Your Standards Dropped So Slowly You Didn’t Notice
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You used to have rules. You still think you do. But the rules today aren’t the rules from three years ago, and you never decided to change them.
Three years ago, you wouldn’t have taken this client.
You know the one I mean. The one who pays late, emails at midnight, pushes scope on every project, and treats the relationship like they’re doing you a favor. Three years ago, you would have said no in the first meeting. But that’s not what happened. What happened is you took a client who was almost this bad. Then you took one who was a little worse. Then you adjusted. And now you’re working with someone your past self would have walked away from, and you can’t point to the moment you decided this was okay because you never decided. It just became normal.
Hemingway wrote a line I keep coming back to. One character asks another how he went bankrupt. The answer: “Gradually, then suddenly.” He was talking about money but he was describing everything. How relationships erode, how careers drift, how standards fall. Gradually, then suddenly you look up and can’t recognize what you’re tolerating.
The drift
There’s never a moment where you sit down and decide to lower your standards. That’s what makes this so hard to catch.
What happens instead is a series of small accommodations, each one reasonable on its own. You let one deadline slide because the circumstances were unusual. You tolerate one comment from a colleague that crosses a line because it wasn’t worth the fight. Each compromise is small enough to rationalize and easy enough to forget.
But each one also resets the baseline. The thing you tolerated once becomes the thing you tolerate. The exception becomes the norm. And the next compromise starts from the new baseline, not the original one, so each step down is measured against the last step down instead of against where you started.
This is how you end up somewhere you’d never have chosen if you’d been offered the full distance in one move. Nobody would accept a thirty-step decline. But thirty one-step declines, spread across three years, with a reasonable justification for each one? That’s how it always works.
