When he said “I do businesses to hunt more insights”, I really felt that. Great little snippet from the great Knowledge Project podcast.

Most companies don’t get it. Most people don’t get it. To them, problems are a sign of failure. They think that the default state is perfection. They believe that if we just worked hard enough — planned hard enough then there wouldn’t be any problems. The only reason we fall from that perfect state is that someone, somewhere screwed up. But that’s not reality. The default state for our reality is chaos. It is ruin. It is entropy and erosion and human nature. We build things to make a better world, and yeah, part of that is people failing. People fail all the time. That sucks, but you’re not going to change it. So you might as well do a good job living with it.

This is really what we all need to cope with. The times we live in are chaotic, filled with uncertainty, fear, and a sense of impending doom. So much so that even our children are suffering at historic rates.

But as I deal with my own struggles to make sense of things, I continue to fall back on accepting that we've always lived in a world that is rife with turmoil. All we can do is go along for the ride, appreciate what we have, and be grateful for those who we can lean on to help navigate it together.

There is too much in this article to even grab a single pull quote from. The entire thing is worth reading from top to bottom.

It did make me think a bit about how I can apply some of this knowledge to my own life. I personally struggle with “what will I be when I grow up” from time to time, and I think even simply knowing that this is not abnormal is helpful.

I think what many people really want from money is the ability to stop thinking about money. To have enough money that they can stop thinking about it and focus on other stuff.

But that ultimate goal can break down when your relationship with money becomes an ingrained part of your personality. You struggle to break away from focusing on money because the focus itself is a big part of who you are.

This, 100%, is me… and if you can relate to that yourself, give this whole article a read.

Under pressure, our free time – our entertainment time, our recovery time – tends to devolve into mindlessness. You know, scrolling social media. Re-watching the same show repeatedly. Numbing and zoning out. Nobody has the energy to learn how to play Axis & Allies after working for 12 hours.

Similarly, at work, people under pressure tend to simplify. We spend less time engaging socially, having fun, and experimenting. We crack down into Serious Business Mode.

While this can be a reasonable adaptation to get through a rough patch, it’s unsustainable. As we get burnt out, it gets even harder to play, reinforcing the cycle. All work and no play makes Jack something something.

Humans need play.

This all makes sense when you understand what your brain wants.

It doesn’t want nice cars or big homes.

It wants dopamine.

That’s it.

Your brain just wants dopamine.

There is a kind of brain fog that feels unique to early parenthood, and yet I know it isn’t. It’s the same sort of disorienting haze that envelopes anyone who finds their time is not really their own, but rather has been sacrificed to another purpose, voluntarily or otherwise. You lose pieces of yourself, little by little, often unnoticed, until one day you begin to emerge from your experience without the faintest idea of who you are, or even who you used to be.

I had this realization when I first got Covid last year, and it’s been gnawing at me a ton lately.

Ever since having knee surgery, I’ve gained weight to the point where I’m almost the biggest I’ve ever been.

My daily routine is just not at all what I want to do. What’s a day in my life, you asked?

I wake up around 6a and immediately grab my phone and doom scroll. Then I wake up and get breakfast prepped for my wife and kids, then I work.

I work from 6:30a until 5p, only taking occasional breaks to interact gruffly with my family and coworkers and stuff unhealthy junk into my body.

The unhealthy stuff has gotten worse over the last few months. I hadn’t had pop in nearly 2 decades. Now I find myself grabbing a Sprite from time to time. I also eat as much sugar as I can bear in as many forms as I can.

After work, I come home and if I’m lucky, I chat with my wife and eat some dinner, then I play with the kids. If I’m not luck and had a particularly tough day (which is the norm as of late), I come home and sit on my phone until it’s time to put the kids to bed.

I do like getting the kids down, it’s a routine I rather enjoy. Vitamins, pajamas, an episode of something, a few books, then tucked in.

After that, I sit on my phone while the tv blares something I’m only half paying attention to in the background. I eat more sugar. Eventually, I move to bed where I continue on my phone until pass out from exhaustion.

A night filled with awkward dreams and uncomfortable sleep greets me at this point (try sleeping with a heavy brace that keeps your knee locked straight). Then, I get to wake up and do it all again.

That routine sucks. It’s no wonder I’m itching for a change. I want to spend meaningful time with my kids and wife. I want to get involved with activities that bring me joy, like working out, tinkering with hardware, or programming new websites. I want to spend time hanging out with friends and folks who give me energy.

I’m heading out of town for an extended business trip here soon. I think I’m gonna budget my life a bit better while I’m there, and when I return, I’m gonna make some changes.

Because life has a way of making you forget who you are.

And when I start to remember the things that used to make me happy, it can only make life better for me and those who have to put up with me.

Human nature is to put boundaries around the loss, so we know it’s something that happens to other people. We say that they’re in a better place or to just remember the good times, because if we spoke the truth – that tragedy comes for us all, that sometimes life is random and cruel and painful and beyond comprehension – I mean, how would we even function?

Death has been on my mind a lot lately. Both of my kids continually ask about it, and a coworker of mine is grieving a very recent death in their family.

This is the conclusion I inevitably come to: death does come for us all, randomly and painfully and mercilessly.

The only way I’ve found to cope with the concept of death is to be grateful to be born in the first place. What a stroke of luck we have to even be alive.

In the words of Jeff Mangum: “How strange it is to be anything at all.”

…but this year will be different!

Anytime you try to control or reverse disorder, you introduce tension. This is true on a sociological level, where any attempt to organize people inevitably leads to rebellion. But more relevantly, it’s also true at the individual level, and is particularly poignant in our desire to control time.

This same thought (trying to control disorder) has been going through my head a lot lately, but I’ve only ever applied it to political discourse or workplace drama. I’ve never once thought to apply it to time.

Burnout is often associated with working too much, but the real reason it happens is because you have defined yourself by what you produce. It’s not just the exertion of energy spent during your working hours, but the exertion of thought spent during the time you’re not working. It lives in the moment where you’re physically with your family, but mentally planning out what you need to do next. Or when you keep looking at the time when you should just be enjoying lunch.

Again, as a recovering entrepreneur, I’m only now becoming aware of how awful my compulsive need to check in on my team had become.

I’m striving in 2023 to better utilize time as an ally, and to build back the healthy habits that I’ve surrendered in the name of maximum productivity and profitability. Those habits include things I actually used to do (5K run or 2.5mi walk every morning, journaling) and things I keep telling myself I want to do (yoga, biking, playing with my kids, dating my wife).