Nobody drifts into a lease. It has a signature, a date and, crucially, an end: a known moment when both parties must look at the arrangement in daylight and decide whether it continues, and on what terms. Compare that to how people hold the arrangements that actually shape their lives. The job has no term; it runs until crisis. The city has no term; it runs until a rupture forces the question. The role, breadwinner, caretaker, the sibling who handles everything, was never even signed; it accreted, and it renews itself silently every year that nobody mentions it. The apartment, the least important commitment on the list, is the only one with a renegotiation date.
This is exactly backwards, and the cost of the inversion is that major life arrangements can only change through emergencies. Without a scheduled moment of re-decision, raising a fundamental question ("should we still live here?", "do I still want this job?") is itself a dramatic act, an alarm pulled in a quiet building. So people don't pull it. The questions go unasked for years, not because the answers are obvious but because the asking has no socially safe occasion, and arrangements that no one would choose today persist on the momentum of their own awkwardness.
The renegotiation date does the hard part
The fix is structural and almost embarrassingly simple: give the big arrangements what the small ones already have. A term. A date. Organizations that run this way demonstrate the mechanism. At Morning Star, the self-managed tomato processor documented by Michael Lee and Amy Edmondson, every employee's responsibilities, goals and metrics live in bilateral agreements renegotiated at least once a year, and have since the 1990s. The genius is not the contract; it is the calendar. Because renegotiation is scheduled, it is unremarkable. Nobody's request to adjust terms signals disloyalty or crisis, since the date, not the person, raised the subject. The calendar absorbs the social cost of the conversation, which is most of the cost.
Ricardo Semler has told a factory-floor version of the same discovery. In 1985, Semco let its plant workers set their own hours. Management predicted the assembly line would collapse under the anarchy of individual schedules. Instead the workers coordinated it themselves, parents of school-age children taking mornings, single workers drifting to later shifts, under a policy that consisted, in its entirety, of talking to the person next to you. Adults, as he put it, do that. The lesson generalizes past scheduling: arrangements stay fitted to lives when the people living them can renegotiate terms directly and routinely, rather than petitioning a distant authority for exceptions to a permanent design.
What was true of hours is now demonstrably true of geography. With remote days settled at roughly a quarter of all paid workdays in the US, according to Stanford's survey research, where one works has quietly become a negotiable term of employment rather than a constant of nature. The terms of a working life that were fixed for a century, the hours, the place, and increasingly the shape of the role itself, have re-entered negotiation. What most lives still lack is not the negotiability. It is the appointment.
Leasing a city, leasing a role
Applied to a city, the lease is a promise with a review: we are here fully for three years, and in the third spring we sit down and re-choose, staying being one of the honorable outcomes. The difference from drifting is total. The couple that re-chooses a city has a shared, dated decision; the couple that drifted has a slowly compounding suspicion that neither dares audit. Applied to a role, the lease is harder and more valuable, because unspoken roles are renewed by pure inertia. The parent who has been the family's default coordinator for a decade holds a position no one ever proposed, and the only current way out of it is an explosion. A named role with a review date can be handed over, split or gratefully renewed. An unnamed role can only be resented.
The objection, that this bureaucratizes intimacy and turns a life into a stack of contracts, mistakes where the coldness actually lives. There is nothing warm about an arrangement sustained by the fear of discussing it. The scheduled renegotiation is not the intrusion of commerce into life; it is the extension, to life's largest commitments, of a courtesy the smallest ones always received: the dignity of being chosen again, out loud, by people free to do otherwise.
A lease, in the end, is just a commitment that tells the truth about time. The jobs, cities and roles held "indefinitely" make no such disclosure, and so they change the only way undated things can: too late, and all at once. Put a date on them. The date will ask the question that no one else was going to.
Sources
- Research in Organizational Behavior / Lee & Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations. Documents Morning Star's practice of annual renegotiation: every employee's responsibilities, goals and metrics are set in bilateral CLOU contracts renegotiated at least once a year, in use since the 1990s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Stanford Report / Bloom, Davis & Barrero (2025). Return to office? Not everybody is doing it. Remote days account for roughly a quarter of US paid workdays in 2025, evidence that geography has become a renegotiable term of employment rather than a fixed one. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/03/return-to-office-not-everybody-is-doing-it