During my PhD, I told a few people I wanted to open a restaurant someday.

Their response: “You don’t need a PhD for that.”

I laughed it off. But that comment stayed with me for years.

What they meant without realizing it was:
Pick a lane. You’ve been sorted. Stay sorted.

School is very good at that. It trains you to derive your worth from a single credential, a single identity, a single track. And when you finally finish, you carry that conditioning straight into the next institution you work at. A different uniform, same logic.

I never personally fell apart. I was productive. Highly functional, even.

But I was also moody, overcritical of everything I did, and occasionally I’d just crack. Sometimes visibly. Sometimes quietly.

Running close to empty for a very long time while the output kept coming.

I don’t think I knew how depleted I was until I stopped and gave myself permission to be bored and “slow”. Healing, recovering, and reshaping.

The deschooling principle

Recently I came across a concept that named something I’d been living without a word for: deschooling.

Ivan Illich wrote about it in the 70s. The idea that formal education doesn’t just teach subjects, it conditions you to need external validation to feel worthy. Grades become performance reviews. Credentials become titles. The institution changes, but the dependency doesn’t.

Deschooling is the slow process of unlearning that. Recovering the ability to do something simply because it matters to you.

What followed for me was less a discovery and more a gradual return, and sometimes an arrival at something entirely new.

Old passions reignited: fermentation, food culture, ingredient discovery. New ones appeared: foraging, system thinking, the gym, building things with my hands.

None of it was aimed to be strategic. None of it needed to be.

Sunday Dinner Club

I don’t own a restaurant yet. But right now I’m hosting a Sunday Dinners Club with a foraging or fermentation lesson beforehand.

Inspired by Donella Meadows who argued that the highest leverage point in any system is a paradigm shift : changing the shared beliefs from which the system arises. Not tweaking the rules. Not adjusting the incentives. Changing how we see.

I am holding the space for those finding their way through that shift through conversations about identity, food system, or anything in between.

I’ve come to believe that the most interesting lives are lived by people who refuse to be just one thing. The PhD didn’t disqualify me from the restaurant dream. Corporate doesn’t limit me to scalable cutting-edge tech. It was always part of the same person.

We should be allowed to hold different identities. Messy, contradictory, evolving ones.

That permission, which I’m still learning, is something we have to give ourselves.

Let me know if you would like to join me on one of these Sundays in the Netherlands?

Written by guest contributor Avis Nugroho. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Want to become a guest contributor too? Send your suggestion to the Aligned Ambitious team here.