My friend told me over the phone:
“I’m glad you’re still so active and have so many interests.”
“I find it hard to want to do… anything really.”
I’ve had at least 4 conversations like this over the past week. More over the past month. A draining sense of apathy, of vague despair. Of pointlessness most of all.
I feel it too. But I am living in active defiance — sometimes ignoring, sometimes free from, and sometimes in direct opposition to this boring, lonely, unsatisfying, slow-motion apocalpse.
I have the pieces of the solution — my solution anyway. It’s the same three words that have been guiding my development all year.
Trust
Connection
Flow
Trust was a tough one to wrangle. It’s never done, but I feel I’m over many of the major humps there.
I am beginning to glimpse the value of flow. Deep work. Intuitive connection. Unthinking passion. It’s a form of grace and meaning. It’s very much not-in-your-head-joy. And lots of it.
It’s connection that has been hitting me. And I just found a new layer of insight, like second fresh, snappy coat of paint on the wall.
We’ve been leaning away from our lives. Who is helping your child’s daycare when they’re overwhelmed? Who is volunteering to coach kids soccer, even though none of the parents have played before?
Who is taking the time to teach that thirteen year-old boy how to talk to girls and what it means to take responsibility for his mistakes?
Not me. I can’t “do” anything else. I’m too busy. I’m too stressed. I can’t handle it. No more commitments. We’re leaning away.
“Someone else”
We’ve learned to say no. To shy away. To decline. To stop putting up a strong front and are collectively just “doing me”.
But there’s no one else. It’s fraying. We’ve dumped our commitments, as many as we can, but we still feel overburdened.
“I can’t take anymore”
How is that possible?
They don’t drain us. I mean, they do. Commitments come with costs.
But god damn.
They also come with connection!!
Commitments create connection. If you honor them — if you lean into your life — they establish and strengthen the bonds between us all. That’s what a fabric of society is.
We’re quickly unwraveling to just a tangle of threads. This is what we’re feeling, but can’t quite put words to. It’s a loss of meaning, yes. But a specific kind of meaning:
belonging
And that’s just connection to each other! We’re leaning away from everything. We’re leaning away from our own lives. We’ve cleared the shelves of anything optional, anything with a rough edge, and accepted cheap replacements — all the while wondering why life feels so hollow.
Lean in. It’s all still there.
Connection, and the commitments we choose, are not the enemy.
It’s our collective, unquestioned revulsion to anything that looks like work. It’s seeing only the costs, compulsively severing obligation, and reacting with abject terror to anything which is not manditory, definite, or worthwhile before even starting — all the while celebrating our independence and trying not to think too hard about that vague feeling that something might be wrong. It’s just anxiety. It’s not my fault. It’s just…
Maybe next time. It’s short notice. I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I should probably. Not today. I don’t feel like it right now. Eh.
We’re turning inward when we should show up. We’re waiting to feel motivated — to feel connected. To feel anything. We’re waiting to feel it. That feeling comes less and less until you’re not so active. You don’t have so many interests. Until you have only things you haven’t done in a while. People you haven’t really seen. It’s understandable. It’s completely normal.
It’s normal and that ain’t good! I think that’s what we’re all feeling. We’re feeling what it’s like, in many different flavors of bad, when no one around you really wants to try, or commit. Not unless all the conditions are right, anyway. Who holds the weight of society when none will carry it?
Cost-first, conditional connection isn’t leaning in. It’s leaning away
Notice when you’re leaning away, and just lean in instead. No qualifiers. How you are is more important than what you do. Always.
I’ve had at least 4 conversations like this over the past week.