A Manifesto for the Exhausted

I attended an event earlier this week where I got the opportunity to hear members of my local community practice and improve their communication skills through the Toastmasters International organization. This worldwide network aims to build confidence and public speaking skills in individuals of all professions and backgrounds.

During one of the prepared speeches, a woman said something that has stuck with me for the rest of the week:

When she said that, the whole room went silent and felt the weight of that phrase. It has been swimming around in my mind ever since, and it inspired this week’s newsletter.

Obsessive Doing

At least in America, we live in a culture that is obsessed with doing.

We feel like we should always have to be doing something. Whether that is working on a project, cleaning the house, or some other superficial obligation, many of us strive to fill every gap in our day by doing this or that.

It’s easy to point out obsessive doing in a person who works nonstop, all day long, 7 days a week; that person who is “so committed” to their job that they sacrifice time with their family, loved ones, and even sleep in order to “get more done.”

Many of us are taught early on that our value is directly related to our output. In other words, we are only worth what we are able to produce. This makes historical sense when you consider the development of the modern labor and education systems.

Back in the early twentieth century, when our country was coming out of the Industrial Revolution and turning towards mechanical output, jobs in factories and organized assembly line settings took off. Workers were trained on specific tasks and their evaluation as a worker was determined by how much output per hour they were able to accomplish. The emphasis was on what the person was doing, the being was completely disregarded.

Many historians and educational scholars believe that the true intent of reforming the education system in these days was not to encourage creative or individual thought, but to prepare young students to be more compliant and productive workers in the future. Early education reform was therefore seen as an investment in future employees and economic growth rather than an investment in students.

This has led to a culture whose entire economic and social structures focus on enhancing and optimizing productivity and profit regardless of the social cost.

Overworking, or “hustle culture,” though, is only one manifestation of obsessive doing. Another is a bit more subtle: jamming every moment of “free time” with an activity or task.

Free Time

Most of us spend our free time like we spend our paychecks: it’s gone before it ever hits the bank account.

We realize we have a free day on Saturday, so all week we figure out exactly how we “want” to spend it, and that is usually in the form of doing.

We schedule a day to deep clean the house, do the laundry, run errands, and more until our day off feels just like another work day. Only, this time we worked all day and didn’t get paid for it!

Think about how you spend your unnoticed free time: the time you spend eating, commuting, or working out. Most of us don’t think about this as spare time, but we fill it anyways with “multi-tasking.” We try and smash two seemingly compatible tasks together instead of focusing on them individually in the name of time management.

I am especially guilty of this in my own life!

As one example, I’ve recently become more committed to reading, so I read while I eat my breakfast and listen to audiobooks in the car. I often find myself feeling guilty if I “haven’t been productive enough today,” (whatever that means), and so I try and cram a few more productive crumbs into the last grains of sand in the hourglass.

How silly is that!

The End Game

A common trope we toss around in the workplace is the idea of retirement.

People literally count the days until their retirement and throw huge celebrations that they don’t have to work anymore.

I remember when I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and just started my job teaching elementary music at Walden Lake Elementary. The very first presentation I sat through as I was being processed by the district was on retirement.

Companies all spout off how great their retirement plans and matchings are in hopes of roping in new, unsuspecting employees.

It always seems silly to me that the biggest draw to working at a company is often what they give you when you STOP working there.

We are told that retirement is the reward of a life of doing, but in reality, it is a discovery that most of us don’t know what to do without an assignment.

The National Institute of Health reported that almost one-third (28%) of newly retired individuals report depression. This figure comes from a meta-analysis of original studies on retirees over the last 10 years and shows that retirement, something many of us salivate over, is a gateway for an increased risk of depression.

Why is this, you might ask?

There are several reasons retiring can lead to depression, but one of the chief causes is a loss of identity or purpose. Many individuals define themselves by their work, and losing this role causes a crisis of self-worth.

In other words, we define ourselves by what we are doing and when safe pieces of that puzzle fall apart, we fall apart with it.

We get told what to do for 30+ years of our lives, and in those 30 years we are constantly evaluated on what we do, and if we do the right things, then we suddenly have no more doing to do.

Retirement is when we strip away the mask of the “Professional” and reveal the poverty of the “Person.”

This proposition is completely bonkers, if you ask me.

To be clear, I’m not saying that having a chore day is a necessarily bad way to spend an available Saturday or that working a job until retirement is a recipe for depression. I am trying to highlight that we are primed for doing in almost all areas of our lives, and that doing is, for many people, their only focus.

Doing Culture

A doing culture defines itself by:

• Accomplishment, productivity, goal-setting, and results

• Identity is linked to work and what one achieves

• Time is measured linearly and is future-oriented, valuing efficiency and deadlines

• Status is earned through performance, money, assets

Even as I read back some of those lines, I notice their claws in parts of my own life. I’ve seen being busy as a virtue, engrained in me by an extremely hard-working mother. I worked three jobs and was always the person to say, “Let me check my calendar to see if I’m free,” and then never get back to you because I “got busy” doing something else.

We’ve collectively built a cathedral to the clock and to the time card, only to find that we have no time to pray.

Forcing ourselves to overfill our capacity with productivity leads to burnout, depression, and disconnection. These can include symptoms like:

• Exhaustion: physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion from prolonged stress

• Inefficacy: feelings of reduced productivity, accomplishment, or capability

• Behavioral: increased irritability and using substances to cope

• Numbness: feeling emotionally “flat” or empty

• Social withdrawal: actively avoiding friends, family, and social gatherings

• Relational distance: preference to spend time apart and a lack of intimacy

• Escapism: using distractions like social media, TV, or games to avoid reality

When I left teaching and embarked on this new adventure, the biggest shock was to my calendar. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, not only did I have nothing “to do” but I got to actively choose what I wanted to do with my time.

Being Culture

The antidote to doing is being.

A being culture, on the other hand, defines itself by:

• Presence, experience, stillness, and relationships

• Identity is defined by community, family, and inherent qualities

• Time is circular and fluid, appreciating the present moment

• Values quality of life, unity with nature, community values, and intuitive wisdom

By these qualities alone, it appears that being is nearly the exact opposite of how many of us approach our lives.

While the human doing is motivated to diminish the gap between how things are and how we think they should be, the human being is accepting and allowing without any immediate pressure to change things.

Rather than succumb to the egoistic desire for control and to manipulate, we release our responsibility for the outcome.

I think a primary reason we get stuck in these “doing modes” is because we believe that we can tangibly affect the outcome, what happens as a result of our “doing.”

It’s easy to see why we get this idea when we view life as a direct, causal relationship between input and output.

“If I do this thing,” we think, “then it will result in ______.”

The truth is that we have almost no control over anything, whether we do or don’t do, because the infinite web of cause and effect across the Universe is far too grand for any of us to comprehend.

We think we can figure out the “how” by identifying what we “have to do.”

• If I want my business to grow, I have to do X, Y, and Z

• If I want to be fit, I have to do A, B, and C.

• If I want to be ________, I have to do _____, _____, and _____.

Yet, happening all across the world at every second of every day are billions and billions of webs are being spun, and when these lines intersect with our own in a seemingly random way, we call it luck. But in reality, it is just the crossing of two wires that were meant to cross.

We will never see the vastness of the web of existence, and we will never be able to fully comprehend how everything is woven together.

Here’s a quick experiment for you: take a quick glance around your room and pick one object at random. Maybe it’s a book, or a device, or the chair you are sitting on. Whatever it is, it is the product of an infinite number of variables that had to come together exactly as they did for it to be in your immediate reality right now.

You think you bought that desk at IKEA? What about the billions of decisions Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, had to make just to form a company? The trees that had to be planted, grown, felled, and formed into the desk? The events in each person’s life along the assembly line? The mechanism by which the desk got to the store or to you and the tools you had to use to build it?

If you tried to conceive of “how to” get a desk in your office, you’d never be able to make it through the insurmountable infinity of events and relationships that took place, beyond your knowledge, to make it possible.

Your life is just the same. You are just like the person making the desk, or Ingvar Kamprad, or the tree from which it was made. You have no clue how anything you do affects the rest of the world, nor should you bother trying to understand it. Likewise, we will never be made aware of the unknown workings transpiring right now will affect you later in life.

The desk in my office, which is from IKEA, started forming in 1943 when IKEA was founded. Before that, even, when Kamprad was born in 1926. Before that when his parents met, and when they were born, and the list goes on. An infinite number of collisions led to a single desk.

It’s all absurd when you really zoom out.

A Human Being

A state of being is not one in which you do nothing, but one in which you allow the events of the world to unfold before you without the need to do anything about it.

A state of being arises when there is no goal to be reached, no mountain you need to climb, and no need to evaluate your experience against an ideal.

I’m currently reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, and he offers a profound example using a simple bee. He writes,

A bee is not “doing” anything—it is just “bee-ing.”

A tree is still doing things. It’s photosynthesizing, growing new leaves, deepening its roots, and so on. But it is not doing them for any goal, purpose, or outcome. The tree is simply tree-ing. It is being a tree.

The whole of the natural world simply exists, and anything it does is merely an expression of it.

How to “Do” while you “Be”

As we saw in the examples of the bee and the tree, they are still actively doing things. A bee is bouncing from flower to flower, but the bee isn’t thinking, “Oh gosh, I have to go from this flower to the next so that I can pollenate them and then food will grow and it will feed the entire world.”

That would be a lot of pressure to put on the bee.

So why do we put that kind of pressure on ourselves?

A bee has absolutely no clue that its work allows the whole of nature to flourish, nor does it care.

We can be the same. 

If I haven’t been clear enough, let me say it again: none of this is to suggest that we should sit down, meditate, and do nothing.

By contrast, we can actually do more from a state of being when the doing is an expression of the being.

Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the most influential and prolific composers of all time, wrote over 1,000 pieces of music during his life. These were not 15 second sound bites on TikTok. His works total to almost 300 hours of continuous music. That’s nearly 12 full days, 24 hours per day, without stopping.

He also wrote this before the computer or any modern notation software. It was all by hand!

He didn’t write this much music because he thought he “needed” to or because he simply needed something to fill his days. This work was a deep expression of who he was as a person and his devotion to God.

His work was an extension of his being, not focused on doing anything.

(Bach also was married twice and had 20 children.)

When we approach our lives from a state of being, what we do becomes simultaneously better and more irrelevant.

We learn to see that it’s all made up anyways, that we don’t have to pass judgement on anything we do or don’t do, we just simple be.

I want to leave you with a question that profound impact on me:
Let’s assume you’ve made it to “the end.” You’ve made all the money you want to make, you’ve retired, you’ve crossed all the finish lines of the races you want to run. What will you do then? What will you do when there’s not another goal to be met or paycheck to be earned?

Answering that question will take you closer to your being.

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~Coleman

Living Uninterrupted turns 1 year old!

It is hard to believe that this newsletter is coming up on its first birthday! Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter which will be an exciting anniversary edition!