Not only do you not have time to read all this, I don’t have time to write all this. But most of it I’ve already written at various times over the last few months. So here it all is, an essay on lack of time due to the cult of optimization.
Let’s start with a honking mess of an uber long paragraph I wrote a few months ago to John, in an attempt to express how I felt about our overly complicated life. The paragraph is a disjointed mess and I’m not going to clean it up, because that’s the whole point. There are times when our life feels like an overwhelming, ridiculously long mess. If you’re in a hurry, you can skim over this first bit; you’ll get the gist. It’s overwhelm.
It’s not just too little time and too much work. It’s too much worry, too much to track, to many headaches and hassles. It’s the plumber being late, and the tenant texting, and the scheduler calling me instead of the tenant, and trying to schedule tiling instead of plumbing. It’s the suspended HELOC for who the hell knows why. And the bank statement with tens of thousands of dollars crediting, then subtracting, then crediting in a wild mess that should be gone over carefully, someday, by whom and when? It’s the water leaks and the oil leaks and the power steering leaks and oh, did we cancel the reservations? It’s the dog sitter texting, when is she coming? Did we cancel, did we reserve, and did she ever get paid? And why haven’t I seen a garbage bill in forever, and is my comcast being paid automatically? Did the magazines for the niece and nephews from last year just auto-renew? Did I authorize that? Is the credit card number even still the same? Are the kids still the right ages for the magazines I selected last year and do they even get them or are they just being thrown out with the junk mail and REI catalogs? I try to pass a bank security check when calling in with a question and I fail. Did we make a $1,000 purchase at Home Depot on some random date sometime last month? We could have. How could I not know? They are incredulous. How would I not know? That much money? Speaking of annoying banks, should I open a new bank account for the rentals? Should we just pay the damn HELOC and be done with it? Why hasn’t that expensive ring that’s supposed to track my health shipped yet? Am I supposed to be watching for houses in Santa Fe, am I supposed to be watching LANL’s job ads, and damn, when was the last time the dogs had their rabies shots? Speaking of shots, should I get a flu shot even though I know I’m getting a migraine? Is my mother seriously going to buy a house with a full flight of stairs but won’t live within a mile of power lines? Should I track when my rings are loose and tight, as part of my health tracking? Is it related to the migraines? Would the electrolytes quit working if I took them daily? Do tiny amounts of chocolate actually cause such bad break-outs? How could one bite matter? And why are half my pajamas in the garage, where is my little white box with my only jewelry that’s worth anything, and am I really already out of plastic bins and I don’t have any more room for them in my closet anyway, and why does John have to fly to Dallas just to buy a car? Is the contract on the boat slip up in December or this summer and where are we going to dry-dock it and why do we even have a boat in New Mexico? Are we always going to be in New Mexico? Should we even have a boat? Is the roof patch going to work and will my ceiling dry out if I’m running my humidifier every night? How is it that it took 3 stores to find an ice scraper, and why do my neighbors have Christmas lights up before Halloween? Are we going to have to put lights up? Is there any way I can stop Christmas this year? I think the kid’s magazines auto-renewed. And I’ve been sending the big bucks to my own kids so, there, done. Is it too late to sign up for an absentee ballot or am I going to have to drive down to Placitas and back in middle of the week? Should I just go ahead and start changing the address on everything – too late for the election of course, but it’s going to need to be done. Oh god, we’ve got dozens and dozens of accounts. On-line consumer accounts, financial accounts, insurance accounts, website and business accounts, obscure charities; how could I possibly remember it all? The LLC’s and their insurance accounts and their tax accounts and the coaching business and everything. By the time I get it all changed we’ll move again. And I don’t understand why we’re buying a dishwasher for the Academy Ridge house because I thought it was the Eagle Crest house that had the bad dishwasher – or was that the one that got the dishwasher we took out of the Santa Fe house?
Next, let’s move on to a rant I wrote in October. It was originally supposed to be a little bit of sisterly advice to my younger siblings, except I never emailed it because it degenerated into a rant about my life. My main point was, “don’t follow my bad example”.
John and I work very, very hard. We have far too much to care for. It’s a mistake, and I’m trying to work with John to come to agreements about getting rid of some of our obligations. So I’m talking from experience – and yes, I’m a kettle calling the pot black, yes, I’m throwing stones from a glass house. Yes, I’m being hypocritical. I’m not walking the talk. I’m telling you, don’t do what I’m doing.
The biggest mistake that John and I have made over the past 10 years is to repeatedly get in over our heads time-wise. Time is a resource the same as money. John and I are generally ok with budgeting money, but we’re not ok with budgeting time. As far as I can tell, Steven is the only one of us 4 siblings who’s not desperate for time. The other 3 of us have time budgets that look like the financial budgets of people who don’t know where the month’s rent is coming from, or even where tomorrow’s groceries are going to come from.
When I write on my blog I try to keep it cheerful, and it’s true, we go and do fun things sometimes. But the reality is, my health and John’s health are clearly declining due to lack of time. We are continually and constantly behind with demands on our time – we’ve got roof leaks in Santa Fe (John’s on the roof in the freezing wind patching it at the moment), there’s a broken dishwasher at one of the rentals, there’s a bank issue I have to deal with, there’s a broken window at a different one of the rentals, we just fixed a big leak under the slab of another rental (water bill of $200, repair bill of $3,500), there’s still a ton of things that have to be done at the Placitas house before it can be sold (and John’s insisting on doing the work himself), the Jeep just died and John plans to fly to Dallas to get the replacement vehicle he wants (why none of the vehicles in Albuquerque were good enough, I don’t know), meanwhile, we’re living in 2 different places, which was supposed to be a temporary situation, but we don’t have time to sit down together and figure out what we want to do about it.
Then Darren complained that people think Millennials are lazy. And Laura sent me about an article about how people think Millennials are lazy, and how hard it is to track everything in this day and age. And I’m like, no. Surely no one thinks Millennials are lazy?
I have personally never, ever heard, read, or encountered anyone suggesting that Millennials are lazy. In fact, I have frequently heard people comment on how hard they work (and how hard it is to keep up with them at our age).
Every hiring manager at work knows the younger generations work harder than the older ones. I have received many complements for hiring a great team. The most common complement references their intelligence. The second most common complement references their young ages. Ageism is rampant in the workplace. Many of us simply won’t hire anyone older than a millennial.
However, I have several times encountered Millennials complaining about being called lazy, so apparently it has happened. It only takes one bad apple to say one very untrue thing, and everyone will remember it because it’s ludicrous.
I also suspect Millennials have an inner voice calling themselves lazy, primarily because there’s not enough minutes in a day to get everything done and they are wiped out, and perhaps also sparked by distant memories of their mothers calling them lazy when they were 14 years old and slouching around, as teens will do.
Secondly, the overwhelm and the burnout, and the reasons for the overwhelm and burnout, are not limited to Millennials. Every single thing about the article, except the actual references to Millennials, applies to my own life. Maybe it’s Millennials and Gen-X’ers. Maybe it’s everyone.
So Laura replies,
“I can imagine burnout isn’t an exclusive Millennial thing. However, it can sometimes feel like it. I was talking to Dad earlier today, and he just doesn’t get it. I work as hard as he did, but I am not as well of as he was at this age. It’s really frustrating sometimes. And like how he treats Darren with the college loans and all. Good for you for working your way through college, Dad, but I’m sorry, it’s a different world now.
When you say, “It’s not just too little time and too much work. It’s too much worry, too much to track,” that’s exactly it. We have not only our jobs (and/or school) but we also have to essentially be the project managers of our own lives and of the people that are a part of our lives. We were talking last week about how Alex feels that I’m always telling him what else needs to be done. That’s because I’m being project manager and I know there’s a looming (but as of yet unknown) deadline, so I’m focused on what I need him to do.
She hit it on the nail right there. I am the project manager of our life, and it’s a ridiculously huge project. It’s more than having too much to do. We have too much to track.
I’ve recently been asking John to take on some of the project management tracking tasks. Because I don’t actually like being the one to orchestrate everything, and he doesn’t like being told what needs done. At first he didn’t even understand what I meant. But I drew a lot of analogies with his job, where he is a project manager, and a very successful one. He’s starting to get it, but I’m still tracking most things myself.
Laura’s article contained a comic about how men are happy to help, but they only help when they are directly asked to help. If they didn’t do something and you get frustrated about it, they’ll be surprised because you never asked them to do it. Because they weren’t tracking it themselves.
It’s true that tracking and managing is an enormous, unrecognized task. It’s true that many women seem better at it than many men, and/or many women seem less willing to let it go and suffer the consequences than many men. Maybe.
But that doesn’t address the growing percentage of singles out there, men and women, struggling equally alone. And it definitely doesn’t address the core issue – why the hell are there so many tasks? Why is there so much to manage? Why do we all have to work all the time? And why does so much of everyone’s work consist of tracking and managing, and not actual “old fashioned” work?
I agree that there are gender differences that may be making it even harder on women than men. But I think it’s more than a gender difference, I think it’s a generational difference.
I think there is a change that is happening everywhere that is creating much more to track than there was in previous generations. At first I just thought it was a change that occurred in my own life, but I think the transition happened with Gen-X.
You’re probably thinking I am talking about the explosion of information technology, the internet, and social media. That’s all true, and it does complicate our lives. But there’s something else completely that I think is going on. There’s been a huge perspective shift about what life is all about and how we should approach life.
The baby boomers approached life with a more fatalistic perspective. What happened, happened. Sure, they held student protests in the 1960’s. People have always tried to improve things in life. But what the baby boomers, and the generations before them, lacked in comparison with our current youth was a sense of needing to optimize every moment in their lives. Maybe the boomers invented the concept, but they didn’t fully adopt it. Mine, Gen-X, was the first generation to start adopting it.
The baby boomers, and the generations before them, generally took whatever job was offered and mostly stuck with it. If their birth control failed, they had a child. They bought whatever house they could, based on what was available that weekend they were moving. If something didn’t work out, it “Wasn’t God’s will,” or “Wasn’t meant to be.”
Then sometime when I was about 30, I was introduced to the idea of optimization. Suddenly we were all being taught to optimize our lives. It became “be all you can be”. It became about “good choices”. The buzzword was “proactive”. Suddenly our lives were being measured by an impossible measure of success. Lack of perfection became our own damn fault, rather than “that’s just how life is.”
The relentless pursuit of perfection. Except it goes beyond even just perfection. Perfection is too narrow, too constrained. Perfection doesn’t understand the concept of diminishing returns. But by diminishing returns, I don’t mean “it’s good enough.” I mean, being aware of, tracking, and accounting for diminishing returns helps keep the entire system in its most optimized state. That’s what “working smarter instead of working harder” means. In order to optimize one’s life, one has to understand the concept of efficacy, one has to internalize proactivity. One has to turn “reactive” into a bad word.
It was the boomers who taught us all this – but most of the average boomers did not adopt it. They were already set in their ways. The adopters were the generations who came after them – in particular, their children, who were raised with this new theory of how to approach time and decision making.
It’s a different perspective on life, and the ramifications are huge. Perspectives aren’t just beliefs. They are the unchallenged roadmap to decision making. Perspectives are why you say what you say, and why you do what you do. And what the millennial generation isn’t saying is, “This is stupid, I’m not doing it anymore.” Instead, the younger generations are saying, “I have to work smarter,” and, “I’m not doing enough.”
Think a moment – why is the millennial generation so ridiculously worried about some tiny percentage of out-of-touch boomers who might have met one lazy Millennial one day and made some unrepresentative comment about it? It’s because on the dark days they FEEL lazy because their goals are impossible and they are exhausted. They are fighting a shadow in the corner no one else sees.
Alex’s house is worth over a million dollars. Except that’s ridiculous. Of course it’s not really worth that in any kind of sustainable way. But Zillow says it is at the moment. So why isn’t anyone saying, “Hell, that makes no sense. I’m cashing out. I’m selling and going to Italy to bum around”? Or “This is stupid. I’m going back to my hometown to work a boring $50,000 job and raise a family.”
No, instead, everyone’s saying, “How do I get that next better job? That next 10% pay bump? That next vital thing on the resume?” The millennials are all going, “How do I exercise more, better, smarter when I have no time or energy?” They’re all saying, “How do I eat better, smarter, faster?”, “How can I make a political difference?”, “How will I take care of my parents who are wholly unprepared for the future?”, “How can I raise flawless children to have amazing careers?” “How can I contribute more to my community?”, and “Is my job as meaningful and fulfilling as my friend’s jobs?”
These are all laudable goals, but Millennials are maxed. They want to save the world. They want to have “meaningful” work and be rich and raise impossibly amazing children. But they’re well past maxed. They’re so maxed, they don’t know what it would feel like to not be constantly optimizing. They wouldn’t know what to do next.
The ways Gen-X-ers and Millennials are raising children nowadays makes me exhausted just reading about it. Pure, unchecked optimization. Every second of every day needs to be in some sort of high-value learning or bonding activity. Every purchase, every bite of food, every input needs to be the absolute best for the child – until one exhausted evening they just can’t do one more thing, so they dig a long-forgotten, freezer-burned popsicle out of the depths of the freezer and hand it to the kid, and then feel guilty for the next two weeks.
Yes, their boomer parents are wholly unprepared for the future. Because most of their parents are reactive, not proactive. That doesn’t mean they haven’t worked hard in life. Some worked heroically hard. But those heroics were out of need, not out of optimization. There was a war on. A spouse died. A teenager got pregnant. Shit happened and the previous generations rose to the occasion when they had to. They were brave and determined. But most of them didn’t go out looking for the next hard thing. They just dealt with it when they had to; when the hard things came to them.
The sad reality is no one is prepared for the future. Most of the boomers are not financially prepared for a long retirement. But those things won’t save us. Whatever hell we will all need to face in 10 years or 20 years – or even 2 years – that hell cannot be avoided by having an expensive house or a good job or having money in the stock market.
The next time it seems like someone is accusing Millennials of being lazy, they should thank them for the inspirational complement. Because the millennials don’t know a damn thing about how to actually be lazy, and they’re going to need to figure it out before they kill themselves frantically working toward goals that have no endpoints. How can we know when it’s enough? We don’t. It’s never enough.
I spent almost 20 years as a life coach, teaching people how to optimize their lives. How to set and achieve big goals. How to get the very most out of their time and efforts. How to continually strive to improve themselves. How to improve not only their circumstances but their very being. Continual self-improvement. I taught them that we can all, always be more. That we are never done learning and growing. I taught them how to raise their own expectations for themselves, every day, every week, for the rest of their lives.
What I didn’t teach them was how to know when it was good enough. I’m sorry.
