Am I running someone else's playbook?
Meet the people who stopped — and defined work, money, and meaning on their own terms.
Curated stories, ideas, and experiments to help you design a life that actually fits.
Three things everyone defines differently
(and they should.)
Work
What does it look like when your work actually reflects you?
Not the title. Not the salary. The daily experience of spending your energy on something that fits your strengths — and what people traded to get there.
Money
When is enough actually enough?
Everyone has a different number — and a different reason for it. We explore what changes when people stop optimizing for more and start asking what their money is actually for.
Meaning
How do you know when your life makes sense to you?
Not to your parents. Not on paper. The quiet feeling that your choices are adding up to something coherent — and how people found their way there.
Why this exists
I'm Amara — daughter of two Nigerian immigrants, Virgo birthday twin of Beyoncé, and a recovering corporate overachiever.
I grew up hearing “read your book, do well in school, get a good job.” The unspoken message was clear: your job is the prize. So I climbed. 14 years in tech marketing, the titles, the trajectory, all of it.
The pandemic led me to asking: what is this all for?
During my last two years of corporate work, I screenshotted other people's farewell posts — the designer going back to school for architecture, the engineer retiring to move home to Mexico. I'd think, “I wish that was me.” But I didn't know when or how to stop climbing or what I'd pursue next.
When I was laid off, I opened the email and felt relief.
I won't pretend that what followed was clean. The paralysis of too much choice is its own kind of hard.
Here's what I'm learning: what I thought was my lonely, winding path turns out to be more common than I thought.
A lot of us are quietly asking the same questions:
- Does my work reflect my values?
- When is enough actually enough?
- Does my life make sense to me?
On Alignment is where I'm asking them out loud. I'm reading, writing, and talking to people who've done the work of defining what alignment looks like for them — and sharing what I learn along the way.