ll skip the gym just this week.” (1 degree).
“I’ll stay in this safe job just one more year to get the bonus.” (1 degree).
“I’ll have the difficult conversation next month.” (1 degree).
In navigation, a 1-degree error on a short flight is meaningless. You still land on the runway. But on a long flight—a 40-year flight—a 1-degree error puts you on a completely different continent than where you intended to land.
We rely on time to fix things, but time does not fix things. Time magnifies the trajectory you are already on.
The Biology of Normalization
Why don’t we feel it happening? Why does the high-performance executive wake up at 50 and realize he is a stranger in his own life?
The culprit is a biological mechanism called Sensory Adaptation (or Normalization).
Your brain is an efficiency machine. Its primary goal is to save energy and to do this, it stops registering constant stimuli.
If you walk into a room with a buzzing fan, you hear it loudly for 30 seconds. After 5 minutes, your brain “deletes” the sound.
If you walk into a house with a strong smell, you notice it instantly. 20 minutes later, you are “nose blind.”
The brain does the same thing with your soul.
If your environment is misaligned with your identity, your brain fights it for a week. It sends you signals: anxiety, restlessness, irritability. But if you stay there, the brain eventually realizes: “Okay, this is where we live now.” To save the energy cost of constant fighting, it normalizes the misery. It re-calibrates your baseline. The “unacceptable” becomes “normal.”
The chaos of your office, the cynicism of your friends, the lack of depth in your conversations—your brain stops sending you error messages. You aren’t drifting because you are lazy. You are drifting because your navigation system has been hacked by your own efficiency.
It’s Not Just the Job (The Environmental Drift)
We tend to focus on “Career Drift,” but the most deceptive drifting happens in the environments we inhabit daily.
I learned this the hard way. For years, I thought I could separate my “Inner Life” from my “Outer Environment.” I thought I could be a calm, focused, thoughtful person while living in a chaotic, noisy, distracted world.
I was wrong. Biology beats Willpower every time. Over and over again.
You cannot maintain a “High Performance Mind” in a “Low Performance Room.”
The Domestic Drift: Look at your physical space. Is it designed for the person you want to be, or is it a museum of your past habits? If your kitchen is stocked with junk, then you will eat junk. If your living room is centered around a TV, you will watch TV. You drift into the path of least resistance.
The Social Drift: We normalize the energy of the people around us. If you spend your weekends with people who complain, gossip, and worry, you will find yourself complaining, gossiping, and worrying. Not because you are weak, but because you are a social primate wired to mirror your tribe.
For a long time, I drifted socially. I spent time in circles that didn’t challenge me, simply because it was easy and was “safe.” But safety is expensive. The cost was that I had to dim my own lights to match the room.
The “Outsider” Tax
This is what I felt during those corporate years. It wasn’t like I was failing. By all external and conventional metrics, I was winning. But internally, I felt like an actor on a set.
I was an “Outsider” trying to play the “Insider” game. Do you know how much energy it takes to suppress your natural instincts for 10 hours a day? Some can tolerate more than others, but for me it is exhausting.
I see so many people paying this tax.
The creative who stays in administration because it is “sensible.”
The entrepreneur who takes the paycheck because the startup path is “too risky.”
The philosopher who works in sales.
They aren’t crashing. My guess is that most people don’t get to that. But they are on autopilot. And the autopilot is programmed for Survival, not for Destination. They are waiting for a crisis to force them to move. But because life is long, the crisis might never come. You might just drift safely, quietly, and comfortably... all the way to the end.
Checking the Compass
The Drift is inevitable. You cannot stop the wind and the current. But you can check the compass.
Since your brain will normalize your environment (you are nose-blind to your own life), you cannot trust your internal feelings to tell you if you are off course. You feel “fine.”
You need an External Reference Point.
1. The Calendar Audit Look at your last 30 days. Not what you said you valued, but where your body actually was. Did you spend time building? Or did you spend time reacting? The calendar never lies.
2. The Friction Test When you are doing your work, or sitting in your home, do you feel Flow or do you feel Drag? Drag is the friction of wearing a costume. It is the exhaustion that comes not from working hard, but from pretending.
3. The 10-Year Projection If you change nothing—if you simply hold this exact heading for another 10 years—where do you land? If the answer scares you, you are drifting.
The Turn
The good news is that because life is long, you have time to correct it. But you do not correct a 20-year drift in a day. You do not fix it with a “New Year’s Resolution.”
You fix it by altering the environment. You change the inputs. You change the room. You change the signal. You wake up, look at the map, and make the 1-degree correction back toward yourself. Not saying it is easy, but you have time, so you do it one day at the time.
Start today, and then you do it again tomorrow. And again.
Brilliant piece on sensory adaptation hijacking our navigation system. The calendar audit is somethign I started doing last year after realizing my "intentions" and my actual time allocation were wildly differnt. What I've found is that even recognizing the drift doesnt fully fix it because we tend to recalibrate what acceptable misalignment looks like.