I remember walking by the brunch room while on my way to get some snacks and seeing my coworker sitting there alone. She had that blank look on her face and while I did not know what precisely had happened, I got the sense that I might soon find out.

She struck me in my first interviews as a hard-charging, high-achieving superstar employee - the type I knew well at True&Co and enjoyed working with. For the first few weeks all our correspondence was strictly professional. She did not bring up anything about her life outside work and I did not volunteer anything.

“Ugh. I just had a talk with our manager,” she said out of the blue. “And they asked me what I wanted out of this job for my long term career goals.”

I knew what was coming. I put my snacks on the table, grabbed a Coke Zero out of the fridge, and sat down next to her. “And those are?”

And so we talked. Talked about what got us here. What frustrated us about our careers up until now. Mulled over non-existent answers of what to do next.

People talk (and joke) a lot about quarter life crises. I think they are real. You start out of college in crisis mode. You are holding on by a fingertip’s grip, trying not to fall ass backwards into your parents’ basement. So everything matters. Your job becomes your life for some time as you build yourself up.

But that is not sustainable. You can spend 5-7 years in constant crisis mode but you cannot do it for 50. The brain chemicals just numb you to the constant fight-or-flight crises. The physical and emotional costs start to pile up after age 25 - you are not young as you used to be. The rewards you get from the hard work start to diminish in their mental value to you. You ratchet up the amount of work you do until you finally hit your end and everything burns into ash.

It takes time and perspective to realize these things. But they are powerful enough to cause you to make real changes in your life. It did for me.

My coworker told me that she was going to Bangkok to take some R&R. I knew that would be the turning point and she would not come back the same person. Sure enough a few weeks after she came back she sat me down and told me she was leaving the company.

“So what are you going to do next?” I remember asking her in that conversation.

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” I replied. And I was not referring to my current job.