In The Rooms Episode 3. Job and Career
Three complaints show up in almost every corporate counselling session William Ferrell runs. Never enough time, guilt when not working, and quiet unhappiness. He traces all three to one source, a culture that treats every deadline like an emergency and every promotion like the finish line.
William Ferrell, M.Couns.onMar 19, 2026William Ferrell has heard the same three sentences so many times he could finish them before his clients do. In his counselling practice, people come in stressed about their careers, their workload, their sense of purpose, and somewhere in the first twenty minutes they land on one of them. I never have enough time. I feel guilty when I'm not working. I'm just not happy. Three lines, different people, different companies, different industries. Same sentences.
At some point, that corporate ladder you're climbing stops being ambition and becomes a trap, because you're always looking for the next thing.
William Ferrell, M.Couns.
Ferrell, a counsellor with a master's in counselling, has been sitting with that pattern long enough to see what connects the three complaints. He argues they connect to the same root: the way corporate culture trains people to think about urgency, something most people absorbed so gradually they can't even see it anymore.
Everything Is a Fire Drill
The first thing clients tell Ferrell is that there's never enough. Never enough time, never enough people, never enough resources. The to-do list is always longer than the day. Behind that exhaustion is a belief that most people didn't consciously choose. It crept in quietly, normalized by the environment around them.
Corporate culture, Ferrell explains, trains people to treat everything like an emergency. "There's always a fire drill. There's always a meeting. There's always a deadline." But he pushes back hard on that framing, at least for most knowledge workers. "We're not doing rocket science. We're not doing surgery. No one's going to die if this meeting is pushed back a day." A lot of that urgency isn't coming from the actual stakes of the work. It's coming from fear: the fear of looking bad, dropping the ball, missing the bonus, having a manager notice.
The anxiety isn't about the task. It's about the performance of the task, and the imagined consequences of being seen to fail. When you're running on that kind of fear, every slide deck feels load-bearing. Every delayed reply feels like a small disaster. The work itself doesn't become less important; it becomes impossible to keep in proportion.
Your Job Is Not You
The second pattern Ferrell hears is guilt. Not the passing kind, but the kind that shows up on weekends, public holidays, on the first morning of a vacation when someone doesn't know what to do with their hands if there's no phone to reach for. They come in asking, in so many words: what do I do when I'm not working?
"When your identity is your job," Ferrell says, "it's really hard to enjoy all of the other parts of life." The KPIs, the quarterly numbers, the next project: these aren't just tasks. They've become the scoreboard someone uses to measure whether they matter.
The problem with that arrangement is structural, and Ferrell is direct about it. "At the end of the day, we're just a line item on an income statement." Tying your identity to an institution that may view you primarily as a cost to be managed isn't just psychologically risky. It's, as he puts it, not a sustainable practice. The company will restructure. The role will shift. The manager who valued you will move on. And if the job was who you were, what remains when the job changes?
The Next Thing
The third thing Ferrell's clients say is the bluntest: I'm not happy. And when he traces where that unhappiness comes from, he keeps arriving at the same place: the relentless forward pull of always wanting more.
Most people were taught to want the next thing. The next promotion, the next raise, the better title, the corner office. That's not ambition being corrupted. That's ambition working exactly as designed. The design though doesn't include a finish line. "If we're always striving for the next thing, we can never be happy with what we have." Once you get the promotion, the satisfaction window closes almost immediately. You're already computing the next step. Whatever you've achieved, you can't really sit inside it.
The question Ferrell tries to help clients ask isn't how do I get what I want, but can I actually be present with what I already have? The corner office and the parking space don't disappoint because they're not worth having. They disappoint because most people have never practiced the skill of receiving what they wanted. They've only ever practiced wanting the next thing.
The Thirty-Second Reset
You don't need to quit your job or dismantle your career to start pushing back on this. Ferrell's suggestion is simpler, and harder: the next time something at work feels like a genuine emergency, stop and ask yourself honestly whether anyone's life depends on it. Not figuratively. Literally. If the answer is no, and it almost certainly is, give yourself thirty seconds to let the urgency be what it actually is: manufactured.
That gap between the real stakes and the invented ones is where most of the suffering lives. Naming it won't fix the culture. But it means you stop running drills for fires that aren't there.
Watch the full conversation with William Ferrell in the video above.
William Ferrell is a counsellor and psychotherapist based in Central, Hong Kong. He works with expats, professionals, individuals, and couples. 15+ years of clinical experience. Accepting new clients.
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