The Cost of Every Yes

I turned down a lucrative role this year.

On paper, it was a great opportunity. I would have been heading up an entire copywriting department. I’d have my own team. More responsibility. More influence. Almost certainly more money.

Any American millennial would look at this and think, what’s the problem here? Just take it. A few years ago, I would have said yes without thinking twice. But the more the role was described, the more I felt myself dying a little inside. Not because there was anything wrong with the opportunity. It was exactly the kind of role I would have jumped at.

But somewhere along the way, something in me changed. I started asking myself if “this” — whatever “this” was in the moment — was even something I truly wanted, and not something I should want just because it fit into the typical career trajectory or society’s expectations that society itself doesn’t live up to.

The posture of my heart moved away from wanting to fit into some culturally acceptable mold and towards wanting to please and honor God with my life. He was the One who made me, who saved me. Loves me.

I no longer want to spend my days building someone else’s dream while my own sits patiently on the shelf waiting for “someday.”

For many years I believed being a responsible adult meant saying yes to every opportunity that paid well or opened another door. I assumed wisdom meant maximizing every advantage, climbing every ladder, keeping every option open.

But now? Now I’m realizing that wisdom looks more like knowing which doors deserve to remain closed.

Choosing not to pursue the role further wasn’t a financial decision for me. It was a decision made from recognizing that it didn’t align with the vision of what I want my life to be.

There is a cost to every yes and a cost to every no.

Not just in hours worked or money earned, but in attention. In creative energy. In peace. In the quiet parts of yourself that slowly disappear when your life becomes devoted to building something you don’t actually want.

The older I get, the less willing I am to trade those things away.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? Jesus asks this in Mark 8:36, and it keeps bringing me back to the only question that actually matters: how am I stewarding the life God gave me?

Some might look at the decision to turn down the role and think I’m foolish. And the truth is, I’m more than okay with that. Instead of optimizing for the most money, I’m optimizing for peace. Instead of hustling harder and treating everything as urgent, I’m choosing alignment.

Living with intention doesn’t necessarily make decisions easier to make, but it does make them simpler.

You have to slow down long enough to take an honest and maybe even uncomfortable inventory of your life so you can make decisions from a place of alignment and not reaction. Once you’ve taken a beat you can start to build out a rubric for yourself to guide how you want to make decisions moving forward.

If you are constantly on the go, moving from one thing to the next and the next and the next, yet can’t seem to figure out why you feel anxious all the time, it might be because you haven’t given yourself any room to breathe. You’ve been on auto-pilot for so long that living according to someone else’s urgency and priorities has become the norm.

Summer is the best season for slowing down. It’s almost culturally expected.

The days are long. The air is warm. The perception of time seems to continue on and on.

So here’s what I want to challenge you to do with this weekend.

• Book a weekend away somewhere (or a staycation) soon. It’s summer, take advantage of it. Research consistently shows that even 15 minutes in a natural setting — not scrolling, just being — measurably reduces anxiety and mental fatigue. You don’t have to go far. You just have to go.

• Turn off your phone for the whole weekend. Not on silent. Off.

• Journal what you actually want for your life. Not what sounds responsible. Not what your family expects. What do you actually want? Get it out of your head and onto paper.

• Create your own rubric — your own scoring guide. This will include things you are and are not willing to compromise on anymore. Are you willing to take a pay cut in order to move states and be closer to family? Are you willing to walk away from a “good” opportunity in order to actually have space in your life to pursue your calling and giftings? Write it down.

• Print it out where you can see it every day until it becomes second nature to how you move.

• Just delete social media. I’m going to keep saying this until the end of time. No, you do not need it. No, you do not need it to grow your business or side gigs. Substack and YouTube are different things. I am very pro sales and marketing, but let’s start getting radically honest about what is actually required — and not just because “everyone is on there.” They’re not. It just seems that way.

• Develop a spiritual practice. I’ve recently been practicing no phone or technology before prayer and reading scripture in the morning. This has become one of my non-negotiables. How you start your day determines the version of you that shows up.

• List 2-3 things you want to be true in your life moving forward, then reverse engineer what habits you need to develop in order for them to become true.

• Evaluate your rubric weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. It will evolve. That is ok.

There is a cost to living intentionally, but the benefits far outweigh any perceived negatives.

And if you’re thinking this is easy to say when you have the time and space for it — I’d push back on that. You don’t need a perfect life or an excess of free time to start making more intentional decisions. You need a willingness to get honest about what your current ones are actually costing you.

What might feel like a loss from slowing down and choosing differently is really just that fear of missing out starting to rear its ugly head again. You’re not missing out when you’re focusing on living well, not rubbernecking the lives of strangers on the internet or the neighbor next door.

Living intentionally isn’t a buzzword or a beautifully curated Pinterest board. It’s your actual day-to-day decisions that create the outcome that is your life. It’s that simple.

You have been given the gift of life.

So what are you going to do with that one big beautiful life that you have?

If this landed for you, share it with one person who needs to read it. And if you want to go deeper on slow living and opting out, I've been making videos on exactly this over on my Youtube channel if you’d like to check it out.