Live Bodhi

Essay

I Spent Forty Years Learning How to Disappear Into Work

By Live Bodhi Steward

A man working alone, late, at a dimly lit office desk
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

A million users.

That’s what it felt like in 1995 — not a number but a sensation. A small team, a product that hadn’t existed before, and then suddenly people all over the country were using it. Erols Internet. We grew from a few thousand users to over a million in the first year. I was responsible for designing and ordering the network infrastructure to carry that growth. There was no playbook. We figured it out as we went, and it worked, and the working felt like something close to electric.

I didn’t know then that disappearing into work that matters is one of the best feelings available to a person. That’s what makes it dangerous.

I didn’t know that lesson would take forty years to fully examine. What I also didn’t know — what no one tells you at the beginning — is that you can vanish completely and never notice, because the vanishing feels like the best version of yourself. You’re not disappearing. You’re finally showing up.

I was also a father during this time. I coached my son’s football team. I attended games, wrestling matches, lacrosse matches. I was there for all of it. Not performing presence — actually present. The current hadn’t pulled me all the way in yet.

My mother told me a story around then — my son was four or five years old. A small boy pressing his hand against a glass door. A handprint on the glass. He left a mark.

The image lodged somewhere. I didn’t know what to do with it. Seeds rarely feel like seeds when they land.

It didn’t happen all at once. It never does.

You don’t decide to make work the organizing principle of your life. You just keep making reasonable choices — the next challenge, the next mission, the next stage that’s slightly harder to leave than the one before. Each one builds the walls a little higher without your noticing, because from the inside it doesn’t look like walls. It looks like purpose.

Then September 2001.

A friend of mine — a fraternity brother, a father, a husband — was killed in the attacks.

When someone like that dies suddenly, the people around him feel it in different ways. Some grieve. Some go still. I did something that I’ve thought about many times since: I put myself on a layoff list. I decided my job should end. I set out to bring my expertise in telecommunications and networking to the intelligence community.

I thought I was choosing something. What I was actually doing was redirecting grief into motion, and the motion landed me deeper into the same current I’d been swimming in. The crack formed. And then it froze back over.

I am not sure I noticed, at the time, that those were two separate things.

After that came the intelligence work. A mission bigger than any startup — something that genuinely mattered in ways that went unseen and unappreciated by the world at large. That invisibility was part of the appeal. The work was real. The stakes were real. And it was addictive in the specific way that work is addictive when you’re good at it and it feels like it counts.

Here is the philosophical center of it, and I want to be honest about it because the honest version is more interesting than the cautionary tale.

The pension.

“The golden handcuffs of a pension” — that’s the phrase I use when I describe it now, and it’s accurate, but it doesn’t fully capture the mechanism. It wasn’t that I was trapped. It was that I kept choosing to stay, one year at a time, and each individual choice was defensible. The mission was real. The security was real. The sense of belonging to something consequential was real.

What I didn’t understand — and wouldn’t understand for years — was that I was paying for all of it with the only currency that doesn’t accumulate.

Experiences are the only things you can own without fear of them owning you back.

That’s the conviction I eventually arrived at. It took a long time to see it because I was inside it. The pension wasn’t owning me. The identity was. The work had become who I was, not just what I did. I wasn’t just busy — I was gone. And when work is who you are, you don’t examine the terms of the arrangement. You just keep going.

The mission often served to minimize the discomfort and keep me from looking too hard at other options. That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.

There were costs I saw clearly and costs I didn’t see until much later.

The missed occasions, I tracked. You know when you’re not at the birthday, not at the anniversary, not at the holiday table. You feel it and you file it and you tell yourself you’ll make it up later, which is its own kind of self-deception.

The other costs were quieter. Years inside intelligence work change the way you process other people. You become more suspicious. More jaded. Less willing to open up, less able to trust, more hesitant to start new friendships. The skills that kept you effective in that environment don’t turn off when you leave the office. They become the default setting.

I want to be careful here. I am not complaining about the work or the service. I would not trade the mission or the experiences it produced. But clear-eyed accounting requires naming both sides of the ledger, and the ledger has two sides.

Thailand changed something. Not in one moment — more like a slow thaw.

My last overseas assignment brought me there, and the country did what some places do: it held still long enough for me to feel the weight of everything I was carrying. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t being managed by what came next. Railay Beach, where the limestone cliffs come down to the water. The temples of Siam Reap. The elephant sanctuary in the mountains above Chiang Mai. These weren’t bucket-list experiences — they were just places that required presence, and presence was something I’d been rationing for years without realizing it.

I met the woman who would become my wife during this time. We talked about faith — really talked, the way people talk when they’re not performing for anyone. We found something unexpected: the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Buddha kept arriving at the same place from different directions. Not identical, not interchangeable, but convergent in a way that felt more like signal than coincidence.

Somewhere in all of it — in the conversations, in the stillness of places that would not let me look away — I began to come back into view. Not dramatically. The way someone steps out of a shadow they didn’t know they were standing in.

The handprint seed my mother had planted decades earlier — I still hadn’t named it. But something had begun to move.

My mother passed away during Covid, after Alzheimer’s took what it takes. My father followed a few years later — dementia, depression, an end that arrived before he could see it coming.

There’s a particular quality to watching a parent’s mind go. It’s a mirror, and the reflection isn’t about them. It’s about you.

They were struck by circumstances they probably didn’t see coming. That’s the thought that stayed with me — one of those realizations that settles in and won’t let go. Not as grief, though grief was part of it. As a prompt. A reckoning. A question about what I was doing with the time I still had, and how much of it I was spending on what actually mattered.

I started pulling back. Not from everything, not all at once. But the direction changed.

If you’ve spent years disappearing into work — if the current has felt like purpose and the walls have felt like meaning — I’m not here to tell you that you were wrong. I’m not sure I was wrong either. The path was right. The experiences were real. The work mattered.

But here is what I’d tell the version of myself who was just starting out, standing at the edge of that current, about to step in:

Time is the most precious currency. You can only spend it. You can’t save it up for later. You can’t buy more — and unlike your bank account, you never know how much you have.

Just the weight of that sentence, held long enough to feel what it’s asking.