The Bear in Mind
“Are we what we do for a living?” asks Jason Gay in his recent Wall Street Journal article, ‘I’m a Psycho’—What ‘The Bear’ Says About the Work-Life Revolution: Is it possible to be fully committed to a career—and have a healthy life balance?”
This is an essential question of Season 2 of “The Bear,” the acclaimed TV show now streaming on Hulu that has become the hit of the summer thanks to its offbeat recipe. On the surface, “The Bear” is about a chef who returns to Chicago to run, and then revamp, his brother’s restaurant. On deeper levels, however, this show is about myriad mental health issues around work, life, family, and recovery. (Spoiler alert: plot details revealed ahead.)
For me, Season 2 represents one of those dangerous places we get into when we create a life around our passions. Personally, I feel a little bit like Carmy (“The Bear,” as his late brother Michael had nicknamed him) myself right now. I never stop. And I keep thinking, Am I gonna be able to pull this off? It’s like the “Friends & Family” episode where they open the new restaurant. I’m at that stage of my career, and I put it all on the line, like The Bear, and I never stop. Here I am, building a life around my ultimate passions. But I’ve I've become so obsessed with it all. And I take it personally.
There’s a layer of what happens when you have to let go, like when Carmy gets stuck in the walk-in refrigerator. Do you feel like you’re stuck in the walk-in of life, of your career? Right now, I’m stuck in the walk-in during the doldrums of summer. People aren’t really booking any speaking engagements. The kids are out of school, and there’s no real routine. Every single person says, “Chris, you gotta be patient.” And now I’m in the walk-in. I’ve checked every single box. I’ve hired the best video editor to capture my speeches. I’ve done everything, and now I’m waiting for someone to let me out.
Then there’s the layer of what happens when people practice empathy, the main point of my book The Millennial Whisperer. One character goes to Norway; another goes to culinary school; another learns how to polish forks. Someone is saying: “I believe in you. I’m willing to invest in you.” As The Daily Best summarized: “An episode like “Forks,” the seventh of the season, especially drives home the point that the place where you thought you were lost could also be where you find your purpose.” So many corporations have lost the heart and the connection. There is a direct ROI from empathy, as I’ve shared with dozens of audiences around the world.
“The Bear” also teaches us to give people the benefit of the doubt with their imperfections, whether it’s polishing forks or injecting donuts. We see that “every second counts,” and we see Carmy’s relentless pursuit of perfection, but what really counts is human connection over perfection. No matter how foolproof you build the system, no matter how much generative AI you build into your company’s foundation, it comes down to the human quotient. It comes down to being sentient humans. And the way we're sentient human beings is to recognize our faults, our fallacies in ourselves and in others, and be vulnerable so that we can have help when we need it.