The pandemic changed the world, and we came out of it more saturated than ever. Everyone seems to be demanding more from how we work, lead, and live. So why are we still being handed the same old playbook?
You want a good life for yourself, your family, and the people you lead. Yet today, we're all experiencing saturation, with schedules, screens, roles, and other demands that make it nearly impossible to thrive. You keep trying to get it under control: clearer goals, harder boundaries, better systems. So why can't you find that hour with nothing you have to do? And why, at the end of most days, does it feel like nobody got the real version of you-including you?
For a moment, it looked like things might change. The pandemic showed that the workplace could bend with us. Instead, we got called back to the office and now AI has us wondering whether we even matter.
What if our exhaustion was never a personal failing, but the price of living by rules built for a world that never had us in mind? Women navigating the demands of work and family feel these fractures most acutely, but their experience doesn't just speak for women. It speaks for all of us. A window into what was never just a woman thing.
Michele Benton, Ph.D.-a global business executive, daughter, spouse, and mother-unravels this outdated system, revealing a more human outlook. And her answer is Squishy: a porous, entangled, creative, alive way of leading, loving, and living, not despite the saturation, but because of it.
The perfect day when everything finally settles isn't coming. But the good life is already here, in the middle of it all. And it's squishy.