Back when I had a proper job from 2013-2018, I remember the dilemma I had every weekend– or ‘quadrilemma’, to be precise. Do I…
- Try and rest, relax and recover for the week ahead? maybe vegetate and play video games and watch tv? maybe exercise?
- Socialize? Meet friends and family?
- Try to get a head start on work at my job, so that I’d be on top of my deadlines and feel good at meetings?
- Work on my own thing?
Sometimes I would feel so torn between all the options that I’d get 0 out of 4 meters filled. I found it difficult to relax when I felt like I had so many other things competing for my attention. I lived a long way away from my old friends, and I struggled to make any good friends in my neighborhood, so socializing would require planning and travel which I never felt like I had the energy to do, and never felt like I was able to ‘justify’. Sometimes I’d make some progress on work, but actually most of the time I think I decided to work on my own writing– which largely paid off. Although when I do a big picture overview of the past decade, I wish I had socialized more, and I wish I had… just treated myself better, gone out more.
I imagine those things will remain true for me as I look out at the decade ahead. And now I have a child, so my actions don’t just affect me and my wife– they also inform my son’s baseline assumptions about what life is like. In my case, my parents ran their own family business, with very little boundary or separation between work and life– the fastest way I can convey this is that my dad would be free to come home for lunch and take a nap afterwards, but he also had an extension of the home office phone in their bedroom. In an odd enough way, I suppose my parents in the 90s lived in a psychological reality that’s not too dissimilar from how current-day people live with work emails and messages sending push messages to their smartphones. Everyone is ‘always on’ now, for the most part. There have been attempts to push back against it, which I commend, but that’s the baseline assumption I’m familiar with (especially in Singapore, which is famously terrible at work/life balance.)
I left my job mid-2018, and have been self-employed ever since, which means I have been self-employed for longer than I was ever employed. The bad news is I’m not a great boss of myself. I did manage other people in my last job and received some positive feedback for it, but I was never quite able to treat myself with the same respect that I treated others. I’d like to think that I’ve gotten better at it over the years, but to what extent? The real proof is in the outcome, and for the most part I’m slightly underwhelmed with my outcomes. I wrote and published 2 ebooks and maybe a couple of decent essays, and I’ve done marketing consulting for a couple of dozen clients. If I search my heart for the truth, I feel like with better management I could have done twice as much, at a minimum. And again, I find myself thinking, as a dad, it feels more important than ever that I do a good job of managing myself.
Has my ‘quadrilemma’ changed? Well, the demarcation between “my job” and “my own thing” has become much blurrier. I think I understand the importance of rest better now. Actually, to give myself some grace, I think I was making decent improvement on every front until I became a parent, at which point the disruptions to my routines and the chronic sleep deprivation smashed my entire operation with a sledgehammer, forcing me to rebuild everything from scraps. It actually does feel like one of those video games where the player loses all their gear and levels and is forced to grind all over again. But the good news in both counts is that there’s always something more fundamental that isn’t lost. I notice that even on my hardest days these past couple of years, I’ve never really become as despondent or depressed as I was in my teenage years, or in my mid-20s. I really do have a handle on that stuff. That’s something I can be proud of.
Still, “I remain psychologically functional” feels like a very low bar, and I’d like to be a little more ambitious than that. I’ve been sloppy with my correspondence, missed an appointment recently, and generally feel like I’m out of sync with my work, my material, my processes. All of those things just feel like they are in disarray. What is to be done? This substack is called Frame Studies, so let’s experiment with some frames.
I’ve established before that a mess is not just a clutter of objects, but of intentions…