No B.S Friday: Why I’ve decided to not be normal.
Sometimes it can be exhausting doing nothing.
Let me show you what I mean. Put your hands together in front of you like a prayer emoji.
How much energy does that take? Not much right.
Now engage your arms and push your hands against each other as hard as you can.
How much energy does that take? Quite a lot right? If you’re like me, you’ve probably broken out in a sweat.
But from the outside nothing has changed. It's still looks like you're doing nothing.
All that energy being burnt, and nothing is happening.
This is often what I think about when someone tells me that they're exhausted, and they just don't understand why.
“Why am I completely wiped out at the end of the day? All I did was go to work and potter about the house. It's not a big workload. Other people can manage it. Why am I so tired?”
My guess is generally that they've set up some sort of complex within themselves, that burns a lot of energy, and achieves nothing.
And achieving nothing is kind of the point of the complex.
Imagine you have an incredibly annoying co-worker. They're constantly trash talking you behind your back, and stealing your credit and your biscuits from the break room.
You have a powerful urge to punch them in the face.
But you don't. You talk yourself down and contemplate the pictures of Zen Gardens in the foyer. You successfully extinguish the urge to violence.
You have successfully done nothing. But you have burnt a lot of energy in the process. With the left-hand of violence press firmly against the right hand of your will, all day, it's no wonder you feel tired at the end of the day.
The way I see it, being a normal, functioning member of society takes up a lot of energy like this.
We have our primal urges. We want to cage wrestle our co-workers. We want to go full demolition derby with the morons on the commute home. We want to accost the mailboy on his rounds and smoosh his cute little cheeks.
And… we want to break away from this strange reality we have created where we are stuck in these things called jobs doing the same tasks over and over again for years on end. We want to be last seen running into a state forest half naked with a hatchet and a hunting bow.
But we don't.
We don't do any of these things. We show up for work. We smile politely at our co-workers. Will let the mailboy do his rounds. We do nothing.
But this nothing takes a lot of energy. The left-hand of our urges must be held in place by the right hand of our will.
And it's exhausting.
So why are you tired? I don't know. Maybe the meat industry’s right and you're not getting enough iron.
Or maybe we just don't appreciate how much effort goes in to being normal.
JG.