Stories

You Don't Need To Wait for Permission at Sixty

By Avis Nugroho · Guest Contributor

If you're deep in your job right now, achieving, performing, ticking every box you were told to tick, and somewhere underneath it you feel hollow, this is for you. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something is wrong with the models we were handed.

We were trained to believe that success looks a certain way, that impact only counts if it's stamped by an institution, that you endure the misalignment now, compromise, sacrifice, and get the permission to actually live later, maybe at sixty or seventy, once you've "earned" it. Hopefully, you'll still be alive then.

I believed that too, for a long time. I was good at believing it, and honestly, a lot of it served me well for a while. I want to tell you what came after that belief stopped fitting, not the highlight reel but the two years before it, because I think it matters for anyone trying to be both aligned and ambitious at once, and refuses to be told those two things can't coexist.

Unlearning that took me two years, and it's still not finished. Telling it publicly is its own small act of defiance because I have a fear of oversharing, if I'm honest. But one of my values is "belonging", and I told myself that I want to be safe to be soft, that I should stop holding myself back from telling my life stories. The meaningful connections I've made always started with someone taking the first step in being vulnerable. So let this be that first step.

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Identifying the mask

For the last two years, I've been unraveling something. I was in a job I originally wanted. The PhD graduate with multiple papers and commercialized research hopped on the highway and entered the interface between R&D, business, and strategy. The first two years were enjoyable at best, bearable at worst, because I was learning new disciplines and interacting with diverse groups of people, globally. The kind of job that would never be given for someone my age and career level. Steep learning curve was not a problem. I did what I do best: learn fast and outperform. I framed everything as opportunities for accelerated growth.

But somewhere along the way, my interests started to split apart. I found myself at a crossroads where I felt like I had to choose between the professional template I was handed and the person my inner child craves. Uncertain what to do, I started an MBA, and I found myself drawn more and more toward regenerative business: food culture and slow food systems. I was mesmerized by local, seasonal and overlooked ingredients or products. Especially the ones guarded by the wisdom of indigenous and traditional communities around the world. Communities whose knowledge isn't just "alternative," but is actually the backbone we've quietly built modern industry on top of. Nothing natural and sustainable was invented out of thin air. We inherited it.

I realized I had become unaligned with what I was doing. I felt disconnected. Every day felt like putting on a mask and repeating a small lie to myself that I was still making the impact I wanted to see, when inside, I didn't believe it.

Here's the part people don't spotlight: I never thought of myself as burnt out, because the model of burnout we're shown is someone who can't get out of bed, who's exhausted after an hour of work. That was never me. I was highly functional and resilient af. I was achieving. All KPIs exceeded max targets. I could do plenty of things. I just didn't feel energized. I didn't feel like myself. I felt disillusioned. That's a different kind of burnout: the kind where you're succeeding on paper and empty everywhere else.

There's a grief in that, one I didn't have a name for at the time. All the years spent quietly overriding my own intuition because somebody else's version of success looked more legitimate. All the small ways I edited myself to be someone other people would recognize and approve of. Grades, titles, the right answer to "what do you do." Somewhere in there, I'd stopped recognizing myself too. I could see where this road would take me: jaded, and sick. Someone wise once told me: "happiness is a second, sadness is a minute, but bitterness is a lifetime."

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Stopped managing others' projections

I think the biggest realization was that I was surrounded by the wrong kind of people. Not bad people, just people caught in "misery loves company." They had real problems, they felt trapped, they didn't believe life could look different for the next thirty or forty years, but they didn't dare to think bigger, or take some agency. Meanwhile I was branching out, becoming the healthiest I've been, embracing vulnerability, and somehow I was judged. Not mocked outright, just quietly doubted. Even the question "what will you do after your MBA?" carried an edge. I didn't have the answer at that time. But I knew that change doesn't come without a first step, even one taken without knowing where it leads.

It was isolating. I knew I needed to surround myself with people who fit where I was trying to go, but I didn't know how to find them. I'd been stuck in the same professional and personal circles for years.

Looking back, I understand now that the doubt I felt from them was never really about me. People don't see you as you actually are. They see you through whatever lens they're carrying: their own fears, their own limits, their own unlived choices. That judgment I felt was more about their relationship to their own stuck life than anything true about mine. The moment I stopped trying to manage how they saw me, I got a lot lighter.

So, this is my current mantra:

Philosophy has long argued that the spiteful critics are actually sad. They can never really know how it feels to live, the joy of love, and of trying. I learned to laugh at the critics and go back to living anyway.

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Followed the openings, not the predetermined plans

My train to Germany got cancelled. Deutsche Bahn, so, expected. I ended up booking a last-minute ride through a carpooling app, one hour before departure. The driver and I clicked immediately. On the way back, my original ride was cancelled too, out of nowhere, so I went back to the same guy. We became friends. He ended up helping me get started with foraging and fermentation workshops. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who were genuinely aligned with what I cared about, and that started rebuilding something I'd lost: my belief that I could dream bigger. From there, other doors opened too: a LinkedIn connection, a colleague's nudge. Piece by piece, I found a community rooted in regenerative business and real depth.

Funnily enough, I didn't have to try. The universe did it for me. The biggest shift, though, is that I no longer compartmentalize myself. I'm safe to be my whole self with these people. They see me. They recognize me. We cheer for each other. And that feels like real progress. More than any title or achievement I chased before. It's no longer a mere transaction.

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Decolonizing my own mind

Somewhere in this, I realized I'd been trying so hard to become a person built on models that were already obsolete to me: the narrow, linear idea of what a scientist or a corporate professional is supposed to look like. My core values hadn't changed. I was just operating inside a system that never matched them.

Growing up Indonesian, I was raised on spirituality, and collectivism. The latter refers to the idea that nobody really wins unless everyone wins. And I started to notice how things labeled "spirituality" get dismissed as woo-woo, when really it's just a different vocabulary for the same understanding science eventually reaches too. When we talk about pausing to strategize, spirituality would call that resting, grounding, reflecting, aligning. Same thing, different language.

The same goes for indigenous knowledge. It has always been legitimate. It didn't need Western frameworks to catch up and grant it credibility. It was we who lacked the tools to understand it. And even now, it only seems to get taken seriously once it's rediscovered and rebranded by someone outside the community it came from. That pattern started to genuinely bother me. Why do we look down on these communities instead of learning from them?

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Found the peace and followed my energy

All of this, the unlearning, the new habits, the new people, was preparation for something bigger, though I didn't know it at the time. Then one morning, after two weeks in an intimate, values-focused community, I woke up and felt the quietest I'd felt internally in a long time. No debate. No pros and cons running on a loop. Just quiet. And in that quiet, I knew: it was time to take the leap, and move toward the bigger picture. We all have some kind of mission in this world, whether we admit it or not. I'd been ignoring that voice for a long time.

I think desires exist for a reason. Not the small, borrowed ones. The ones that are actually mine keep pointing somewhere, showing me where my energy wants to go. I'd spent years treating that pull as a distraction from the "real" plan. That morning, I finally let it be the plan.

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Rebuilding from the constant overflow

These days, I wake up, go to the gym, have my morning reflection, do a bit of analytical, technical, or business work, then go out to either volunteer on the boutique farm, forage, or do the social and networking part. I come back, and I still have energy to strategize at night, experiment with fermentation, be with the people close to me, and still read before sleep. Even in my dreams, I am still granted clarity through ways I find surprising but pleasantly entertained.

The farm work is back-breaking. I'm hitting record calorie counts on my smartwatch. I've been sunburned, stung by nettle, scalded by boiling water, stung by a wasp, and none of it bothers me.

I used to think I had one finite pool of energy. Turns out I have several: physical, mental, spiritual, and social, the kind that comes from actually being rooted. When one energy pool needs recharging, another can still carry me. That's the part nobody told me. Life is temporary, and there's still so much left to experience. On the other hand, when my body told me to rest. I just do. Rest and joy don't have to be things we earn eventually; they're allowed to be easy, and fun, starting now.

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A vision reset

I've been fermenting since I was twelve, almost twenty-five years now. That childhood curiosity turned into almost fifteen years of academic research and about five years of industrial experience. I want to become a fermentation advisor, perhaps for SMEs and artisanal fermenters, not just industry, but that's just one piece.

I want to be an educator, an author, a researcher, and an ecosystem developer. I want to document the full spectrum of indigenous and traditional fermentation, food preservation, and foraging practices from the Global South and other communities whose heritage rarely gets a spotlight. Fermentation gets reduced to sourdough, koji, wine, and kimchi, as if that's the whole story, when the practice is ancient, the principles are advanced, and the variety is enormous. I want to build a platform: workshops, field trips, books, and eventually a retail channel, that doesn't just document this knowledge but creates real economic pathways for the communities who hold it.

I think I will name this business "Larasati Food Sentinel", or something along that line. The name itself carries meaning: laras (harmony) and ati (heart), so altogether, "harmony at heart".

Larasati is also a Javanese puppet character. She's a figure inserted into the Mahabharata tradition, created by Javanese poets rather than appearing in the original Sanskrit epic. She's known as an excellent archer, considered equal to men, even to her own husband, Arjuna. What's striking is that she came from a humble village background, yet she broke through the traditional constraints on women to become a skilled archer on par with Arjuna, who then had her matched against Srikandi, the noble-born archer. Her personality is described as strong-willed yet gentle-hearted, captivating in speech, and able to calm anger and conflict. In short, humble origins, quietly formidable skill, someone who earns recognition on her own terms without needing to boast. Paired with "Food Sentinel," it tells a real story: someone unassuming who turns out to hold deep mastery, standing guard over something precious.

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Ambitious and aligned, not one or the other: stop waiting for permission

Here's the part I can't unsee anymore: people around me, young and old, are getting sick. Many of them worked hard their whole lives and were still waiting for the right moment to enjoy it. The payoff kept getting pushed further out, until there was no more "later" left to push it into, and their physical body displaced their existence.

Somewhere, many of us absorbed a deal: endure a life misaligned with what you actually care about, keep performing, keep achieving, and one day, at sixty, maybe, you'll finally have earned the right to enjoy it. I stopped waiting for that day. I don't think you have to wait either.

Funny thing is, even the people who make it to sixty rarely call it what it is. I've seen it: someone finally steps back, starts something soft and slow and clearly joyful, and still insists it isn't retirement, just "reinvention." As if enjoying life still needs a productive alibi to be socially acceptable. Even at the finish line, some of us can't stop performing for the deal.

That deal isn't a law of nature. It's just one story about how a career has to go, and there are other ways to write it. You don't need to sacrifice ambition to be aligned, or trade impact for happiness. That trade-off is a myth, not a fact. You are allowed to build a life where your work, your values, and your actual self are the same thing. Not as a fantasy for later. Now, while you're still capable of doing something with it.

You do not need a cancelled train, a chance conversation, or years of quiet unraveling to give yourself permission. You can start with one honest sentence about what isn't working. That's it. That's the first step I took, and it's the only one that ever mattered.

If you're still wearing the mask, I see you. And when you're ready to take it off, you'll find there are more of us out here than you think.

If you are in doubt: To live is to do. To be great is to try. It is better to have lived and failed than never to have lived at all.

I hope you do too.

If this resonates, connect with Avis in the Aligned Ambitious Community or on LinkedIn.