Royal Fatigue

The glorification and glamorization of busy.

PART I

“What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

-- Bertrand Russell

Disclaimer: this primarily of advice to myself and to my fellow entrepreneurs. It may be applicable to most of you reading, but please do not take offense if you truly believe that your use of time and your attitude about that does not apply to these words.

For a few years now my life has gradually become an invisible but full fledged tax write-off. I categorize every experience as if it were an expense. Those time expenses that can benefit my workflow or my business and general survival -- so that my brand will live too. Gone is rest and leisure unless categorized under "reference material" or "studying" -- all for the purpose of applying any sort of profitable time into work. I have trained myself to become a workaholic to the point that my body physically reacts negatively to rest. My body will not allow itself to relax. It's the strangest and most contradictory form of selfishness I've come to know.

I've been reflecting on these problems for months and constantly find myself struggling with it. I struggle with balancing living life and the pressures of productivity like a smoker who has been working on quitting for a decade. I realized a few things during this time. It's not just me. This is as much a cultural norm as pumpkin flavoring in the fall.

I thought for forever that I was simply genetically predisposed to have obsessive work ethic. Members of my family have literally gone nuts as a result of nipping these behaviors in the bud too late. But then, after those people in my family fixed themselves, I wondered what it was that still seemed to pressure me to be twice as productive as the day before. I of course am responsible for my actions, but something outside of my own attitude still loomed over me. 

I want to be productive, I want to use my time wisely, and I want to benefit from my work... But what room for benefit do I have if all of my time is spent working?

I soon started to notice, mostly upon my fellow entrepreneur friends, that rest and leisure are now seen as an expensive luxury, instead of as necessity. It's a rare treat you receive after traveling X amount of miles or answering Y amount of emails. All normalcy looked as if it had escaped from my fellow artists' lives. Their work is their life. As is mine. 

Being too tired is so glamorous, isn't it? Busyness and fatigue are badges. Those badges no longer represent fathers and mothers who have resentful children because they're not really with them even when their parents are present. Those symbols project "I'm going places, I'm getting more done than you are therefore I am more successful, I am worth more, I'm tired because the world needs every moment of mine, I'm busy because I'm important, I'm important." 

You know how you feel when you look at old Hollywood photos? The glamour in partying, leisure, vacation, gigantic libraries, camping. It was all so gorgeous and interesting. Now, all my feeds tend to be about hopping planes to New York, reading books for blogs, meeting friends for meetings, and posting photos of food from those meetings. Is there nothing left for ourselves to be done in private, anymore? Nothing that can't be judged by our followers/subscribers/customers? 

Say you are very good at balancing your business and you life. That's great. You put your computer away at five and take the rest of the day for yourself. But. Now I'm guilty of this. You're also the first person to take a photo of your glass of wine or your meal or you cuddling your cat. Like how a new mother shows off her child. You are making your recharging time your work. Any person with a business knows that social media can be a full time job. Stop that. This time is for you, not a chance for 73,000 other people to give you their opinions on your food and drink. These photos or your Netflix binge and check-ins to restaurants at airports and clubs in big cities become their own badges. A public pat on the back for a reward that you allowed yourself to experience because you were productive. Let everyone know you deserve this slice of pizza today because you finished an eight hour shoot.

You could have called your mom in the time it took for you to choose a filter and come up with something interesting to say. What of those two thing is more valuable than the other? The last time I talked to my mom was almost two weeks ago. Not because I don't want to, it's just that doing anything outside of working sounds like the most daunting task in the world. Ironic, right?

Now, I know all too well the importance of social networking. It seriously almost does require 24 hour activity in order to sustain relevance. But it must to stop somewhere.

Since I've been in Nashville I've been trying to get out more. Going to events and parties and openings and the like. It's been a blast and I've met some interesting people. But let's be honest. It's been for work. Not just for the sake of it being fun. It's networking. It's making appearances to tweet about later. I probably would have had a lot more fun if I wasn't thinking about what other people thought about my work or what I was going to say about my going out later.

We are not super humans. When we try to expect that kind of performance from ourselves, we will always fail and that feels awful. Particularly for a person like you and I. Every day this week has been awful for me. I ran out of juice. 

It's an ugly cycle. Getting up before the sun does, fitting in a workout, coming home for breakfast, ripping into work during breakfast, taking a break to shower, and then spending the next twelve hours finding and making up ways to be productive... there's not enough coffee or B12 in the world to sustain that kind of lifestyle consistently. And I know that. But I still do it. I fear losing the glamour of busy. I fear sitting with only myself and focusing only on what's in my head because I know there's not a whole lot left in there at the moment other than a to do list for tomorrow or the movie I watched last night. This makes me so tired, but not in the ethereal moody way you see on tumblr. 

A popular internet figure posted this pretty photo on their tumblr. It's partially what compelled me to write all of this. This is another somewhat relevant piece of media that came to my attention after finishing this photo set.

This week I've been too tired to work the way I usually do, but have also acquired a tremendous amount of guilt from being normal and watching an entire Netflix documentary without editing photos or video or checking email while doing so. That moment I took for myself felt wasted, but waste and productivity can mean completely different things to the next person. For me, it was an accomplishment.

Give yourself some credit. Stop trying to feel guilty. For me, reading a chapter in a book is an accomplishment. If I can do that without checking my email, I've done a good for that day. For some of you, being productive might mean getting the kids to school alive. That's great. Don't define your levels of success, productivity, or even leisure based on your favorite model on instagram. You will make yourself sick. It happened to me because of me. So be wary of your expectations of yourself as well. Your self worth is not measured by your busyness, whether it be private or public.

I'm going to work much harder on this in the next couple of weeks and I'll report back to you with a few new photos as well. I encourage you to at least reflect on your attitude toward yourself in correlation with time. Perhaps considering if it's something you need to tweak some. Maybe you don't need to change at all. But we would never know that unless you took a break to think about it, right?

Please feel free to supply your thoughts on this matter or to follow up with me if you have decided to change anything!