Fiat Work — a clinical lens from my forthcoming book, applied to current news on this hub.
What this lens is
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Most people think work is where we go to prove our value to the world. As a couples therapist, I look at modern career culture and I see something entirely different. I see a trauma response. I call it Fiat Work.
Fiat work is not your job description. It is the emotional system underneath your job. It is the way systemic instability enters your body long before it shows up in your bank account. In a fiat system, the ground is always moving, so you learn to perform your worth instead of inhabiting it. Fiat work pays you in anxiety, rewards you with exhaustion, and measures your value by the amount of pain you are willing to absorb.
I see the devastating clinical results of this dynamic in my office every week. I sit with brilliant founders, attorneys, and executives who have cracked the code of professional adulthood, yet their nervous systems are in free fall. They are surviving by letting a protector part run their lives. I call this part The Bull.
The Bull believes that stopping is dangerous and that rest is a moral failure. The Bull treats work as a battle that must be won to outrun the terrifying feeling of not being enough. This strategy works flawlessly for building a company or climbing a corporate ladder. But it is an absolute disaster for your living room. The exact traits that make these high achievers wealthy are the ones destroying their marriages, breaking down their bodies, and completely eliminating their capacity for real presence. You cannot build a secure, loving relationship on top of a nervous system that is running for its life.
If you recognize your own exhaustion in this pattern, the internet will tell you to try a new morning routine, set better boundaries, or find another productivity hack. That is nonsense. You cannot optimize your way out of a broken feedback loop.
The way out of fiat work is vocation. Vocation is not a romantic escape from making money. It is work that emerges from your organic self rather than from panic or performance. It is the shift from using work to earn your worth to using work to give your value. When you find that steady ground, the shame softens, the true self breathes, and you finally stop auditioning for your own survival.
Explore the essays below to see exactly how Fiat Work is shaping the news, our culture, and your own nervous system.
Get the chapters as they are written
Fiat Work is one of the lenses in my forthcoming book, Proof of Work: From Fiat Life to Thriving in the AI Age, with Greenleaf in 2027. The waitlist is my Substack, where the chapters are being written in public.
Essays applying this lens to current events
Essays applying this lens to current news will appear here as they publish.
Read more about the book · About Figs
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”