Needed, Not Free

Nobody stages an intervention for the person who answers every Slack message in two minutes.

Nobody worries about the engineer who stays late because “nobody else can do this part.”

Nobody questions the person who builds a system only they understand.

We call that person dedicated.

We promote them.

We give them awards.

We tell stories about them at all-hands like they are heroes.

And they are building a prison and calling it purpose.

Being needed is the most socially acceptable addiction on earth.

Not drugs.

Not alcohol.

Not gambling.

Being needed.

It answers the one question most people cannot sit with.

Do I matter?

And once you find a way to answer that question, once you become the person the team cannot function without, the engineer who holds the whole system in their head, the parent who does everything because “it’s just easier if I do it,” you will never voluntarily give that up.

Not because you are selfish.

Because you are terrified of what happens when the answer to “do I matter?” has to come from somewhere inside you instead of from other people’s dependence on you.

I know this because I have felt it.

The warmth of being the one who knows.

The quiet pride of being irreplaceable.

The way your chest opens when someone says “we need you on this.”

It feels like love.

It feels like proof.

It feels like safety.

It is none of those things.

Every person who has ever been hired was hired to do one thing.

Solve a problem.

Some problems are harder than others.

Some are more ambiguous.

Some are more ambitious.

But the job is always a problem that needs solving.

And we are not paid for effort.

We are paid for the value of the problem we solved.

Two people can work equally hard and earn wildly different amounts, and it has nothing to do with how much they sweat.

It has to do with the level of problem they solved and how many people needed it solved.

solving problems for yourself
solving problems for your team
solving problems for your company
solving problems for your industry
solving problems for society

Each step multiplies the reach.

Each step multiplies the value.

Most people understand this intuitively.

Work on bigger problems.

Create more value.

Find more purpose.

Simple.

So why don’t people climb?

Because climbing requires you to stop being needed at the level you are on.

And that is the part nobody can do.

Think about the sandwich shop.

You make sandwiches.

You go from four minutes per sandwich down to three.

That creates some value.

But the person who turned that sandwich problem into a billion-dollar business did not make sandwiches faster.

They asked a different question entirely.

How can it be cheaper and faster to make a sandwich without a person standing there?

Assembly lines.

Pre-packed ingredients.

Robots.

They took themselves out of the equation.

And that is the thing most people will never do.

Not because they cannot.

Because taking yourself out of the equation means you are no longer the one making the sandwich.

You are no longer needed on the line.

You are no longer the person everyone depends on at lunch rush.

And for most people, that feeling, that loss, is worse than staying exactly where they are.

The harder a problem is to define, the more someone will pay you to figure it out.

Doctors do not get paid to write prescriptions.

They get paid to diagnose what is going wrong and decide how to fix it.

Software engineers do not get paid to write code.

They get paid to take a problem that someone is doing manually, or slowly, or repeatedly, and turn it into something that runs itself.

The prescription is the receipt.

The code is the receipt.

The diagnosis is the work.

The irony is that the engineer’s entire job is to automate problems away.

To take human effort out of the equation.

To make it so no one has to do the thing ever again.

And yet most engineers refuse to do that to their own role.

The premium is in the undefined.

And most people can do this.

I truly believe that.

Anything of extraordinary difficulty can be accomplished through an immense amount of concentration, a bit of luck, and a whole lot of persistence.

The issue is not ability.

The issue is not intelligence.

The issue is that solving an undefined problem means leaving behind the defined one you have already mastered.

The one that makes you feel competent.

The one that makes you feel needed.

The one that makes you feel like you matter.

And your body will fight you every step of the way.

We have all worked with someone, or known someone, who was incredibly successful.

And that person did not do much except delegate.

And my first reaction, honestly, was the same reaction most people have.

That sounds lazy.

That sounds like they are not doing anything.

But that is the addiction talking.

That is the part of you that needs to be in the code, needs to be the one who fixed it, needs the proof that you were essential.

I have watched people say they want to grow, and then volunteer for the same work they have been doing for three years.

I have watched people say they want to lead, and then refuse to let anyone else touch their code.

I have watched people say they want to move up, and then spend their weekends doing the job they are supposed to be delegating.

They are not choosing the problem.

They are choosing the feeling that comes with being the only one who can solve it.

The most valuable thing you can do is make yourself unnecessary.

Not dispensable.

Unnecessary.

At your current level.

If the system collapses without you, you have not built anything.

You have made yourself a bottleneck and called it indispensable.

Yes, you may be the best person for the job.

But that creates two problems.

One, it prevents others from learning how to do it.

Two, it prevents you from ever moving on to bigger problems.

And here is the paradox that will feel wrong in your body the first time you hear it:

The more replaceable you make yourself at one level, the more valuable you become at the next.

But most people cannot tolerate that.

Because at the next level, you are a beginner again.

You are incompetent again.

You are the person in the room who does not have the answer.

And after years of being the person who always had the answer, that feeling is unbearable.

So your identity fights you.

Not consciously.

Not loudly.

It fights you the way your hand fights letting go of a ledge.

It volunteers you for the old work.

It makes you feel guilty when someone else does it slower than you would have.

It whispers that you are wasting your talent.

It makes the familiar problem feel urgent when it is not.

People build their entire sense of self around being “the person who can do X.”

The best debugger.

The fastest implementer.

The one who always knows.

And the moment they try to move to a higher-level problem, that identity starts pulling them back down like gravity.

Most people unconsciously sabotage their own growth because staying competent at a lower level feels safer than being lost at a higher one.

The ceiling is not skill.

It is identity.

And now the ground is moving.

When electricity arrived, it did not just replace candles.

It eliminated entire industries.

And then it created industries no one had imagined.

Jobs that were impossible before became inevitable after.

The ladder did not shrink.

It grew.

New steps appeared that no one had language for yet.

AI is doing the same thing.

It is collapsing the lower steps of the problem ladder.

The problems that used to require a person, the manual work, the repetitive implementation, the things we built entire careers around, are becoming automated.

Not all of them.

Not overnight.

But enough that if your identity is attached to a step that is disappearing, you will feel it in your chest before you see it on your screen.

And this is where most people panic.

They grip harder.

They cling to the step they know.

They argue that the old way is better, that the machine cannot do what they do, that their level of the problem still matters.

And sometimes they are right.

But often they are just afraid.

Because above them, the ladder is growing.

There are problems emerging right now that were never possible to solve before.

Problems that only exist because AI made the lower levels cheap enough that someone can finally look up.

Problems that need human judgment, human taste, human clarity.

Problems that are bigger, more ambiguous, more valuable than anything the disappearing steps ever offered.

The ladder is not shrinking.

It is stretching.

And the people who let go of the old step are the ones who will reach the new ones.

The ones who break through are not smarter.

They are not more ambitious.

They learned to tolerate being unnecessary.

They can watch someone else do the thing they used to do, worse than they would have done it, and not intervene.

They can sit in a room where nobody needs them and not panic.

They can let go of the ledge.

The people who earn the most often choose which problems to solve, not just how to solve them.

And sometimes the highest-value move is preventing the problem entirely.

A consultant who says “don’t build this product” might deliver more value than the team that spends a year building it.

A leader who kills the wrong project early saves more than the leader who rescues it late.

But you will never get there if you are still downstairs, holding the system together with your bare hands, high on the feeling of being essential.

There is a difference between hard problems and valuable problems.

Pouring concrete is hard.

It is grueling, physical, demanding work.

But the value is capped.

One-click checkout?

It looks simple.

It is a button.

But it created an immense amount of value by making it slightly more convenient to buy something.

Hard and valuable are not the same axis.

Do not confuse effort with impact.

Do not confuse sweat with value.

The world does not pay for how much it cost you.

It pays for how much it was worth to them.

And do not confuse being needed with being valuable.

Being needed means the system depends on you.

Being valuable means the system grew because of you.

One is a trap.

The other is a legacy.

Trust is the gatekeeper.

No one is going to hand you a higher-level problem if they have no reason to believe you can solve it.

Build that trust.

Solve the problem in front of you so well that someone hands you a bigger one.

But when they hand it to you, let go of the old one.

Actually let go.

Not “I’ll still keep an eye on it.”

Not “just loop me in if anything breaks.”

Let go.

Because the thing you are holding onto is not the work.

It is the feeling the work gives you.

And that feeling is a leash.

You can be essential or you can be free. You cannot be both.

If your income has plateaued, if your sense of purpose has plateaued, ask yourself honestly:

Is it because you cannot climb?

Or is it because you will not stop being needed long enough to try?

Most people will read this and agree with it and change nothing.

They will go back to the same desk.

Answer the same Slack messages.

Fix the same bugs.

Hold the same system together.

And feel the same quiet warmth of being the one who knows.

And they will call it dedication.

And it will feel like enough.

And years will pass.

And they will still be on the same step, convinced they were holding everything together, never realizing they were just holding themselves in place.

Let go of the ledge.

Find out if you still exist without it.