Procrustes owned a small estate on the road between Athens and Eleusis. In Greek mythology he was a host, if you can call him that, who offered travellers a generous dinner and a bed for the night.

But it was a special bed. And a macabre form of hospitality.

Procrustes didn’t ask whether you were tired. He didn’t ask who you were, where you’d come from, what you’d seen. He had one obsession: the bed had to fit you perfectly. If you were too tall, he chopped off your legs with a hatchet. If you were too short, he stretched you until you reached the required length. No one survived his hospitality.

Eventually, the story delivers its poetic justice. A traveller named Theseus turns up, fearless and unfooled, and forces Procrustes to lie in his own bed. Then he makes him fit.

On the surface, it’s a bonkers myth about cruelty. But like most Greek myths, it holds a deeper meaning. In common usage, the word Procrustean has come to describe any situation where an arbitrary standard is used to measure success, while ignoring the obvious harm caused by the effort to conform.

But the detail that stays with me isn’t the hatchet or the chopping and stretching. It’s the arrogance.

The bed is assumed to be correct. The traveller is assumed to be the problem.

The bed survives. The traveller doesn’t.

And once you see that logic, you start noticing how many Procrustean beds we’ve built. The modern world often confuses a framework for reality, and then tries to squeeze the soul of a person into a category, a rubric, a score.

I know, because I’ve slept in them. We all have.

School was my first Procrustean bed: timetables, syllabuses, and a narrow definition of intelligence that rewarded what could be marked. We tell ourselves we’re serving students, but often it’s the other way around. The students serve the tests. Schools are mostly judged by averaged scores and tidy metrics, not by whether a young person feels more alive, more capable, more themselves.

If I had to name the dominant emotion of my school years, it would be ennui. I sleepwalked through it. I was an average student at best. Most of what I now count as education happened outside the classroom: books, films, music, ideas, the strange private thrill of learning with no clock and no grades. That was fun. That made life feel large.

And somewhere along the way, a lesson lodged itself in me: compress yourself into what counts, and real life will always be outside the frame.

Then jobs: a bed made of job descriptions and KPIs. The corporate version of the myth is rarely violent in any obvious way. It doesn’t chop your legs off. It does something more subtle. It persuades you to do the chopping yourself. To sand down the edges. To translate your complexity into bullet points. To become a professional version of you. To fit.

But there is a price to fitting: a low-grade hum, an ache, a feeling that something essential is being left outside the room.

That ache is not a personality quirk. It’s information.

We build Procrustean beds because we fear what we can’t measure.

A curriculum can’t capture a human being, so we chop the human to match the curriculum.
A job description can’t name the full person, so we shrink the person to match the job.
A leadership model can’t contain the complexity of relationships, so we turn people into “resources”.

The world prefers crisp categories because crisp categories make planning easier. They create an illusion of control. They allow administrators and managers and institutions to feel that the glorious mess of life has been tamed.

But a person is not a tameable thing.

This is where Viktor Frankl sits at the centre of my resistance.

Frankl’s core insight, earned in the hardest school imaginable (he was imprisoned in Auschwitz), is that the human being is not merely driven by instincts and conditioned responses. Yes, we have drives. Yes, we have histories and wounds and patterns. But there is also an interior space: a freedom, an agency, a depth that cannot be reduced to behaviour.

He described it as that space between stimulus and response where we get to choose.

That “space” is not an abstract philosophical idea to me. It’s the part of the self that never quite fits, because it isn’t built for fitting. It’s the part that keeps asking: is this true? Is this mine? Is this meaningful?

Inside each of us is what I can only describe as an infinite conversation. A dialogue between longing and duty, between the life we are living and the life that keeps calling us. A conversation that cannot be contained in a rubric.

Procrustes is what happens when the world refuses to honour that conversation. And sometimes, more painfully, when we lack the courage to honour it ourselves.

The most uncomfortable realisation is that Procrustes is not only “out there”.

Once you’ve lived in enough beds, you can start carrying one around inside you.

You begin to speak to yourself in the language of fitting.

Be realistic.
Don’t overthink it.
Just do what’s required.
Stop being so sensitive.
You’re lucky to have this.
This is how it works.

You pre-emptively shrink yourself so you won’t be rejected. You stretch yourself into shapes that win approval. You take the vivid inner life, the whole human, and you treat it like a problem to be managed.

You become your own host. Dinner, then mutilation.

This is why the quest for meaning can feel so confronting. It isn’t just about finding some inspiring purpose statement. It’s about dismantling a lifetime of internalised beds. It’s about admitting that a great deal of what you’ve been praised for might have been clever compliance.

And it’s about asking: what did I lose in the process of becoming acceptable?

Underneath these beds is fear.

Fear of bad grades.
Fear of failure.
Fear of being thought of as difficult.
Fear of losing authority.
Fear of being exposed as human.

Leaders fear that if they loosen the bed, if they allow the messiness of real humans, their authority will vanish and chaos will reign. Students fear that if they step outside the rubric, they’ll pay for it. Employees fear that if they bring their full selves, they’ll be punished for it.

So we keep fitting.

But if fear built the beds, then the antidote isn’t motivation or productivity. It’s freedom.

When I say freedom, I don’t mean the modern, weightless version. Freedom as escape. Freedom as doing whatever I feel like. Frankl meant something sturdier. Freedom is not only freedom from, from the tyranny of circumstance, from the labels, from the bed that insists you must fit. It is also freedom to: the ability to take responsibility for a stance, for a task, for a life. In other words, freedom is not the absence of constraint. It’s the presence of inner agency, and the willingness to answer for what you do with it.

Frankl would say: you can’t always choose your conditions, but you can choose your stance toward them. You can choose not to surrender your depth.

And once you reclaim even a little of that freedom, the beds begin to look less like fate and more like furniture. Something you can move. Something you can dismantle.

There’s a temptation, when you wake up to Procrustes, to swing to the other extreme. To reject all structure, all roles, all frameworks. But I don’t think that’s the point.

Some beds are worth sleeping in.

Some structures protect what matters. Some constraints give shape to a craft. Some systems, well designed, can help humans thrive.

The problem is not the existence of beds. The problem is the belief that the bed is sacred and the human is disposable.

The question I’m trying to live into now is simpler. What would it mean to build a life where the frameworks serve the human, rather than forcing the human to serve the frameworks?

In work, it might mean designing roles around strengths instead of forcing strengths into roles.
In education, it might mean teaching for depth, not just performance.
In culture, it might mean refusing the myth that measurable equals meaningful.

And personally, it means treating the ache as a signal, not a weakness.

Because whenever I’ve felt that old resistance, the feeling of being stretched or chopped, I now try to ask: is this a temporary discomfort that comes with growth, or is this the old Procrustean violence of fitting?

The difference matters. One discomfort expands the self. The other erases it.

The Procrustean myth ends with the tyrant defeated, but the deeper ending is this: the road remains. Travellers still pass through. Beds still exist.

The real question is whether we can become the kind of person who notices the bed before we lie down in it. Whether we can resist the flattering offer of “perfect fit” when it comes at the cost of our own depth. Whether we can build lives and organisations that honour the whole human: all the experiences, skills, talents, dramas, vulnerabilities.

A curriculum cannot know a person. A job description cannot name a soul. A framework cannot contain the infinite conversation within us. The bed is not the truth.

I’m starting to think the problem isn’t structure. It’s brittle structure, the kind that mistakes a model for a human being. That’s Procrustes: one bed, one ruler, one idea of “fit”. But art has always evolved differently. It survives through variation, revision, and selection. It allows for ambiguity. It learns from small failures instead of pretending it can eliminate uncertainty. Great art doesn’t demand that life become neat. It becomes strong by staying close to what is real.

And maybe that’s the lesson. A meaningful life should be built the way art is built: draft by draft, through experiments and subtraction, until what remains is sturdy enough to hold the whole human.

Meaning, for me, has begun to look less like climbing into the right bed and more like dismantling the ones that were never mine.

I stole the title of this essay and the story of Procrustes from Nassim Taleb wonderful book of aphorisms: The Bed of Procrustes