I'm navigating my own midlife transition whilst helping others do the same. My newsletter community includes professionals who are questioning whether there's more to work than ticking boxes. We explore practical questions like: What if that Monday morning energy dip isn't inevitable? How do we navigate professional decline with dignity? When is "enough" actually enough? If you're approaching 50 (or already there), feeling professionally restless, or simply curious about creating more intentional work, this is for you. I write for people who understand that meaningful change happens gradually, one decision at a time.
After 20 years, I'm not sure my work matters
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Hello, A 27-year-old bride was shot dead at 4:30 AM on a Sunday morning, just hours after her wedding in Goult, a village in southern France. Her husband critically wounded. A 13-year-old boy fighting for his life. The cause? A drug-related settling of accounts. I live hours away. I don’t know these people. This tragedy is completely unrelated to my life. Yet I can’t stop thinking about it. The uncomfortable conflict The bride was innocent. No criminal record, no connection to drug trafficking. She simply married Hassan A., a man with 26 mentions in the criminal database for drug trafficking and criminal association. He brought a loaded gun to his own wedding because he knew violence might follow him. Part of me feels sad for her. The injustice of dying on your wedding day. But another part of the question is: what about the choices that led to this moment? My sympathy feels complicated and conflicted. This isn’t an isolated tragedy. It’s a symptom of a drug crisis in France that we’re failing to address:
And here’s where it gets personal for me. I’ve spent over 20 years as a compliance officer. I work many hours with the goal of stopping drug-related money from flowing into the economy. There are thousands of us working on that. We detect suspicious transactions, implement sophisticated systems, train staff, and write policies. Companies invest millions in these frameworks, but the numbers tell a brutal truth:
All that money from France’s €6 billion drug trade flows through legitimate financial systems. My job is to find it. But I can’t help the feeling that we’re just ticking boxes. We draft reports after reports. We demonstrate compliance. And drug traffickers continue operating. Teenagers continue getting recruited. I sit in my office, reviewing Know Your Customer reports, implementing procedures, and training staff. I’m good at my job. I genuinely enjoy the intellectual challenge of compliance work. But when I read about yet another drug-related crime news, I have to ask: Is any of this working? I've completely lost my sense of purpose at work. Next week I don’t have easy answers. But I’ve discovered something unexpected about rebuilding purpose when your professional work feels insufficient. It was about recognising that purpose doesn’t have to come entirely from your day job, and that seeking it elsewhere isn’t giving up, it’s reclaiming energy. Next week, I’ll share what happened when I stopped trying to fix my sense of purpose within an imperfect system and started building it in a completely different way. Because here’s what I’ve learnt: sometimes the answer isn’t working harder within the constraints. It’s creating space outside them. Until then, I'm genuinely curious: have you ever questioned whether your expertise is actually addressing the problem you thought it would solve? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response. Inès P.S. The Goult tragedy is real. The statistics are from France’s anti-narcotrafficking reports. The 1% recovery rate comes from UNODC and FATF data. Sometimes the numbers themselves tell the story we need to hear. |
Inès Yong's Newsletter Archive
I'm navigating my own midlife transition whilst helping others do the same. My newsletter community includes professionals who are questioning whether there's more to work than ticking boxes. We explore practical questions like: What if that Monday morning energy dip isn't inevitable? How do we navigate professional decline with dignity? When is "enough" actually enough? If you're approaching 50 (or already there), feeling professionally restless, or simply curious about creating more intentional work, this is for you. I write for people who understand that meaningful change happens gradually, one decision at a time.
Hello, Last week, I shared the uncomfortable truth about my corporate work: after 20 years, the systems I help build catch only 1% of the problem they’re meant to solve. Some of you might be asking the same question yourself: how do I keep showing up to work when I suspect my expertise isn’t actually making the world better? Here's my answer to you. It isn't about finding more meaning within the systems or pretending the limitations don’t exist. It is about doing something completely...
Hello, I’m back in France after four weeks in Malaysia, feeling a bit like I’m operating in slow motion whilst everyone else has already shifted into September gear. It’s strange how returning to your birth country can feel both like coming home and discovering somewhere entirely new—especially when you’re seeing it through your children’s eyes for the first time. Watching them smell durian and wrinkle their noses, then light up over roti canai, reminded me how much of who we are gets passed...
Hello lovely readers, After two decades in compliance, I've collected quite a few stories about how our corporate systems create their special brand of chaos. These aren't fictional tales—they're real experiences that show how well-meaning processes can sometimes defeat their purpose. 15 Anecdotes from the Corporate Theatre 1. The Annual Copy-Paste Ritual Every year, I spend hundreds of hours recreating identical regulatory forms with exact information for approval that never changes. It's...