Saturday January 20, 2024 // Early Morning
Everyone is still asleep. The dog needs to go out soon though. Out into yesterday’s snow.
I’ve been thinking about the quantity of everything recently. There’s so much everything. Everything continues to grow and always will be growing. And it’s something I don’t believe we are equipped to handle biologically or temporally. We don’t have the ability or the time for everything.
Compare today to 50, 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years ago. These are fractions of blinks of the eye in an evolutionary scale. There’s just so much of everything that we humans – or parents, working adults, kids, etc. – didn’t have to think about or even have access to all that long ago.
Are our brains capable of handling all this information? All these things we need to do?
I’m self-employed. Every year there’s always something new thrown my way. Some new license or federal form or method of payment or tax code change that I need to be aware of. And it keeps building and building.
Listen, I’m pretty “together” in terms of remembering to do things. I have a solid system (s/o OmniFocus). But at what point is it too much?
The whole self-employed thing is just one part of life. Parenting? That’s a whole other spectrum. Parents of today have a whole host of new things to deal with that previous generations did not.
And then we get to time. Time has never changed. That’s the one constant in this whole equation. 24 hours in the day today. 24 hours in the day 100,000 years ago. 24 hours in the day 100,000,000 years ago.
We have the same amount of time our prehistoric ancestors had – chipping away at stones – while we “hustle” trying to pick up yet another skill we can hopefully monetize after the kids are put to sleep, the dishes are done, clothes prepped for their field trip tomorrow, lunch made for the trip into the office, …
Or we could just spend our time chipping away at stones.
I don’t have a solution. Maybe this is just a rant of an overstimulated, overworked father who instead of relaxing at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning is trying to monetize yet another hobby.
– Josh // Looking to simplify
Related Reading: What is Important?