Labor Day is American theater with grill smoke.

We parade dignity, sell half-off patio sets, and watch politicians cosplay as short-order cooks for fifteen photo-op seconds.

It’s our annual hymn to external work—the visible grind you can invoice, photograph, and paste into a case study.

Elul doesn’t care about any of that.

Elul is a jewish month that shows up like a tough accountant with a soft voice and says: open the books. The month before Rosh Hashana and then Yom Kippur.

Not your P&L—the ledger you keep tucked behind your ribcage. Cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul. No loopholes, no brand spin, no “contextualization.”

Just the uncomfortable audit of who I’ve been, where I’ve missed the mark, and what—before the Yomim Nora’im—I’m prepared to actually change.

We are deeply fluent in the first kind of labor: what the world can see. Campaigns launched. Numbers hit. Deals closed. I know the rhythm by heart—the dopamine of dashboards, the confetti of a new logo win, the way a clean deck can feel like righteousness. It’s seductive because it’s legible. Co-workers clap. Clients nod. Algorithms bless you with tiny blue thumbs.

The second kind of labor is harder to post about: what only you can see. The quiet repairs. The discipline to pause when your ego wants to sprint. The willingness to stand in the gray and admit: I’ve sorted people into heroes and villains because it made me feel safe. I’ve told myself I’m the good guy catching the bad guys, and I’ve worn that story like armor. Armor works—until it rusts onto your skin. Then it keeps you “safe” by keeping you separate.

I’ve done that. PTSD, ASD, scar tissue—pick your acronym. Useful for surviving. Terrible for understanding. It turns nuance into a threat and other people into silhouettes. It sabotages joy, and it burns bridges faster than a matchbook in a desert wind.

We love the myth that success buys peace. It doesn’t. If it did, the richest and most photographed among us wouldn’t keep slipping into the dark. That’s the terrifying truth: external achievement fills calendars and empties souls when it’s used to patch holes that can only be mended from the inside. The applause is real; the silence after is realer.

Judaism offers a different route with teshuvah (repentance) —not a groveling apology tour, but return. Return to the person you meant to be before fear, habit, and grind bent you out of shape. Return to generosity, to curiosity, to restraint.

Return to simchah (hapiness) that isn’t rented from public approval. That’s the labor Elul demands. And it pays in something rarer than money: inner quiet.

Marketing and advertising are identity centrifuges. Spin fast enough and the parts of you that aren’t “on-brand” get flung against the wall. You enter the field for creativity, empathy, the thrill of making something that lands. Then the treadmill speeds up. The clock compresses. The ask multiplies. “Always on” stops being a slogan and becomes a circulatory system.

Somewhere in there, self blurs into role. You stop measuring your days by conversations or kindness, and start measuring by clicks and client emails replied to at 11:58 p.m. Surveys routinely show most in our world grapple with impostor syndrome; that tracks. When your value is denominated in metrics you don’t fully control, anxiety is not a bug—it’s the house style.

Burnout arrives like fog, not fire. First, achievements taste flat. Then, weekends feel like loading screens. Eventually even wins register as paperwork. That’s not laziness; that’s self-estrangement.

The job becomes the mirror, and the mirror forgets your face.

Over-identify with your title and every bump in the road feels like a personal verdict. A lost pitch morphs into a character flaw. A layoff reads like erasure. A sloppy comment from a client becomes a Greek chorus in your head. Careers matter—deeply. But careers that consume become a kind of slow-burn theology: all meaning flows from the quarterly business review. Bow down or be crushed.

You know the end of that story. Friendships thin. Hobbies wither. Curiosity shrinks to the borders of your niche. The world narrows until you can’t tell where you end and the inbox begins.

There is another way, and it’s gloriously unsexy. Fewer victory laps, more practice. Fewer declarations, more discipline.

Mentorship helps. Honest friendship helps. So does the occasional act of holy rebellion: shutting the laptop while your better self still has a pulse. None of that trends. All of it heals.

Put these two holidays on the same calendar page and something clicks. Labor Day says work has dignity—the external kind that builds and sustains. Elul says work has meaning—the internal kind that restores and directs. You need both or you end up rich and restless, accomplished and hollow.

So here’s my kabbalah of labor for this season:

Build things. Repair yourself.
Ship the work. Soften the heart.
Hold the line. Make room for the gray.

I’m committing to that, publicly, because secrecy is how old patterns survive.

I’m choosing curiosity over certainty, generosity over suspicion, conversation over combat.

I’m choosing to notice when my armor starts to creak and to step out of it before it becomes a sarcophagus.

I’m choosing to remember that my worth as a human being is neither enhanced nor diminished by a dashboard, and that happiness is less a mood than a muscle: trained by small, stubborn acts of kindness—especially toward people who don’t audition for my approval.

Labor Day honors the hands.

Elul refines the heart.

Let the two shake hands and call it a year’s real beginning.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.