I spent far too much of my Sunday wrestling with words in an attempt to understand my current state of mind. The wrestling was fine in the morning, almost enjoyable, but by lunchtime, I felt stuck and as though the day was slipping away from me. I could feel a funk coming on. I went to the Bay to get some fresh air, read, and maybe short circuit the funk. It didn’t work very well.
The state of mind thing seems to have a few interwoven threads that generally add up to me trying to figure out what I’m doing or should be doing with my life. It’s a big question that’s only easy to answer when I remind myself to accept things as they are and I attempt to disabuse myself of the notion that we have a purpose here.
The other night I was talking with one of my friends. He’s looking for work, but is realizing that his past few years in tech have been stressful and somewhat traumatizing. While he talked about wanting to leave the rat race, he’s also realizing that he benefits from the structure employment provides and the sense of purpose he feels. Without work, he’s a little afraid that he’s going out too much and socializing too much. I suggested that going out and socializing might be a natural response to not being employed. I shared with him my “bucket” theory in which we all have a few major domains into which we put our energy and/or draw on for fulfillment. The big buckets tend to be family/friends, work, passions/hobbies, health (mental and physical), and intimate relationships. Ideally, we have a little something in each bucket from which we can sustain ourselves. Ideally, we find ways to replenish the buckets when they get low or draw on the other areas when one is depleted. When life’s going well, all of the buckets are somewhat, if not to the brim full. When life’s not going great, the buckets tend to be empty.
In my personal experience, the buckets are never all full or all empty and they’re seldom close to being the same level. I tend to have one or two semi-full buckets, while the others might be rusted out and leaking. For a good part of my adult life, my focus was on work and my family. I didn’t spend a lot of time with friends, I wasn’t exercising very much, and I didn’t focus on any passions or hobbies. When I became single, I started to put my energy into new relationships, friends, and hobbies/passions.
And this was the state of mind issue that was bothering me: aside from having built some new friendships, I’m not feeling particularly successful in any of the other domains. An encounter with a different friend who asked me how dating was going reminded me that dating is decidedly not going – I don’t pursue it. A viewing of a documentary about ending homelessness in America reminded me that I’m knowledgeable on that subject yet doing nothing with that knowledge. The growing presence of AI is a constant reminder that work can be taken away in a flash and the work landscape is shifting. Reading good and inspiring poets reminds me that I don’t take the craft seriously enough and I don’t dedicate enough time to it.
In short, I spent much of my Sunday trying to determine if my buckets were low or simply neglected. I spent my time trying to determine if the labels on the buckets have changed – if the reason I’m not pursuing things that I care about is because I care about them less. Despite the writing and the self-reflection, despite the probing and questioning, I didn’t come up with any answers. And maybe it wasn’t a funk, and was more a sense of tired complacency. A sense of complacency that says I think those things are still important to me: writing, meaningful work, a decent relationship, but I’m not sure how to go about them. And so I didn’t.