The regulator hisses, a rhythmic, metallic rasp that reminds me I am exactly 11 feet below the surface of a saltwater ecosystem that doesn’t particularly care if I live or die. My name is Casey H.L., and I spend a significant portion of my life as an aquarium maintenance diver, scrubbing the calcified remains of prehistoric dreams off acrylic walls while sharks-mostly the lazy ones-drift past like gray, indifferent clouds. It is a quiet job, or it should be, until you climb out of the tank and find a printed spreadsheet waiting in the breakroom. My manager, a man whose primary contact with nature is a desk plant he forgets to water, had highlighted a new figure in neon green. We weren’t just maintaining 41 tanks anymore; we were ‘stretching’ to 61.
There was no extra oxygen. There was no additional diver. Just the word ‘stretch,’ hanging in the air like a bad smell.
I recently deleted 3,001 photos from my phone by accident. Three years of documentation, birthdays, sunsets, and the specific iridescent scales of a dying parrotfish I’d tried to save-all gone because I clicked ‘confirm’ on a prompt I hadn’t fully read while my hands were still shaking from a 71-hour work week. That loss, that sudden digital void, felt strangely similar to the way ‘stretch goals’ operate. You pour your life into a container, believing the container has a bottom, only to realize the person holding the container is actively drilling holes in it. We are told that these goals are motivational, that they push us to discover latent potential we didn’t know we possessed. In reality, they are a managerial hedge. It’s a way to extract 131% effort by setting a target at 151%, ensuring that even when you perform at a level that should be considered heroic, you still walk away with the faint, metallic taste of failure in your mouth.
The Review Ritual
During my last performance review, I sat across from a laminate desk and heard the words that define the modern workplace: ‘You did great work and hit 101% of your goals. Truly exceptional. For next year, let’s aim for 151%!’ There was a smile attached to this sentence, the kind of smile you see on a predator that’s already calculated the caloric value of your bones. I asked about the budget for new scrubbers or perhaps a second assistant to help with the 21 commercial accounts we’d just landed. The answer was a vague gesture toward ‘efficiency’ and ‘synergy.’
The Physics of Exhaustion
This is the lie of the stretch goal. It assumes that human effort is an infinitely elastic band, capable of being pulled tighter and tighter without ever losing its structural integrity. But physics-and the 11-stitch scar on my thumb from a stressed-out triggerfish-tells a different story. Everything has a breaking point. When a goal is set beyond the realm of the achievable, it ceases to be a target and becomes a weapon. It allows management to withhold bonuses, justify ‘needs improvement’ ratings, and keep staff in a state of perpetual, low-grade anxiety that prevents them from looking for the exit. It is a psychological trap designed to make the unreasonable seem inevitable.
Goal Setting: Unrealistic Expectation vs. Human Capacity
I find myself thinking about the 1,001 moments I missed because I was underwater, literally and figuratively, trying to hit numbers that were never meant to be reached. We live in an era where ‘transparency’ is a buzzword, yet the most basic transparent transaction-work for pay, effort for result-is being systematically dismantled. We want things to be clear. We want to know that if we pay for a service, we get that service. We want to know that if we do our job, we are done. This is why I appreciate systems that don’t play games with expectations. For instance, when I’m looking to upgrade the infrastructure of my own life, I look for clarity. Even something as mundane as replacing a broken blender or a stove requires a certain level of honesty from the provider. You want to see the price, you want to see the specs, and you want to know it will work as promised. It’s the same reason people gravitate toward
when they need kitchen tech; there is a functional honesty in a machine that does exactly what the manual says it will do, unlike a manager who promises a ‘growth opportunity’ that turns out to be a slow-motion collapse.
[The impossible goal is not an invitation to excel; it is a permission slip for your boss to ignore your humanity.]
Growth vs. Atrophy
I am not a lazy person. I have spent 211 consecutive days in the water before, monitoring the pH levels of a delicate reef system while my own skin felt like it was turning into parchment. I understand the need for growth. But growth without resources is just atrophy in disguise. If you ask a plant to grow 51% taller but give it 31% less light, you aren’t an ambitious gardener; you’re a fool with a dead plant. Yet, in corporate towers, this logic is celebrated as ‘disruptive’ and ‘bold.’ It is a coward’s way of managing. Instead of doing the hard work of optimizing workflows or securing better equipment, the manager simply moves the goalpost further down the field and tells the exhausted kicker to ‘dig deeper.’
Forced Ambition
I remember a specific Tuesday, about 41 days after the new targets were implemented. I was cleaning a tank for a high-end restaurant. The water was 71 degrees, and I was exhausted. I watched a small hermit crab try to move into a shell that was clearly too big for it. It kept tumbling over, unable to maintain its balance under the weight of its own ‘ambition.’ I realized then that the crab didn’t choose the shell because it wanted a ‘stretch goal.’ It chose it because there were no other shells left. We have created a work culture where the ‘right-sized’ shells are being hidden away, and we are forced into oversized expectations that eventually crush us.
The Symptom vs. The Addiction
There is a profound dishonesty in the way we talk about burnout. We treat it as a personal failing, a lack of ‘resilience.’ We are told to meditate, to take 11-minute walks, to drink more water. But you cannot meditate your way out of a 71-hour work week. You cannot ‘breathe’ through the realization that your performance review is a rigged game. The burnout isn’t the problem; the burnout is the symptom of a systemic addiction to the ‘stretch.’
I think back to those 3,001 deleted photos. I spent 81 minutes trying to recover them, digging through cloud backups and cached folders, before I realized the futility of it. They were gone because I was too tired to be careful. The stretch goal had stolen the memories of the work I had already done. That is the ultimate irony: by pushing for 151%, they often end up destroying the quality of the original 101%. In the dive world, if you stay down too long trying to finish one extra tank, you get the bends. The nitrogen bubbles in your blood don’t care about your quarterly projections. They only care about the laws of physiology.
The Demand for Reciprocity
We need to start asking for the data behind the stretch. If a manager asks for a 51% increase in output, we must ask for the 51% increase in support. If the answer is ‘we need to be leaner,’ then the goal must also be leaner. We have normalized the idea that ‘exceptional’ is the new baseline, which by definition, is a mathematical impossibility. If everyone is exceptional, no one is. If every goal is a stretch, the word loses all meaning. It just becomes another way of saying ‘I want more from you than I am willing to pay for.’
Last night, I sat on my floor and looked at the empty folders where my photos used to be. It was 11:01 PM. I felt a strange sense of relief. The pressure to preserve everything, to achieve everything, to be everywhere at once, had momentarily snapped. I can’t get those 3,001 photos back, just like I can’t get back the years I spent chasing numbers that were designed to be unreachable. But I can stop saying ‘yes’ to the stretch. I can climb out of the tank when the air gets thin, regardless of what the green highlighter says.
I will go back into the water tomorrow. I will scrub the walls and check the filters. I will do my job with the precision of a person who knows exactly what their life is worth. But I will not stretch until I break. I will leave that to the hermit crabs and the managers who don’t know how to garden. The silence of the tank is enough for me now, as long as I know exactly how deep I’m going and exactly when I’m allowed to come back up for air.