You’re doing everything right. So why does it feel off?
On inherited sacrifices and the quiet cost of unexamined success
There’s a particular kind of discomfort that’s hard to explain.
You’re doing well. Objectively well.
The job is good. The salary is solid. You’re competent, respected, progressing. From the outside, it looks like success.
And yet something feels slightly off.
Not wrong enough to justify a dramatic change. Not right enough to ignore.
It’s not burnout.
It’s not misalignment.
It’s not a boundary issue.
It’s something quieter — and more structural than that.
When a choice was never really yours
An inherited sacrifice is a trade-off you continue to make not because you consciously chose it, but because it was normalised, rewarded, or assumed by someone else — and you absorbed it without ever revisiting the choice.
It’s not about suffering.
It’s not about martyrdom.
And it’s not about bad decisions.
It’s about unexamined logic.
You didn’t decide, “This cost is worth it to me, now.”
You decided, “This makes sense,” and never came back to the question.
Inherited sacrifices often come from:
Family expectations
My parent did this. This is sensible. This is stable.
(I became a lawyer because my dad was one. I was good at it. It made sense. It took years to realise my interest was in business, not law.)Organisational norms
This is how serious people behave here.
(We work late. I could leave at six, but somehow that option doesn’t feel available to me.)Outdated career logic
Hustle culture. 996. If you work harder, you’ll get there faster.Well-meaning advice
Stick it out. Pay your dues. It gets better.
None of this is malicious. There’s no villain. No one forced you.
It just made sense at the time.
And then it kept making sense.
And now you’re living inside a definition of “sensible” you never consciously chose.
A very successful friend of mine recently left her job entirely to be a stay-at-home mum. Everyone expected her to be bored, frustrated, desperate to return. She isn’t. She’s genuinely happy.
Not because she rejected ambition — but because she realised she’d outgrown a version of success she inherited earlier in her life.
She wasn’t running away from something.
She was recognising that she’d been operating on someone else’s risk tolerance.
How inherited sacrifices accumulate
Lives are rarely shaped by one big decision.
They’re shaped by dozens of reasonable ones.
You take the promotion because it’s the logical next step.
You expand your scope because you’re good at it.
You stay because leaving feels risky.
You prioritise work because that’s what ambitious people do.
Each decision makes sense in isolation. Each is defensible. Sensible, even.
But they compound.
And one day you realise you’re living a life that made sense at every turn — and still doesn’t quite make sense as a whole.
This isn’t a personal failing.
It’s a path-dependency problem.
Research backs this up. More than half of working professionals across generations say they regret their career choices, yet only a small minority actively change direction. Most stay exactly where they are — not because they’re fulfilled, but because momentum is powerful and alternatives feel illegitimate.
This is how drift works.
Nothing breaks. There’s no crisis.
You’re fine.
And fine is where inherited sacrifices hide best.
Who decides what counts as ambition?
Some desires feel reasonable. Others feel unacceptable.
You’re allowed to want a promotion.
You’re not allowed to want less responsibility.
You’re allowed to work harder.
You’re not allowed to work less and still be taken seriously.
You’re allowed to optimise.
You’re not allowed to stop optimising.
This permission structure isn’t innate. It’s learned.
From parents who valued certain paths.
From managers who rewarded availability over outcomes.
From cultures that equated ambition with hours worked.
From advice that told you to prove yourself, wait your turn, push through.
Over time, you start policing your own thinking.
“I want to step back” becomes “but that’s not realistic.”
“I don’t actually care about this promotion” becomes “but I should.”
“I’m tired” becomes “I just need to push a bit harder.”
You’re not being told what to want anymore.
You’ve internalised the filter so deeply you don’t notice it operating.
Career research even has a term for this: passive decision-making — where people react to available options and social expectations rather than actively defining what they want. It’s common. It’s normal. And it’s rarely named.
The difference between compliance and choice
Here’s the most important part:
Recognising an inherited sacrifice does not mean you have to change anything.
You can see it clearly and still choose to stay.
The difference is this:
it becomes a conscious trade-off, not unconscious compliance.
Same job. Same workload. Same constraints.
Different relationship to them.
I know someone who stayed in a demanding role after realising it was shaped more by expectation than genuine ambition. They didn’t quit. They didn’t scale back.
But they stopped feeling guilty for resenting parts of it.
They stopped treating exhaustion as a personal failure.
They stayed — but on terms they could name.
That’s agency.
Not leaving.
Not fixing.
Just seeing.
And sometimes, that alone changes how something feels.
The relief isn’t in transformation.
It’s in honest naming.
In saying:
“I’m doing this because it gives me X, and I’m accepting the cost of Y.”
Not:
“This is just how it is.”
This isn’t a one-time insight
Inherited assumptions don’t disappear once you spot them.
They reassert themselves.
Under pressure. Under deadlines. Under expectations.
Drift is gravitational, not lazy.
You’ll forget. You’ll slip back into autopilot.
That’s not failure. That’s reality.
Awareness is fragile. It needs revisiting — not because you got it wrong the first time, but because this is ongoing work.
The question isn’t whether you’ll drift.
It’s whether you’ll notice when you do.
An open question
What are you doing right now that you’ve never consciously chosen?
Not what’s wrong.
Not what needs fixing.
Just: what did you inherit — and never revisit?
You don’t need an answer.
Just the question.
And maybe this week, you’ll notice something you didn’t notice before.
That’s where agency begins.
The 'path-dependency problem' framing is spot on. Most people optimize at each decision point without realizing they're building toward someone else's defenition of success. Had a similar realisation few years back when I kept taking on more scope becuase it was 'the sensible move' until burnout forced the question: whose ambition was I actually chasing?
Wow, “inherited sacrifice” is such a good term for this. Great read!