swamped, but he'll be alright
c'est la vie, friends
Haigh.
Sav here.
And this week, I’m feeling swamped.
I’m waddling, like a lost penguin, into murky waters that go up to my beak and I’m not sure whether it’s a creative slump, corporate burnout, or the titular quarter life crisis.
Alas, in a flurry of strokes against this keyboard — let’s talk about these pieces of proverbial furniture I keep stubbing my toe into.
On creative slumps 🎨
Some people struggle with consistency.
I struggle with starting.
Recently, I’ve found myself in the creative slump of not being able to get any momentum on what I write. I wonder if it’s got something to do with my current job being a lot more word-heavy than the previous one. I wonder if it’s because I’m finding discomfort in my writing environment. I wonder, and it’s most likely to be this one, if I just haven’t given myself the necessary time for words to develop.
In other news, I’ve had this burning urge to do something labourous with my hands. I don’t really care what it is, but I think it would helpful if it was something new. There is a certain flair that comes with doing something new that it makes me okay with sucking, because I have no predetermined expectations to be immediately great.
I want to paint a landscape. I want to play an instrument. I want to bake some brownies. I want to throw a piece of clay and shape it into a wobbly, personalised mug.
It’s still so irrationally difficult to start though.
I don’t know whether it’s a subconscious bias in what I’ve been clicking and searching for, the universe conspiring in my favour or just the Google algorithm getting a hook on how I’m feeling — but I’ve been seeing a lot of posts and videos recently on the innate power of creating things. I’ll be tagging some of them, along with Substacks relevant to my topic of discussion, throughout this post.
This is a reminder to myself that I am permitted to create something. There is no creation to faint. No creation to small. The act of creation, of bringing something to existence that was not there before, of narrowing the gap between ideation and execution — whether it’s a plate, cupcake, journal entry, Lego house, or joke to my dislodged bathroom tile; it is valuable, and it is me. Creation proves that we exist.
On corporate burnout 🔥
Fellas, am I burning out from work?
I don’t think I am, but perhaps that denial is exactly what’s ripping me apart.
I’ve learnt after all that burnout isn’t typically caused by challenging or stressful times, but instead the consistent of weight of something on your back — that heaviness that haves you checking your emails on the train, forgoing the coffee run that you promised yourself in the afternoon, claiming that you’ll finish one last account before closing up for the day.
Surprisingly, three years into the corporate world, and only now am I really playing the hippest, overplayed, highest-grossing turn-based strategy game of all time: Microsoft Outlook. I now understand what it means to be swamped with so many emails that I don’t have the time to do the investigation and analytics work I was primarily hired to do.
The ominously dark sky doesn’t help either. Have I mentioned that I get seasonal depression? That I’m heavily influenced by the amount of sunlight I get?
I’m adamantly against overtime, but I seem to have no problem shortening my one-hour lunch break to a fifteen-minute scramble. Perhaps I need to remember that my full-time employment contract states I work 37.5 hours per week. Perhaps I need to remember that it is federally mandated that employees cannot work for more than 5 hours continuously without a 30-minute unpaid break. Perhaps it’s actually fine that I leave a little later, if I could fit an hour’s run across Circular Quay and Darling Harbour.
This is a reminder that I’m not in the business of saving lives. Nobody will collapse if I’m away from my desk for ten minutes more than necessary — and if something was really urgent, I’d get a phone call telling me that that’s the case. There will be crunch periods I cannot avoid and I should forgive myself for them. It pays me significantly more than my job to give my body and heart the good, adequate rest they need.
On quarter life crises 🔮
At least once a year, though usually more than once, I get some kind of quarter life crisis.
I have yet to be hit with a proper crisis per se, but it’s this looming unease that undercurrents my day-to-days like a stuffed nose, enough to make me space out in the middle of the road and get honked at by incoming traffic.
Let’s call it the quarter life pickle.
Because it’s a bit of a nuisance.
Because it’s a little comedic.
But also, because it’s something I think is very, very integral to the multilayered burger that is life.
(Even though I’m not the biggest fan of pickles)
I’ve developed some disdain towards how I’m spending my time — not because I don’t enjoy it, but because 1) it’s not indicative of the future I’d like to live 2) nor does it build towards that extraordinary future.
The future I want is one where I can choose when and where and how much I’d like to work, where my family’s livelihood would not be dramatically impacted if I stopped.
The future I want is one where my wife can run, I don’t know, a flower shop that loses thousands of dollars a year but brings so much joy to her and the community that we just let it happen.
The future I want is one where I can be alongside my kids during the most joyous and boring times in their life, spending three hours in a row playing Uno if that’s what they want to do.
The future I want is one where I can work on projects that are meaningful to me, no matter how they manifest, whenever I want.
This could be the course-seller, red-pill-mentality, hustle culture bro speaking in my ear: but it seems like the only present-day way to get there is to build a business or agency of some kind.
It feels like something that I ought to fast-track now because if I don’t get it off the ground in my 20s, my kids would take priority in my 30s, and the golden handcuffs would chain me in my 40s and perhaps I could actually get some movement during my 50s but by the time I succeed — if even I do, I’d be retired, exhausted, and not even have the will to spend it.
Honestly though, as I typed that down, I realise how much time that actually is.
I’ve got my 20s to experiment, 30s to try, 40s to try again, and perhaps a few decades of shots-on-goal after that. There is so much I could do in a single year. What about a whole ass lifetime?
This newsletter is one of the things I’m trying right now. Perhaps it’s fleeting. Perhaps it’ll stay forever. IT’s my side project right now, but only God knows what it would be next year.
I like to think my 28-year-old self is better connected and more knowledgeable than my 24-year-old self, and that he is nothing close to the expertise of my 35-year-old self, or the connections built of my 48-year-old self, or the veteran familiarity that comes with my 65-year-old self; with a string of failures and successes under his belt, feeling like he has finally garnered enough experience to give life a go.
This is a reminder that life is both short and long. Life is short; so take action now, and make the most of your relationships, experiences, and savour each moment of the day. Life is long; so plant the seeds of today to power your tomorrow, you have plenty of chances to reinvent and reinvest yourself. Your greatest resource is your young, malleable mind and like a car at night: even though you can only see the road directly in front of you, you always seem to end up at your destination anyhow.
