You're Not Confused. You're Just Afraid to Want More Than One Thing.

I'll be honest with you about something.

I love my corporate career. Thirteen years in, and I genuinely mean that. But I also question it. More than I usually say out loud.

Not because the work isn't good or the people aren't remarkable. But because I also love painting. And podcasting. And teaching yoga on Tuesday evenings. And writing. And now this. And somewhere in between loving all of it, a question keeps showing up quietly: am I in the right place?

I sat down to record a conversation with Maria Grillo, founder of Crunchy Bread Culture Studio and I/O Psychology practitioner, expecting to talk about workplace culture. What I wasn't expecting was to walk away with language for something I'd been carrying for a while.

Maria talked about two kinds of discomfort. There's functional fear, the practical anxiety about money, stability, the unknown. And then there's existential discomfort, the quieter, slower feeling of being in the wrong life. The unsettling hum of functional comfort with no real fulfillment underneath it.

Most of us, she said, are managing the wrong one.

We avoid the functional fear of change because it feels loud and immediate. Meanwhile the existential discomfort of staying exactly where we are keeps running in the background, quieter but more corrosive over time.

When she said that I felt something shift.

Because what I realized is that I'm not experiencing existential discomfort about my corporate career. I genuinely love it. What I've been experiencing is something different: the discomfort of believing I have to choose. That loving many things means I must be confused. That doing more than one thing means I haven't figured it out yet.

Maria didn't say any of that explicitly. But the conversation made me feel safe to explore. Not to decide. Not to quit or pivot or declare anything. Just to stay in the question a little longer without treating it like a problem that needs solving right now.

Some stages of life allow you to build more than one thing at once. That's not indecision. That's a different kind of ambition.

And what I know clearly, more clearly than almost anything else, is that I will always choose to invest my time and energy in things that make me feel fulfilled. That's my filter. Not which one. Not how many. Just: does this fill me or drain me?

That question is enough to keep moving forward.

Are you managing functional fear or existential discomfort right now?

I'd love to hear where you are!

If this post resonated, listen to our conversation here. Maria Grillo does extraordinary work helping individuals and teams answer exactly these questions. Find her at crunchybreadculturestudio.com