Why Leadership Feels Harder Than It Used To

Leadership feels harder than it used to. Not because the work itself has fundamentally changed, but because the environment leaders are operating in has. The pace is faster, competing demands are constant, and the pressure to respond immediately is ever-present. What once required steadiness now demands endurance, and many leaders feel that strain without fully understanding where it’s coming from.

There is a quiet substitution taking place in modern life, one that rarely announces itself and almost never feels dangerous in the moment. It does not arrive as collapse or crisis. It arrives as relief.

I have come to think of this drift as the Dopamine Substitution. By dopamine substitution, I’m not talking about addiction or weakness. I’m talking about what happens when the durable, sustaining forces that once anchored leaders, like meaning, patience, shared purpose, and earned trust, are replaced by faster rewards that have been fostered by advances in technology. Instead of depth, we get stimulation. Instead of belonging, we get affirmation. Instead of endurance, we get relief. The result isn’t moral failure. It’s a nervous system adapting to an environment that no longer allows things to take their time.

You can see this substitution everywhere. You see it in the need to check for responses instead of sitting with uncertainty, and in the pull to react publicly rather than think privately. You can also find it in the preference for recognition over respect, visibility over impact, certainty over coherence. It shows up in meetings, in families, in leadership decisions, and in the quiet exhaustion leaders feel even when nothing is “wrong.”Dopamine itself is not the problem. It is a necessary and useful function of the human brain, designed to motivate action, reinforce learning, and reward progress. It was never intended to provide orientation, coherence, or purpose. Those have always come from somewhere else. They’ve come from values lived under constraint, relationships that demanded something, work that took time, truths that weren’t negotiable, and a sense that life was bigger than comfort.

The problem is not dopamine. The problem is substitution. When relief becomes the primary response to discomfort, it begins to displace the experiences that once gave effort its meaning. Stimulation becomes easier to access than reflection, distraction more available than presence, and comfort preferable to coherence.

None of this feels destructive while it is happening. In fact, it often feels reasonable.

·      Outrage feels justified, even as civility erodes.

·      Certainty feels reassuring while truth is fragmented.

·      Shallow connection eases loneliness, even as belonging is displaced.

·      Charismatic figures rise, not because they are grounded, but because they make people feel better.

In the moment, these substitutions work. They reduce tension. They soothe anxiety. They create the feeling of movement without requiring endurance. Over time, though, they hollow things out. This is not a story about people losing their values. It is a story about an environment that steadily pushes against the conditions required to live them.

Leadership has always demanded discomfort. Empathy requires staying with pain that is not your own. Integrity requires choosing alignment over relief. Courage requires tolerating uncertainty and consequence. Humility requires ego discomfort and self-examination. Purpose requires patience and sacrifice. These are not abstract ideals. They are endurance skills.

The environment shaped by this substitution trains people away from endurance. Discomfort is interpreted as failure rather than signal. Delay is treated as injustice. Ambiguity becomes intolerable. The reflex is no longer to remain present and work through difficulty, but to exit quickly and self-soothe.

This places leaders in a different landscape than in the past. Leaders today are not working only against disagreement or resistance. They are working against a modern cultural reflex that prioritizes short-term emotional relief over long-term coherence. Teams increasingly are pulled toward reassurance without accountability, clarity without complexity, connection without vulnerability, and outcomes without process. None of this comes from malice. It comes from conditioning.

When leaders attempt to meet this reflex with more stimulation, more urgency, or more emotional management, they unintentionally reinforce it. Relief may increase. Stability does not.

Leadership depends on orientation, not motivation or stimulation. Orientation. Without it, leaders are pulled toward managing mood instead of building trust, soothing anxiety instead of establishing direction, and providing comfort instead of holding alignment. Over time, this exhausts leaders and erodes confidence on both sides of the relationship.

The principles of good leadership have not changed. What has changed is the environment in which those principles must be lived. The ground is softer. The pull toward ease is stronger. The cost of drift is delayed, but cumulative.

This is why so many leadership failures today feel confusing rather than dramatic. There is no single breaking point. No obvious villain. Just a steady movement toward whatever feels easiest in the moment.

The substitution explains why that movement often goes unnoticed until something collapses. It explains why erosion can feel acceptable while it is occurring. And it explains why leadership grounded in timeless principles now requires greater clarity, steadiness, and self-awareness than ever before.

Before leaders can offer direction, they must understand the forces quietly pulling people away from meaning. Without that understanding, even the best intentions are easily undermined.

The terrain has changed.

The work has not.