The feeling presents in different ways. It is when work requires an increasing commitment due to that new project and you start to feel yourself losing momentum. It can be the washing machine that goes out sending you to a friend or parent’s house to temporarily wash clothes. More subtly it is the grind from kid’s sports, trying to catch up with friends, keep up with work and stay on top of all the random tasks required to keep a home moving.
The amount of things that required decisions and attention in the modern world is simply too much. This is not a scientific situation because the definition of “too much” is so personal. We all have friends who seem to thrive from packed out schedules and I’m open to the idea that their capacity is just higher. For the rest of us, the normal pace of the modern world is constantly hitting against the upper end of our mental bandwidth and its wearing us out.
The Constant Information Push
If you have a job that involves email communication, then this is where this process starts. Its the constant ping of emails throughout your day that keeps your brain unsettled. I hear about this from friends all the time and it definitely seems to be the most soul sucking aspect of may jobs. The ease of email or intra office messaging is not what our brains are built for. It is the biggest reason why many of us feel like we look back at our average workday and wonder what we really got done.
Stacked on top of the work information flow is the texts and social media information flow that sits in our pockets throughout the day. This makes it way to easy to make our break from work information simply a new source of news or friends information. This isn’t a dive into the dark side of social media which is something that plenty has been written on. The issue is more that our breaks from high information flow jobs is just a different channel of digital information.
By the end of a day, our brains have processed so many screens and so much content between work and our phones that it is exhausting. The challenge is that it creates a hamster wheel that gets so easy to continue to hop back on.
Endless Busy Schedules
This section is definitely skewed to reflect the lives of people with school age kids since that is the world I currently inhabit. The thing I hear constantly from friends is about the pace of life and how busy they are. The simple fact is that the normal offering of activities for kids today is way beyond what it was 20-30 years ago. The activities also ramp up in intensity much faster. Kid’s soccer or baseball is much more involved and time consuming for modern parents and increasingly city facilities are tapped out which leads to more travel for practices and games.
Add to this that most careers see a gradual uptick in hours works as one moves from an individual contributor role to management and its simple to see how the squeeze gets put on anyone with a family. This is the biggest place that I see modern life hitting the wallet. Our brains our extended and distracted, but we now sit in the most refined convenience economy in history. The growth of E-commerce and food delivery puts endless pressure to choose a simple option even though it likely costs more than alternatives. Grabbing a quick fast food meal on the way to a practice is pretty much always over $10 now.
This hamster wheel of two working parents and busy kids schedules keeps us in a state of survival mode. In this state, we are also constantly pushed on by a hyper refined consumer economy that is always removing barriers to purchase. Its just not a situation that humans are built to succeed in.
What can we do?
It can feel like we are trapped in a death spiral especially when modern media is also battling for attention with doomsday headlines. However, the first step in battling against the current state of overstimulation and overspending is simply to start seeing it for what it is. I would compare it to rafting in strong rapids. If you are simply expecting a passive, pleasant ride then you are bound to feel tossed about and off kilter. If you know that you need to be actively avoiding rocks and fighting to be in a safe position then it could be enjoyable.
Here are some ideas for slowing the pace down to help your brain:
- Keep work email off your phone
- Have set times to put your phone away each day
- Be intentional to remove inflammatory content from social media feeds
- Read a paper book for a bit each day
- Talk to your kids about choosing a few activities to focus on
- Have a morning routine that resets you (definitely without a phone in hand)
Here are some thoughts for helping for fighting overspending:
- Make a plan to limit trips to the store
- Keep shopping apps off your phone
- Keep a stock of staple foods for busy days
- Only use food delivery if someone is sick or injured
- Review spending at the end of each month (Easier said than done, but so illuminating)
Fighting the Good Fight
I have seen content increasing in different aspects of this same topic around food, busyness, loneliness and other topics, but the primary theme is always similar. The modern world is too much for how we are wired as humans. It hits us with too much information, too many calories and is engineered to perfection to extract money from us.
The crazy thing is that nothing is forced. If we are paying attention and fighting to improve our day to day then its more than possible to flourish. Hope this article gives you some encouragement in this department.