Life as Collateral – The Golden Handcuffs

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

Mads had everything. He was an investment director at one of the country's largest funds. His compensation package was extraordinary – base salary, annual bonus, and options that would vest over the next three years. He had the house, the car, the membership, the wardrobe. He was, in every visible sense, winning.

He also had not slept properly in eight months, had developed a persistent anxiety that alcohol temporarily quieted, and could not remember the last time he had wanted to get out of bed in the morning. Not because he was sad – but because he had run out of reasons that felt real.

The Price of the Package

The golden handcuffs are a well-known phenomenon. Compensation structures that are deliberately designed to retain – options that vest over time, bonuses tied to tenure, packages that would be forfeited upon resignation. The message is clear: you can leave, but it will cost you.

What is less often discussed is the psychological dimension of this arrangement. When leaving becomes financially catastrophic, the question of whether you want to leave becomes threatening to ask. And so it is not asked. The question goes underground – and emerges instead as anxiety, as numbness, as the vague dread of Sunday evenings.

The Calling He Had Abandoned

In our work together, Mads spoke – reluctantly, then gradually with more openness – about what he had wanted to do before the career had gathered its own momentum. He had trained as a landscape architect or forest manager. He had spent three years in a firm he loved before the financial sector had offered him an opportunity he could not, at the time, refuse.

That was fifteen years ago. He had told himself, more or less continuously since then, that he would return to it someday. Someday had not arrived.

Finding the Key

The handcuffs, it turned out, were not primarily financial. The numbers were real, and leaving would genuinely cost him. But the deeper constraint was psychological: the belief that he could not afford to be someone who gave this up. The identity investment in the role was greater than the financial one.

What the work offered was not a simple permission to resign – it was something more nuanced. A process of separating what he had chosen from what had chosen him. Of understanding which parts of the current life he genuinely valued and which he had simply stopped questioning. Of re-contacting the person who had once wanted to build things with his hands.

Mads did not leave the fund immediately. But something changed in his relationship to the work – and to himself. The cage became a room he could choose to walk out of whenever he was ready. That shift alone was worth more than the options.

Stay tuned.

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