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Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Fatigue, Failure, and Burnout: A Crash Course in Adulting



Burned out. That word pretty much summarizes my state of mind right now.

I don’t even know why I feel this way, really. I don’t have the most leisurely life on earth, but my life’s far from being unmanageable.

I have a pretty stable job with a relaxed work environment, and a reasonably supportive family to come home to. So why am I feeling like a drowned rat?

Well, information overload should certainly shoulder part of the blame.

Over the past year, I’ve been reading every book and watching every video I could get my hands on, that had anything to do with productivity, success, digital marketing, novel writing, or publishing. And I’ve gotten some fantastic advice and bucketfuls of motivation.

Plus, I’ve had more epiphanies than I can count in these last few months.

Getting a Handle on Life is Hard Work

I returned home after finishing university in May, 2017. And I could not be happier with the progress I’ve made since then. I feel like a completely new person now, in terms of everything I’ve learned about writing, storytelling, book-marketing, brand building, blogging, and self-publishing – all this while holding down a full-time job and learning the ropes of corporate life.

So it’s not that I feel I haven’t learned or grown enough. It’s just that I feel like, no matter what I do, no matter how far I go, it will never be enough. I feel as though I’m always running to catch up, and no matter the distance I cover, the goal-post just keeps moving further and further away.

There’s no dearth of information on the Internet. Hell, people have published entire step by step guides to success, about how they achieved their goals and succeeded in their chosen profession; how they built an audience online and started making a full-time living from their writing. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am to have access to all these resources at the click of a button.

The Never-Ending To-Do List

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because there’s so much to do, you never feel like you’ve done enough.

If I write a thousand words a day, the next moment I’ll read an article or watch a video by someone who regularly writes two thousand words before breakfast.

If I start a blog, I’ll read an article about the importance of an email list, and if I start an email list I’ll watch a video about how the software I’m using is on its way out and really I should have signed up for a different emailing software and used a pop-up on my blog to get better conversion rates.

And after I’ve done all that, I still can’t be sure if I’ve done anything right. If any of it is going to work or if I missed out on some essential element that will bring the whole thing crashing down.

Uncertainty and the Fear of Failure

There are so many blueprints to success that they all get jumbled up together until the whole structure looks like it’s gonna collapse with a resounding bang any second now.

Will something that worked in 2013 work as well in 2018? Or is blogging old now, and what really matters is having a YouTube channel? Will that work? Does it matter? Can we ever know?

I suppose this blog post is my attempt at getting some kind of catharsis. I’m talking to myself as much as I am to anyone who might be reading this.

I’ve never considered myself technologically savvy. Nor have I ever believed that I had any particular talent in the realm of marketing, or finance, or graphic design for that matter.

Hell, a year ago I could hardly have a phone conversation with a stranger without having a semi panic attack. Sometimes, I still can’t.

Fake It Till You Make It

And yet, building an online business requires me to do all of that, and then some. And not just to do these things, but to do them well. To do them like an expert. And all the while writing two or more books a year.

Well, that’s what the online guides and tutorials say, anyway.

And it isn’t that I haven’t managed any of them. I have, in fact, ticked off quite a few boxes on that list. The only problem is that the list is ever expanding. So every time you tick off one box, four more appear at the end of it, taunting you with the empty little space inside the square.

The space where a tick should have been, if only you were a little more hard-working, a little more diligent, a little more committed.

But commitment’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

Especially when you’re not sure of the outcome of your efforts. When you’re not sure what it’s all leading up to, or if it’s leading up to anything at all.

Sometimes, I feel like that’s the worst part, the uncertainty of it. To an extent, I guess this boils down to the education system that we all grew up in.

Life Has No Annual Exams

In school and college, you studied what was there in the syllabus and you took a test based on that syllabus.

And you either passed or failed that test, there was no third option. If you failed, you studied the same syllabus again and took the same test once more, hoping for a better outcome this time. If you passed, you went on to the next class, studied a new syllabus and then took a test answering questions on that.

The point isn’t about the quality of the syllabus, it’s about the certainty of outcome.

For the first 15-20 years of our lives, we have very little experience with uncertainty. You’re on a ladder and you always know where the next step is, and what you have to do to get on it.

You know the syllabus that you have to cover when studying, the day on which you have to take the test, and the marks that you have to score in order to pass.

And I’m not saying any of that is easy. All I’m saying is that it is what it is.

There are only two options: either you pass or you fail. If you fail, you study the same material all over again and try to do better next time. If you pass, you go up to the next class and prepare for the next examination.

But no matter what, there always IS another class to get to, another test to study for.

You may like it or you may hate it, but you’re never at a loss for what to do next. You’re never confused about whether or not you’re on the right path, because for those 15 years (barring very few exceptions) there is only one path.

Am I Wasting the Best Years of My Life?

So you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re wasting all this time (and maybe even money) chasing an impossible dream. Whether or not there’s something better you could be (or should be) doing with your time.

Whether or not any of it will be worth it in the end.

And of course, there’s no way to know any of that. Uncertainty is the only constant in life, and it’s pretty much the only thing we’re never taught to contend with during our formative years.

And I wonder sometimes if that’s part of the reason why we’re so afraid to follow our dreams, to work on our passions. Why it’s so much easier – at least in the short term – to do what everyone tells us to do.

To get the degree your parents want you to get and take the highest paying job you can get your hands on during campus placements.

Why Dreaming is Scary  

I mean, that degree and that job mightn’t bring us happiness, but they are safe. And I don’t mean financial safety, though that is a part of it. What I mean is emotional safety, which is as important, if not more.

Because you see, if we fail at a job we never truly wanted or liked in the first place, well, we can blame it on circumstance. Family issues, inflation, shrinking job market, excess competition. Take your pick.

But if we fail at our passion? At the one thing we’ve always wanted to do? Now that’s scary, because then, we’ve truly failed. Then, we can no longer be the victims of circumstance. Then we’re the captain of our own ship. And if that ship sinks? Well, we’re going down with it.

Or it feels like that, anyway. And that’s scary as hell.

The Drawbacks of Captaining Your Dream Boat

Setting a goal, by definition, means defining the criterion for failure. When we say what we want, we simultaneously make a statement, whether knowingly or otherwise, about what we don’t want.

To then not get the thing we’re aiming for is failure. And failure is never more painful than when it’s associated with the one thing we want more than anything else; our passion, our dream.

It’s much safer to leave our dreams in the realm of eternal potential.

Much more comforting to say I want to be a writer, than to say I’ve written 64,000 words for the manuscript I’m about to trash, because I don’t know where to go from here. To say that I’ve written three full manuscripts that’ve all been uniformly rejected by every agent and publisher. To say I self-published a book that didn’t sell twenty copies because I didn’t know the first thing about marketing.

Because you can’t fail at wanting to be a writer. But you can very much fail at finishing a good manuscript, getting picked by an agent, and making sales on Amazon.

Dealing with Success and Failure

So when we try any of those things, we’re defining criterion for failure. We’re telling everyone – and more importantly, ourselves – that this is what I’m trying to get. And if I don’t get it? Well, then I’ve failed.

And that’s terrifying. So terrifying, it can paralyze us.

Especially when we’re not used to dealing with uncertainty, with the sting of failure, the possibility of getting knocked down.

And when you’ve grown up seeing the world in binaries – through the lens of pass or fail – it can be hard to see that you can be getting closer to your goal even as you fail.

It can be hard to see that writing an unfinished bad novel is a necessary stepping stone to completing a good one. That publishing a book that doesn’t sell is essential for learning how to publish one that does. That getting rejected by publishers is the only way you’ll ever learn how to write, publish, and market a book all on your own, before starting to write the next one.

When you’re used to studying from a syllabus, the endless possibilities of life can come as a damn rude shock.

I mean, what do you do when you can literally do anything?

There Can Be Such a Thing as Too Many Choices

Do you focus on the corporate job, or try to get a traditional publishing deal, or try your luck in the confusing maelstrom of the indie-publishing world? Or some disconcerting, burnout-inducing, combination of all the above?

That’s the dilemma.

And that’s the one thing the study-the-syllabus-and-take-the-exam system doesn’t teach us. How to deal with dilemmas.

As I write this today, I’m sleep deprived and have ache-y arms from hanging off the grab-handles of an overcrowded bus for more than an hour on my way back from work.

At the end of a hectic day, did I want to sit down and write this post?

Hell no.

Was there something more interesting I could’ve been doing? Hello, Netflix! Was there something more lucrative? Hey there, freelance writing!

There’re no more tests to pass, so every moment is a test. Every decision you make will add or subtract a point from your final marksheet. And there is no syllabus to tell you which parts of the book of life you need to memorize to pass this exam.

The Perks of Indecision

Should you do the thing that you want to do, but which doesn’t pay well? Or the thing that you don’t particularly want to do but will add to your bank account? Or is doing anything at all a waste of time in a meaningless universe wherein the only truth is Netflix?

Honestly, right now, I’m leaning heavily toward that last option.

You know, I would’ve liked to have ended this post with a solution, a nice concluding paragraph wrapping everything up and laying out the answers to the questions I’ve brought up throughout this article. Anybody who knows me knows how much I hate cliffhangers.

But the thing is, I don’t know what the answer is to any of this stuff. What’s more, I don’t even know if I’ll ever find out. Most probably not.

But that’s okay.

On this test, I’m giving myself the freedom to fail.

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