The most difficult moment is not the departure itself.
Once the decision is made, the old system cut open and you are standing on the other side, a brief, strange calm can arrive. There is no applause and no immediate danger. The world makes no sound in response to your personal choice. It simply continues.
The real pressure comes afterward. You seem to have entered unnamed territory, with maps invalid and signposts gone, judging direction only by what you feel beneath your feet.
You are outside the old system, but the new one has not established reliable feedback. Each day you work, solve problems and invest time and energy, knowing that these efforts do not yet fit a mature evaluation framework. They cannot quickly become résumé entries, titles or a definite upward path, as before. Nor are they sufficient to create new security.
This phase has no name.
You cannot clearly explain what you are doing, because you are still discovering it. You cannot judge whether the choice was right, because its essential indicators have not appeared. You do not even know whether the path leads to a stable structure or merely a longer uncertainty.
From outside, this period is almost silent.
There are no milestones to share or success stories to tell. You sense the gaze of others—not sharp, but persistent. Some care kindly, some observe discreetly, and others quietly await a verdict: did you choose correctly?
You know better than anyone that no verdict yet exists.
This is the defining feature of the suspended period:
It neither rewards courage nor immediately punishes hesitation. It simply requires you to remain there.
The inertia of the old world repeatedly knocks at the door.
You remember familiar processes, clear rules and proven paths. Some nights you realize that, had you stayed, life could still be respectable and stable, with recognition and reward. This comparison is not imaginary. It is a genuinely available alternative timeline.
For that reason, passion alone does not get you through suspension.
It is more like an endurance test—not of your courage to jump, but of your capacity to keep moving without confirmation. You must accept that for a considerable time, nothing you do can immediately be proven worthwhile.
You begin to see that the scarce resource is not opportunity itself, but the capacity to withstand being unvalidated.
Many retreat here, not because they misunderstand change, but because they cannot bear prolonged suspension. They need clear coordinates, a system to receive them and predictable life again. This is neither shameful nor wrong. It is another understanding of risk.
I kept going not because I was certain that what lay ahead was better, but because I knew that returning at this stage would make any belated security inseparable from confirmation that I had missed my chance.
Suspension does not provide answers.
It strips things away: dependence on certainty, sensitivity to others' judgments and the self-understandings that hold only during an upswing.
As these are gradually removed, you can finally see:
Can you still act without a system lifting you?
Only after entering the new-energy business did I realize that my earlier judgments about “active allocation” had remained largely on paper.
Reality does not become gentler because you decide earlier or more rationally. It immediately drags you onto unfinished ground and makes you test, bodily, what you understood and what you misjudged.
The company was just starting out. It had no historical baggage, but little directly reusable experience either. The organization expanded, roles shifted and boundaries were redrawn daily. “Does anyone know where to begin?” was asked more often than “How well was it done?” What seemed agreed yesterday might need dismantling tomorrow.
Traditional Western manufacturing wraps individual capability in thick structure. Processes, standards, rhythms and clear responsibilities absorb much uncertainty. Even when growth slows, individual errors often remain buffered while the system works. Here that buffer scarcely existed. Engineering, cost, supply chains and pace were directly exposed to reality, constraining one another with little redundancy.
This was clearly not a place to wait for the optimal solution. It required a constant production of workable solutions. A judgment half a beat late allowed a problem to develop into a more expensive reality.
For the first time, I understood that “platforms are disappearing” described the retreat of a rhythm, not merely the fate of a company.
I watched people with excellent résumés and unquestionable ability struggle. They were not lazy; they were accustomed to systems that had already defined boundaries, pace and success. When those premises vanished, their capabilities revealed how dependent they had become.
Others grew rapidly. They were not necessarily smarter, but more comfortable with incomplete information, less preoccupied with being judged correctly and more willing to advance without consensus. Rather than wait for a mature system, they shaped it as it emerged.
For me, this was an unusually direct, even harsh, practical education.
I saw more clearly that new energy was not merely a different form of propulsion. It rewrote industrial timescales, decision speed and risk allocation—a particularly harsh change for traditional Western manufacturing. In some organizations I experienced, processes supporting quality and reliability could slow a change of direction if not adjusted. Quality systems themselves are not obsolete, however: electrification and intelligent vehicles still require safety, verification and delivery at scale.
The industry's subsequent years repeatedly confirmed this view: established European automakers' uneven transitions, American industrial giants' prolonged struggle between profitability and reconstruction, and capital markets' punishment of firms with the right scale but the wrong speed. I had left not merely a company, but an industrial system losing its advantage in time.
But the new world was not safe.
It was more dangerous.
At precisely this stage, AI spread broadly. Beyond efficiency gains and job substitution, it further compressed the timescale of human activity. Algorithms approached judgments once requiring years to acquire, while accumulated experience rapidly lost scarcity. Experimentation grew cheaper, but errors could happen faster. Entry barriers fell, but elimination accelerated.
In this environment, “wait and see” was no longer neutral. It became highly risky. Some judgments, if not made within the right window, lost their value even when directionally correct.
During this period I also began visiting Southeast Asia more frequently.
Initially for work, these visits became essential recalibrations of perspective. As Bangkok shifted from a short visit to a place of sustained living, and my judgments extended beyond one market, a long-absent sense of space returned. Different development stages and institutional rhythms were operating simultaneously. The world would not pause until one system had figured everything out.
I finally understood that setting out was not about finding a more certain answer. It was about reaching a position where change was still possible.
The new-energy wilderness gave me neither immediate security nor a repeatable success milestone. It accomplished something more important: it moved me from someone who understood change to someone acting within it and bearing its costs.
From here, the question changed.
It was no longer whether to act, but, once inside a continuously accelerating and stratifying world,
How to keep moving without locking myself into another single structure.
That is the question I will discuss next.