Lately, I’ve been sitting with a quiet but persistent discomfort. It shows up every time I open my phone and see another post explaining why my business isn’t growing fast enough, why I’m invisible without funnels, why seven figures is the only proof of legitimacy, and why relevance can apparently be purchased if I’m willing to pay the right person to tell me how.
I understand the mechanics of selling. I understand that money has to move for any of this to work. I’m not naïve about commerce, nor am I romanticizing struggle. But something about the current language of business feels deeply unwell. It’s not just loud or repetitive. It’s exhausting in a way that seeps into your nervous system. As if the market itself is constantly tapping you on the shoulder, asking you to perform harder, faster, more strategically, until the work you once cared about becomes indistinguishable from the machine you were supposed to be building an alternative to.
What we call “growth” right now often looks like extraction with better lighting. More content. More urgency. More persuasion. More emotional leverage disguised as clarity. The goal isn’t connection. It’s conversion. And somewhere along the way, the relationship between business and community becomes purely transactional. You give me your attention. I turn it into revenue. Repeat.
The thing is, many of us didn’t start building because we wanted to dominate attention or optimize human behavior. We started because we wanted to make something meaningful. Something beautiful. Something useful. Something that could hold taste, creativity, imagination, and care alongside sustainability. We wanted to contribute to a life that feels whole, not just profitable.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from being told, over and over, that if you’re not playing the game the prescribed way, you’re failing. That resistance is a flaw. That slowness is a liability. That community-centered work is nice, but not serious. It’s a narrative that leaves very little room for humanity, and even less room for mental health.
What if the issue isn’t that we don’t know how to sell, but that we don’t want to sell like that?
What if we’re craving models of business that allow for dignity on both sides of the exchange? Where trust is built over time instead of engineered through pressure. Where care isn’t a marketing angle, but a structural choice. Where a brand can still be beautiful, discerning, and financially viable without turning its audience into a dataset to be mined.
I don’t believe the answer is to abandon commerce. I believe it’s to rehumanize it.
There is a way to sell that feels like a conversation instead of a chase. A way to grow that doesn’t require constant self-surveillance. A way to build that understands resistance, beauty, and imagination not as distractions from success, but as essential to it. These are not soft values. They are the foundations of cultures that last.
We are living in a moment where people are deeply tired of being treated like targets. They are looking for businesses that feel like places, not pipelines. For work that respects their intelligence and their time. For brands that don’t just extract value from communities but actively invest in them.
I’m choosing to build in that space. Slowly. Intentionally. With care.
Not because it’s easier. Trust me, it's not. But because it’s more honest to who I am. And because a well-rounded life, like a well-built business, needs room for humanity to breathe.
If that means opting out of the loudest version of success, I’m at peace with that. I’m far more interested in building something that feels true, sustainable, and alive. Something that doesn’t ask me to abandon my instincts in order to be taken seriously.
There has to be room for that.
I’m choosing to believe there is.
With Care.
Tasha Monroe
Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.