The Gap You Don’t See Until It Swallows You

Why the middle is disappearing, and what real leaders must do before the ground gives way

The first time I realized the rules were different, I was standing outside a Walgreens in late November. It was cold. The kind of cold that slips down the back of your neck and makes you aware of every bad decision you’ve ever made. I had just spoken to a friend - let’s call her Meena. She’s a nurse. She’s also a mother, a part-time delivery driver, a full-time worrier, and, in my eyes, a miracle worker.

Meena had just finished a twelve-hour shift. She told me, in the calmest voice imaginable, that she hadn’t eaten since the morning, had one bar left on her gas tank, and couldn’t afford to refill it until payday. And yet, she was about to start her second job for the night, dropping off groceries to strangers who likely had no idea their order was arriving in the back seat of a 2007 Toyota Camry driven by someone with two degrees and a full-time healthcare license.

“Do you ever just stop?” I asked her.

She paused. I could hear the wind through her cracked window. “I can’t afford to,” she said. “You stop, you fall.”

It struck me then. Falling doesn’t happen in a single moment. It’s not a movie scene with music swelling. It’s a slow drip. One missed meal. One rent increase. One broken shoelace away from unraveling.

I’ve lived parts of that story. And I’ve seen it, over and over, in the lives of people I’ve led, coached, mentored. Smart people. Driven people. People who did everything “right” - studied hard, worked through college, degrees, jobs, no shortcuts. Still drowning.

A few years ago, I worked with a mid-level product manager at a fintech company. Let’s call him Jordan. Brilliant mind. Quick with data. A quiet confidence that made you want to listen. He was 38, a father of two, and had just bought his first home. Two months later, he was laid off in a restructuring blitz meant to “simplify operations and improve margins.”

There was no warning. No time to prepare. Just a Zoom meeting on a Thursday morning and a severance packet in his inbox by lunch.

He called me a week later. “It’s not the job loss,” he said. “It’s the silence afterward. I thought I mattered. But I was just… gone.”

Jordan had never been unemployed before. He had always assumed that people with degrees and work ethic and LinkedIn profiles didn’t end up in this kind of fear. That was for “other people.”

Until it wasn’t.

He applied for dozens of roles. The market was flooded. His confidence cracked. His kids noticed he was quieter at dinner. His wife took on extra hours at her retail job. Their credit cards filled up overnight.

And all the while, he kept saying, “I thought I did everything right.”

That sentence haunts me.

Because I’ve heard it again and again - sometimes from clients, sometimes from friends, sometimes in my own head during the quietest nights.

The myth is seductive:

Work hard.

Be good.

Stay loyal.

And the system will catch you.

But here’s what I’ve learned, what I’ve seen too many times to ignore:

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed.

And it was never designed for everyone to win.

It’s easy, in boardrooms and strategy offsites, to talk about optimization, headcount reduction, market forces. It’s easy to run models that flatten human stories into rows of data.

I’ve sat in those rooms. I’ve nodded at the logic. I’ve helped write the decks.

And then I’ve gone home and answered texts from people who used to sit across from me at those very same tables - now wondering how to explain to their parents, or their children, why “value creation” meant they were disposable.

This isn’t just about job loss. It’s about what we’ve come to accept as normal.

We’ve normalized hustle so hard it hurts.

We’ve romanticized resilience while gutting the systems that allow people to rest.

We praise people for “grinding” while quietly hoping we never have to trade places.

We’ve allowed leadership to become performance. Well-scripted panels. Hashtag empathy. Empty statements during quarterly layoffs, followed by catered lunch.

And yet, there are always the outliers. The leaders who remember. Who see.

One woman I worked with, let’s call her Priya.

Priya ran operations for a large logistics company. When the pandemic hit, she didn’t just shift to remote work and hand out masks. She called every single hourly employee to ask what they needed. Not how they were doing. What they needed.

Some said PPE. Others said childcare help. One woman said, “Honestly, I just need to know someone at the top gives a damn.”

That’s leadership.

Not the memo. Not the slide deck. Not the town hall.

The quiet check-in.

The policy that accounts for life, not just labor.

The budget line that favors decency over dividends.

Because inequality doesn’t show up as a headline in your metrics. It shows up as missed birthdays because Mom had to pick up an extra shift. As skipped meds because Dad’s insurance lapsed. As a college student working the night shift just to afford Wi-Fi for classes.

It shows up in the dreams people stop speaking out loud.

I’ve lacked advantages growing up. I won’t pretend otherwise. I lacked safety nets, good mentors, a passport that opens doors, and a last name that didn’t get flagged in job screenings.

But, I was also extremely fortunate to acquire most of these by the time I was 35.

But there’s one thing I learned along the way - real leadership is not what you do when everything is thriving. It’s what you choose when people are barely holding on.

The numbers on your balance sheet don’t remember you.

The people you led - always do.

So what does this all mean?

It means if you run a team, you ask the hard questions:

Can someone thrive here on this salary?

Can a parent be present without penalty?

Can we build policies that assume people are whole human beings - not cogs, not assets, not headcount?

It means we stop praising “lean teams” when they are, in truth, exhausted teams.

It means we stop mistaking privilege for performance.

It means we look at Meena and Jordan and a thousand others like them - and we build a world where the floor is higher.

Where falling doesn’t mean failing.

Where “doing everything right” doesn’t still leave you behind.

Because if the people who did everything right are drowning, then the system isn’t succeeding. It’s gaslighting.

And the gap?

It’s not just economic.

It’s moral.

And it’s widening.

We can close it. But only if we tell the truth.

Only if we lead like it matters.

Because it does.

Have a wonderful rest of your Sunday!

Warm regards,

Adi