On surfing
There are two traps inside any large system.
The first is to stand wholly outside it — self-sufficient, the small things you have made keeping their own quiet momentum, no one's permission required. It is appealing for about a week and then begins, gently, to feel like managed decline. The water pools when it has nowhere to go.
The second is to stand wholly inside it — to let the role become the self. The danger here is more honest. A few months in you wake up one morning and find you have been a zombie. The system rewards the zombie state; that is part of what large systems are for.
The interesting position is neither of these. It is the unstable peak between them — grounded in something the system does not own, and from that ground stepping back into the system as if into a game. You can play because you do not need it. You can leave without losing anything. People notice this kind of person; they appear effortless. Effortlessness is what someone looks like when the stakes are not theirs.
It is, like surfing, an active balance. The wave does not stop. The peak is not a place you settle.
The point is not which destination is good and which is bad — you don't get to live on the peak forever; the wave keeps coming, and any of us, on a long enough timescale, ends up in one of the valleys. The point is that the peak only exists because the valleys are on the same curve. Without ground outside the room, engagement slides into capture. Without engagement, ground slides into withdrawal.
The work, then, is to keep both alive at once. Build the thing outside the room that means the room is not your only room. Then walk back in lightly.