"I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours."
— Matthew 25:25

The Objectives Trap

There is a particular kind of suffering reserved for the successful. It does not announce itself with poverty or catastrophe. It arrives quietly, usually somewhere between the third promotion and the corner office, settling in like a low-grade fever that never quite breaks. Everything on the scoreboard says you're winning. And yet.

The language gives it away. When someone who has achieved nearly everything they set out to achieve begins talking about objectives — about needing to define what winning looks like — something has already shifted beneath them. They are not asking a strategic question. They are asking an existential one. But the only vocabulary they have is strategic, so that's the language they reach for. Set the objective. Execute the plan. Measure the outcome. It's the grammar of quarterly earnings applied to the question of what makes a life worth living.

And it doesn't work. It can't work. Because meaning is not an objective. It is not something you define in advance and then pursue with discipline. You cannot write an OKR for fulfillment. You cannot set a KPI for peace.

But we try. God help us, we try.

The Illusion of the Binary

When someone feels trapped in this way — successful but unsatisfied, accomplished but restless — the mind almost always reduces the problem to a binary. Stay or go. Keep climbing or walk away. The current path or the radical departure. There is something comforting about binaries. They feel decisive. They impose the illusion of clarity on what is actually a fog.

But the binary is almost always a lie. Between any two extremes there are a hundred and eighty degrees of possibility — subtle adjustments, reorientations, shifts in posture that don't require burning everything down or staying frozen in place. The binary persists not because it's accurate but because it's manageable. Two options can be analyzed. A spectrum cannot be optimized. And for someone trained to optimize, a problem that resists optimization feels like a personal failure.

The irony is that the very skills that produced the success are now the obstacle. The strategic mind that built the career keeps trying to engineer the answer to a question that engineering cannot touch. It's like trying to use a spreadsheet to calculate love. The tool is excellent. It's just the wrong tool.

The Common Condition

What strikes me is how universal this restlessness is, even as it takes wildly different forms. Some respond to mortality by trying to outrun it — optimizing health, extending the timeline, treating the body like a machine that can be maintained indefinitely if you just follow the right protocol. Others numb it. The drink, the distraction, the slow surrender to the idea that since you can't solve the problem you might as well stop feeling it. Others, the strategists, try to think their way out — define the objective, build the framework, engineer the answer.

Three different responses. The same underlying ache. Each one is, in its own way, an attempt to seize control over something that resists human control. The optimizer treats mortality as a problem of maintenance. The one who numbs treats it as a problem of sensation. The strategist treats it as a problem of information — if I can just identify the right objective, I'll know what to do.

But mortality is not a problem. It is a condition. And conditions cannot be solved. They can only be lived within.

The Testimony of Randomness

I have written elsewhere about the theology of action over calculation — the freedom that comes from recognizing we are not the architects of our own stories but characters within a story we did not write. That idea lands differently when you sit with the sheer statistical improbability of any human life arriving where it does.

Consider the path that brought you to this moment. Every decision, every accident, every seemingly random encounter. The job you almost didn't take. The person you happened to meet. The catastrophe that rerouted everything. If you charted the trajectory honestly, it would look less like a strategy and more like a pinball machine — bouncing off obstacles, redirected by forces you never saw coming, arriving at destinations you never planned.

And yet here you are. Not because you engineered it. Not because you set the right objectives and executed flawlessly. You are here because something — Someone — caught you at every turn, redirected every ricochet, ensured that the seemingly random path led somewhere that, looking back, you can only describe as grace.

This is the testimony that calculation cannot produce and strategy cannot explain. The failures that should have ended everything didn't. The messes that should have disqualified you became the soil for something unexpected. The moments that felt like waste turned out to be the exact preparation for what came next. Not because you planned it that way. You didn't. You couldn't have.

The Wrong Question

The person who asks "what is winning?" is asking the wrong question. Not because the question is stupid — it isn't — but because it assumes that meaning is something you arrive at through sufficient analysis. Define the target, align your resources, execute. It's a perfectly reasonable approach to building a product or capturing a market. It is a catastrophically inadequate approach to finding purpose.

The question assumes you are the author. That if you can just get enough clarity, enough information, enough insight into yourself and your situation, you can write the next chapter deliberately. But the evidence of your own life contradicts this. You did not write the chapters that brought you here. You responded to them — sometimes well, sometimes poorly — but you did not author them.

This is not fatalism. It is not the resignation of someone who has given up agency. It is the recognition that agency operates within a story already being told, that our decisions matter precisely because they are responses to a reality we did not create rather than constructions of a reality we control.

The shift is from "what do I need to go get?" to "what is already happening that I can participate in?" From architect to respondent. From author to character. And the character, paradoxically, is freer than the author — because the character does not bear the weight of making the story work. That burden belongs to Someone else.

Grace as the Safety Net You Didn't Know Was There

There is a reason the parable of the talents is so unsettling. The one-talent servant's logic was impeccable from a risk-management perspective. He assessed the master's character, evaluated the potential for loss, and concluded that the safest course was preservation. His analysis was flawless. His conclusion was condemned.

What the servant missed — what calculation always misses — is that the master's economy does not operate on the same principles as the servant's fear. The master wanted investment, risk, action. He wanted the mess that comes from actually deploying resources in an uncertain world. He was willing to absorb the loss. The servant's mistake was not that he analyzed the situation poorly. It was that he analyzed it at all, when what was required was trust.

Grace functions as the thing that makes movement possible when calculation says to stay frozen. It is not a guarantee that every step will be the right one. It is the assurance that the wrong steps are not final — that there is a net beneath the wire, invisible until you fall, that catches and redirects and redeems what should have been a catastrophe.

I know this because I have fallen into it. My path did not arrive where it is through careful strategy. It arrived through collapse, through the failure of every plan I thought I had, through the humbling experience of watching my carefully constructed life come apart and then, inexplicably, finding myself standing in something better than what I had built. I did not engineer that outcome. I was caught by it.

This is not a prosperity gospel. The net does not guarantee comfort or wealth or the absence of suffering. It guarantees landing. It guarantees that the story does not end with the fall. And for someone frozen between two options, convinced they need to figure out what winning looks like before they can move, that guarantee changes everything. You do not need to know where you are going. You need to know that the going itself is held.

The Freedom to Not Know

Perhaps the deepest freedom available to us is the freedom to not know. Not the ignorance of those who haven't thought about it, but the settled peace of those who have thought deeply and arrived at the honest conclusion that the question exceeds their capacity to answer.

I cannot tell you what winning looks like. I can tell you that the pursuit of that definition is itself a trap — a hamster wheel disguised as progress. Every time you think you've defined it, the definition shifts. The goal post moves. The satisfaction you expected from arrival evaporates before you get there, because meaning is not a destination. It is a quality of the journey, and it is received, not achieved.

What I can tell you is that the happiest season of my life is this one — not because my circumstances are objectively the best they've ever been (they aren't, by most measures), but because I stopped trying to solve for meaning and started receiving it. The work I do matters to real people. The person I come home to has been there for three decades. The mess of my life, which by any strategic assessment should have produced ruin, has instead produced something I can only call grace.

I didn't define that objective. I didn't set that target. I just stopped trying to author my own story and discovered, with some wonder, that the story being written was better than anything I would have planned.

The manger is dirty. The oxen need tending. But much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.

And the Author knows what He's doing.