I can’t get anything done today
I wake up, probably later than I should.
I have a thousand things to do.
But...
I have nothing especially I have to do.
Which is a bit like having nothing to do? Except for the added guilt.
It’s a day where, if I didn’t have to walk the dog, I’m not sure when I’d get out of bed.
Yesterday was similar. Tomorrow, likely.
I am extremely self-employed. I work mostly alone, always from home. This is the free and self-determined life I’ve designed for myself.
And right now it’s melting my brain.
Envy
Dog and I make it out the door. I call my girlfriend. She tells me what her day has in store. I envy the structure she’s made for herself.
I can do this too, I realise. Decide ahead of time what’s on my schedule day to day. I’ve done this well in the past.
But that’s a solution for Future Me. Current Me would have to take the initiative there and, well...
The walk ends. Girlfriend heads off to keep her schedule. Dog gets started on his busy day of cycling between the best spots on the floor and couch.
Oh no. Here we are again.
The quantum to do list
I mentally consider the list of things I could be doing. Several important items. None yet direly urgent.
When there are so many tasks you could do, but none that must be done today...
You write the list, but it just keeps going.
My to do list takes up two then three columns in my journal. It looks less like a list and more like a constellation.
The gravitational pull of any one item is diffused across the wider body of possible outcomes. A quantum probability cloud.
Somewhere inside is to be found the day I’ll actually have, but it’s anybody’s guess.
With a list this big, doing nothing feels almost the same as doing something
I might try taking the morning off because I’m still tired from yesterday, but feel guilty all morning and not really rest. Or I'll take the whole day off (because I did work on the weekend) but somehow the next day I’m even more tired for having done nothing the day before.
Not a simple, had-a-big-day kind of tiredness. It’s something else. A kind of frozen sadness? A stalled hibernation - the less I do, the more it creeps in.
I’m starting to wonder if there’s a bigger clue here, in this tired and sad feeling. If it actually makes a kind of sense?
Maybe I’m not just wrestling with a list of tasks, day to day. Zoom out and I know I’ve been dealing with this same problem for years.
Maybe I’m tired because I’m also wrestling with a much bigger question, about how to live a good life.
(Cue dramatic musical stab.)
Careful what you wish for
When I was 32, I quit my job to go freelance.
I had no firm idea of where my next paycheck would come from, so when I signed my first contract - for a piece of work a fraction the size of my previous salary - I felt like a god.
I played Queen’s "Don’t Stop Me Now" at full volume. I probably sang along.
That contract didn’t solve all my financial worries in one go, but it meant potential. It meant freedom.
And it meant blessed solitude, the autonomy to design my own work and workdays.
OH NO WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.
I still wouldn’t really trade it in, at least not altogether. I do want more structure and connection, and on my lighter days I know I can probably make that happen, if I’m patient enough.
But after seven years of working this way I can look back and see the bigger tension baked into the whole set up.
The tension of modern life as a whole.
Freedom vs Responsibility.
Autonomy vs Connection.
At 32, building up my dream freelance life, I felt I’d solved these tensions once and for all (in the work arena at least). The perfect solution for my unique introvert self.
Now I wonder if maybe these tensions are in fact just not solvable. If they’re not just the stuff of life, the choices we must weigh up again and again, in all the various areas of our life.
"A person and someone"
Much of this comes down to how we think of ourselves: as a rugged individual moving through life essentially alone? Or as part of something bigger?
The challenge is that of course we are really both, but we can lose sight of this.
You could argue that our particular historical moment has over-indexed ‘individual freedom’ as the prime value, the most important thing to reach for in our lives.
Paediatrician Donald Winnicott famously said “there is no such thing as a baby, there is only a baby and someone” - referring to the simple fact that infants can’t survive alone.
Writer Louise Perry expands this idea to adults, suggesting that we could just as well say “there is no such thing as a person. There is only a person and someone”. After all, we start our lives dependent, end our lives dependent, and in between form all sorts of family or family-like attachments.
But dependence can be an uncomfortable proposition
As I wrote about in my book, many of us struggle with belonging.
It’s hard. It’s tiring. It’s confusing. And when our inner world gets particularly complicated, the thought of being a burden to others is deeply painful.
So the appeal of individual freedom is strong.
So strong, I know that I personally can focus on freedom at the expense of other important factors of a good life, like belonging, responsibility, and connection - especially when all of those other things feel largely out of reach.
I think this Glennon Doyle quote just about sums it up:
“Wait, what? I’ve been trying to find my balance by eliminating pressure from my life. The demands of work, friendship and family all felt so heavy. But what if all this pressure isn’t what’s throwing me off, but what’s holding me steady? What if pressure is just love and love is what keeps me anchored?”
Graham 2023
Lately I’ve been really leaning into this idea of pressure as a kind of anchoring force, not in my work life, but with my friendships.
I’ve been doing *way* more socially. I’ve been saying ‘yes’ to invites of all kinds, and even actively finding events to invite other people to.
Unnecessary socialising!? Who have I become??
My girlfriend excitedly calls this new character “Graham 2023”.
(I vetoed “Graham 2.0” because it felt a little too much like a criticism of “Graham 1.0”, who I maintain was just doing his best. We decided “Graham 2023” has more of an upbeat, campaign quality to it. As in, “Vote Graham 2023! Honk honk!”)
This has been a very conscious, deliberate shift, and while tiring at times, it’s been incredibly rejuvenating at a deep soul level.
My listlessness with work can actually be reframed as kind of a good thing in this context. I’m doing more with my weekends, so right now I’m not approaching Mondays with the same kind of energy and focus I once did. This actually feels like a reasonable trade off, all things considered, even if a new balance will eventually be found.
Stepping into something bigger
All this leaves me wondering if maybe the same kind of shift could happen with my approach to work, and what that would even look like.
We’ve got some big news about Big Feels Club in the works (almost confirmed, potentially very exciting). However it pans out, the theme for both the club and me personally is: taking on more responsibility, doing more.
This is pressure, sure. A challenge to my personal freedom, no doubt.
But could it also be the kind of anchor Glennon Doyle talks about? A chance to step more into something bigger than myself once again?
We shall see…
Seasons
While my big “Graham 2023” social shift was both deliberate and conscious, I can’t really explain why it’s had so much momentum at this particular point in my life, compared to many previous attempts to be a more social person.
Maybe it was just time for the seasons to change.
Likewise, my work life may feel like a strangely sad, often overwhelming slog right now, even as I periodically actually get some pretty good stuff done. I can puzzle over this paradox endlessly, and perhaps find some important answers about how to approach things differently.
And at the same time, perhaps there’s also something perfectly natural about all that, and that’s simply the season I’m in right now in that part of my life.
Again, we shall see…
— Graham
