Category: birthday (Page 1 of 2)

There is always a fire to be put out. Sometimes, those fires feel like all-consuming infernos, and it prevents us from focusing on anything else.

***

Ever since my cancer diagnosis in 2022 time has felt like a gravity that pulls at me harder every year. It drags me further from the things I want to achieve. I want to take more control over it–get up earlier, work later, be more efficient–but that’s not how life works, is it? I have a full-time job. A family to care for. My father has been sick. I need more sleep than when I was a young man. Our own government has conspired (more than usual and more violently) against the most vulnerable of our neighbors, which makes it hard to focus on anything else.

In short, the gravity is strong. Stronger than me.

***

I joke that we should all be given money to live and do whatever we want until we’re middle-aged, and then be forced to work until we die. That way we might be able to enjoy life a bit while we’re still energetic and relatively healthy. Because I have to wonder what purpose we’re allowing ourselves to fulfill if we spend our youth stressed out and distracted from our ambitions, and our twilight years too broken down and tired to pursue them?

Of course it’s a stupid idea. Or is it?

***

One year ago I was just beginning a four-month sabbatical. For the first time in my life I had some freedom over what I did with my time. What did I do? Glad you asked.

I wrote. I finished a novel draft and a screenplay.

I watched movies. Immersed myself in the art form that I first fell in love with when I was a kid.

I walked. Tried to get lost once in a while.

I visited my wife at work for lunch. Got to know her coworkers.

I volunteered at the food bank. Met the people that help those who have been failed by our government and society.

I got involved in the local political scene. Tried to do good in the community.

In many ways, I became more of the person I have wanted to be for years.

And then I had to go back to work.

***

I often think about the amount of time I’ve wasted. Standing in line. Waiting for meetings to start. Being in meetings. Browsing social media. Driving from one place to another.

I started a poem once about asking Heaven’s data analyst (named Dan because I’m pretty sure all data analysts are named Dan) about how much time I lost doing these things we have to do for no other reason than we designed systems that waste our lives. I tried to turn the poem into something hopeful by re-framing our lives not as the number of hours lost doing meaningless things, but the amount of time spent doing things that make us happy. Holding our loved ones. Petting dogs. Laughing with friends.

But it felt disingenuous. I never bothered to finish the poem.

***

If we spend a third of our lives sleeping, and nearly another third at school or at work, how do we make the most of that last third? For many of us, we can’t. We’re too tired. We have other responsibilities. That gravity just keeps pulling us deeper down. And all we can do is reach for the infinite possibilities in the sky above us, even as it gets further and further away.

***

If you can’t do those things, does it mean you don’t want it badly enough? Does it mean the world has conspired against you in some way to prevent you from realizing your ambitions? Is there blame anywhere, either within oneself or with society at large or with the Universe itself?

How much great art have we lost out on because a single mother didn’t have the time, energy, or support system to create? How many people with disabilities could have created something deeply meaningful if only the world wasn’t working against them? What of incarcerated artists? The working poor? Those who decide that instead of dedicating themselves to art, they will dedicate themselves to their community?

Should art be a privilege for only those with time, money, or both?

***

The standard advice is to protect your time. Guard it with a fierceness reserved for insecure men in law enforcement. When you want to write, put a “do not disturb” sign on your door. Find 15 minutes each day to write 100 words and in a year you might have a long short story. Get up at 5AM and write, bleary-eyed and hurried. Sacrifice one thing for another. Choose. Always choose.

***

I wish I had something constructive to say. Some trick or secret I’ve discovered in all the time I’ve wasted fearing that I was wasting time.

I don’t.

My hope is that one day I’ll figure it out.

I think, collectively, we’ve reached a breaking point. Maybe “breaking” is too strong a word. Perhaps we’ve reached a turning point. I know I have. As I turn 38 years old and reflect on the things I’ve learned, about the world as I see it and myself, I’ve realized two things that will definitely make me better off, but I think can help others as well.

And so I have two pleas for myself and for you, dear reader: be less efficient and take more risks.

Be Less Efficient

In our need to be more “efficient” (think AI, the current gutting of our government, or even the process-heavy organization you probably work for), we run multiple risks. For one, eventually efficiency circles back around to inefficiency. Efficiency also tends to replace actual know-how.

Efficiency ==> Inefficiency: There are only so many efficiency gains you can make before you tip back to inefficiency. Perhaps this isn’t a great example, but I find it illustrative of the point I’m trying to make. Technology has gotten too simplified. In the constant streamlining of our technology, ostensibly to make it more efficient, it’s actually gotten less efficient. Before, there were dedicated buttons for each task you needed, say, your phone to perform. Now, because we’ve moved to single buttons on things like iPhone or even appliances like washers and driers, it actually takes longer to perform the task you want to accomplish. The greatest annoyance is my life is that I have to hold the power button on my headphones to get them to turn on or off. It’s only a few seconds, but it’s a waste of a few seconds and it pisses me off to no end.

Efficiency in Place of Actual Understanding: I’ve noticed this at work, primarily, and I imagine it’s a problem across most (if not all) industries. This is most noticeable with the rise of AI, but there is an argument to be made it’s gone on for much longer than that. Instead of doing the difficult work of research or even just reading to understand what it is we’re responding to, or meant to be doing, we have increasingly relied on technology and process to do that heavy lifting for us.

We use AI to summarize articles for us. We lean on process in place of seeking understanding of what we’re meant to do and why. While these things may lead to efficiency gains, are they actually helping us? Are we learning and growing when we rely on technology or process to guide us through the hard parts? What happens as technology gets less efficient or, as in the case of AI, less accurate? What happens when processes become too heavy? I don’t know, but without the understanding gained from doing the difficult parts of *insert task here*, we may lose the ability to do *insert task here* at all.

As a corollary to this, people that lean too hard on technology or process also deflect blame. It can’t be there fault if the process failed, right? If the AI didn’t have the right answer, how could they?

Be Less Efficient: I think the answer is simple, and that’s to do things the hard way. If only to understand how something is done manually, so that if a machine or process you didn’t design fucks up, you’ll be able to recognize it and fix it. That said, I do think there is value in taking the long way to accomplishing a task, sometimes. To really sit with something and work it over in your head gives you a familiarity with it that can make the eventual accomplishment that much more satisfaction.

The other argument here is that doing things the hard way generally leads to better quality. Sure, you can use AI to generate a first draft of a novel or what have you, but it’s going to be hot trash. And because you didn’t do the thinking necessary to turn a good idea into great prose, you won’t know how to fix it. In my line of work I think of this as the “baseline problem.” In my day job we often have subject matter experts helping us to write proposals. Our number one request when starting up a new proposal is to provide baseline from prior proposals to use as a starting point for the writing. The problem is that prior proposals exist in their own context for their own customers, which is likely different than the context or customer we’re currently working within. And so it becomes more work to edit the baseline than if we had just done the work up front to outline and write a crappy (but still better than baseline) first draft.

Personally, I find satisfaction in doing things the hard way. I like the sensation of, say, mowing my lawn with a push mower over a sitting mower. Or handwashing dishes over putting them in the dishwasher. There is a tactile sensation that gives me a sense of being connected with the moment, with the task, or maybe (at the risk of getting too highfalutin), the world. I feel this way about nearly everything, personally and professionally.

Take More Risks

I’ve been risk-averse most of my life. Instead of leaving my hometown at 18 to attend an arts school that had accepted me for creative writing, I stayed local. Instead of going to California and leveraging some contacts I had made to couch-surf and take a run at working in film, I went to DC. So on and so forth, decisions big and small.

Around last July, maybe early August, I decided to take a sabbatical from work. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time and kept putting off. There was always some reason not to do it–money, primarily. But with the cancer scare and the way my time keeps slipping away from me, I decided I had to. There would never be a good time, so why not just do it?

Today is day 3 of my sabbatical.

There are lots of risks. Money, for sure. But also because, for the first time in my life, I’m prioritizing myself and the things I want to accomplish. Which means, for the first time in my life, I have no excuses for not accomplishing the goals I set. Over the next four months I am responsible only to myself, which is sort of a scary place to be. If I lack discipline and don’t accomplish the goals I laid out, will I have more regrets as my time is once again eaten up after I go back to work? Will I be faced with regret, or the the knowledge that perhaps I’ll just never be successful at the things I thought I cared about so deeply since I was young?

Doesn’t matter. None of that matters right now. What matters is that I’m taking the risk to do it. Whatever the outcome is, I’ll have learned something.

And so I implore you, too, to take a risk. I can’t in good conscience recommend a risk that could upend your life (I’m certainly not doing that), but maybe you want to find a new job and are afraid of a potential pay cut or that you won’t be able to find one, or you want to buy a house and are worried about interest rates or return on investment. Maybe you want to ask a neighbor over for dinner and aren’t sure they’ll accept or that you’ll get along. Maybe you, like me, want to write something that feels true to you and are afraid it could be too revealing or that it will be rejected by those that read it.

It doesn’t matter. Do it, anyway.

It’s a cliché, but life is short. Just under three years ago I wasn’t sure I’d ever see 38. With most things in life, in failure there is always opportunity to recover.

I think there is a perception, or at least I’ve always had the perception, that life gets easier as you get older. Maybe it’s because you gain some amount of freedom you hadn’t experienced before. Maybe you get a stable job and no longer have to worry about money (as much). You get married and have a kid (or a few) and aren’t as lonely. Or any number of possible things that can improve as time marches on.

What I’ve found over the course of my 37 years is that life is always hard for most people, most of the time. It just becomes hard in different ways. While owning a home and having a child and maintaining a marriage and having disposable income are all great things, it’s also really hard to maintain a home and raise a child and share your life and be responsible with your money. We work so goddamned hard when we’re young to lift ourselves up, earn the responsibilities that we’re told make us successful adults, but then need to learn how to shoulder the burden of those responsibilities. The margin of error shrinks with each one. It’s terrifying.

Although I’ve not quite reached middle age (all being well), I have reached a point in my life where I’m beginning to lose more than I gain. Eight years ago, I lost my grandfather. A few months after my son was born, I lost my oldest friend. This past December, I lost my mother-in-law. Going forward, I’ll likely attend more funerals than weddings. I know all too well that Death hovers near all of us, all the time, and will reach for you at random.

I say all of this only to acknowledge that life is hard. For most of us, most of the time, it’s always been hard and will continue to be hard.

And that’s okay. Because we level up as the difficulty rises. Sure, sometimes we fail, or we retreat. But most of the time we learn to manage it. We become wiser. Get stronger. Understand ourselves better. There is value in that as part of what it means to get older and to live a life well lived.

For a brief time I wasn’t sure I’d see 36, let alone 37. So, even though things are hard right now, even though most days I feel like I’m barely treading water just balancing my day-to-day responsibilities (to say nothing of my ambitions and dreams, which are largely ignored nowadays), I’m grateful to feel it at all. Feeling like I’m about to crumble under the weight of my responsibilities means I’ve built a full life. It means I’ve achieved things and now must maintain them. Feeling this way means that I am here, experiencing all that life can throw at me and I’m making it through.

After COVID, and having a child, and getting cancer, and losing people I love, I’ve realized that I am resilient. Resilient and persistent.

So are you.

Remember that as things get harder, and they will always get harder. We are resilient and persistent, and life is worthwhile because it is hard.