Michael Hedge
It was the repetition that did it for Alex Hirst. The same 5.30am alarm. The same 6.30am bus to the Tube station. The same District Line carriage, the same Starbucks coffee and croissant, the same meal-deal lunch. The same clients, the same problems, the same-shaped weeks. “Don’t get me wrong: I loved my work and didn’t resent doing it,” he insists. But at 33, leading a team of eight as a head of account management at a growing creative agency, Hirst began to wonder whether he had his priorities wrong.
“I always thought the more time I spent working, the more successful I would become,” he says. “It was a badge of honour. Being the first in and the last out of the office was important to me. I thought that I was leading by example. In fact, I just became more and more detached. I stopped enjoying the highs. I didn’t care about the lows. Eventually, my wife told me that I’d become a shadow of my former self.”