It’s an incredibly dramatic show with lots of yelling and profanity. It’s also really immersive and the cinematography is really good. It’s also filled with these beautiful images and videos of food.
But really what stayed with me about The Bear was how it portrayed the relationship with work becoming tangled up with trauma.
“The Bear”, Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto, started out loving cooking. There was creativity and energy in making beautiful plates of food. We see him journaling, drawing, but we also see his previous mentors drill into him. We see that he comes from a loving but toxic family.
Throughout the show, Carmy struggles with the belief that to be great is to suffer. The show portrays this in a few ways but mainly through the chaos that is managing a failing restaurant, how he is trying to overcome the trauma from his family and previous work and his guilt for “ruining” everything good in his life.
We see how he carries that into his own kitchen, teetering between yelling at people and trying to be better than his previous mentors.
I recognize some of that thinking in myself. Since starting my consultancy, I’ve felt like I should be working day and night because of the “war” stories that most founders seem to have. The stories of working through nights, missing birthdays. The concept that they are suffering for something greater.
Yet, I don’t seem to have that experience. As weird as it sounds, not having a traumatic experience of starting my own business makes me feel like I am doing the wrong thing. Like things are too easy. The show made me question that. Being good at something doesn’t mean you have to be a martyr for it.
Towards the end of the show, Carmy starts to better manage his trauma. But in doing so, he realizes that cooking is no longer what he wants to do. Whether he’s too traumatized by it or he wants a completely new change, the show doesn’t explicitly show. But so much of his identity has been built around cooking that he struggles to understand who he is without it.
And I’ve never defined myself entirely through my work but it’s certainly a big part of me. And I start to think that if I no longer enjoy this path, do I have to keep following it? So much of what I’ve done has led here, wouldn’t it be a shame if I let it all go?
I wrote in The Price of Corporate Work that I’ve basically grown to feel trapped and started to hate my work because of the confines of the 9-5 but what if it was just my relationship with work that was the problem and not the 9-5?
I want to build a consultancy where the work feels creative, energetic and interesting. Earning money matters, but I don’t want the pressure to earn it to swallow everything I liked about the work in the first place.