3/10/25

On most recurrent occasions, if you were to come up to me and ask how I am doing, the average answer would fall somewhere between a sarcastic "peachy keen!", and a "Oh, y'know". Not to suggest that I am in any way doing inherently badly, rather, life as of late has been all-in-all significantly more enjoyable than it has been for most of my adult years. That being said, I am more tired than I think I have ever been for a prolonged period of time than ever before. To put it plainly, I am more or less just going through the motions. I wake up and I work out, brush my teeth, do my skincare, make coffee and clean up my apartment, eat a small breakfast, and either bunker down in my room in front of yards of fabric and a sewing machine, or head out to class, returning some several hours later to inevitably end up in the company of a sewing machine or the blaring blue of my laptop screen anyway. My days have blended into what feels essentially like chores for 12 hours a day, very seldomly being spent doing things that derive me joy or pleasure, but rather things that simply need to be done. Washing the dishes takes up more time than washing my body in a 24 hour period, and though through and through I am in no way "unhappy", I feel almost like there must be something in life that I am missing. Furthermore, it feels as though there is something everyone else seems to have nailed down that I consistently struggle in my ability to conquer. As most people do when mulling through the everyday slew of tasks and responsibilities - and as I am known to do no matter what activity is physically occupying my body - I've spent a lot of time thinking about what this thing could be. Could it be as simple as a change in mindset, and that I truly am a glass-half-empty kind of man? Is it more along the lines of my being somebody who prefers to have things slightly tidier than the average 20-something-year-old, and I just have a harder time understanding that things are not nearly as bad as my brain makes them out to be? Are we all going through the same motions, and nobody is speaking about it in a way that feels relatable to how I am processing it for myself, or am I just much less of a go-with-the-flow type of person? In a generation raised by "YOLO"s and "Do it for the gram", did I somehow manage to evade the mindset that it truly is as simple as "it is what it is", or am I the only one who understands that Arizona would have significantly fewer roaches if we all wiped off the countertops and cleaned the sink as frequently as I do? 

My college experience, and what's more, all of my life leading up to it, has been a learning lesson of how to balance myself, and the life I find myself living. In my younger years, this was a much easier task. For the most part, I was still able to handle having the brain and thoughts I had - and have -  without it interfering in the experiences a young kid and teen were supposed to garner. High school, in particular, was a time in which I will be the first to admit I was privileged to have been able to take it as easy as I did. I'm not the smartest bean on the stalk, nor the most academically inclined individual, but I was able to live a healthy balance of prioritizing what my growing brain needed to stay mostly stable, and completing the tasks a high schooler was expected to complete. I did it as it came, retained a B average, and hardly had leftover work to complete outside of school hours. Somehow, I managed to exist largely for myself, and having the things I required to do sit largely in the backseat while I worked the jobs I applied for, hung out with the friends who invited me, and enjoyed the better half of my time spent alone. By the time I moved into my first apartment, that balance became a steady incline into unbalanced territory. I went to school mostly every day of the week, worked anywhere between 12-25 hours depending on the time of year, and did my school work, but now I had floors that needed swept, carpets that needed to be vacuumed, dishes that needed to be cleaned and unfortunately, an increasingly lengthy amount of steps in my morning and nightly hygienic routine. It became quickly apparent that the life I led before was achievable not because of how good I was at managing all of it, but because of how little I had to manage. Which leads me to the last year and a half. 

Even when working and going to school every day, I was still able to find nights to dye my hair, or evenings to spend with friends doing nothing but smoking and gossiping, and mornings to deep clean every square inch of my apartment - balcony included. But now, not only did the school portion require significantly more time than it ever had before, but I also cared to take the time it needed, plus some. My effort slowly shifted away from clean-shaven legs, twice daily skincare routines, and nights in which vegging was not only achieved, but encouraged, to grades, my friendships, my art, and most notably, my blog. The downside was that despite how hard I was working, and how hard I wanted to continue to work for the foreseeable future, all those other things didn't cease to exist. Dirt and crumbs still accumulated on my floors, dust still fell and slowly dulled the color of my furniture, my body still needed a good scrubbing from time to time, and I hoped to have a few hours at night to at least exhale if not actually enjoy it a little bit. Not to mention I also now needed time to worry about when I would get groceries, take a shower, shit, piss, the days when "cleaning" takes more time than just tidying up, or the rare occasion when I have plans the average 22-year-old tends to have. My daily life has become a race to see how much I can get done in 24 hours before a maximum of eight of them take over to recharge my brain. However, this schedule in and of itself is not a particularly stressful one, in that I've begun enjoying constantly having something that needs to be completed. What is stressful is knowing how normal it all truly is. From an internal perspective, I can't decipher whether or not everyone is spending so much time jumping between tasks, completing their work, and feeling accomplished by the end of the day, or if I seem to be stressing myself out with my perspective of what actually needs to get done. 

For the longest time, the running narrative of the generation directly above us was that they lacked true work motivation. It was rare, especially in the early 2010s, to find a comedy sketch in which millennials and their expectation to be handed "achievement" was not a punchline at some point. I think in the vast majority, current 20-something-year-olds seem to have dodged this mass mindset and have largely taken charge of their own work ethic, accruing disapproval from certain elders simply because that work ethic is focused on our desire to be paid enough to do the work were doing. We got jobs in high school, worked through college, and spent our own money on the non-essential items of our choosing. But it is worth noting that the millennials who added Yoga balls to office spaces and turned journalism into listicles on Buzzfeed, were our biggest role models at pivotal times in our adolescence. Though, in my experience, we seem significantly more willing to provide for ourselves, there is certainly room for the millennial lack of commitment to have rubbed off on us in more ways than one. The biggest issue we as young adults have is that, for the most part, we respect ourselves in ways previous generations have done. We experienced market crashes, the rapid decline of safety in crowded areas, and TV stars as presidents, and the conversations surrounding it all has allowed us a much different perspective of what our lives look like, what we believe they should look like, and what we want them to look like. This takes form in some of our biggest decisions; colleges, whether or not to go to college at all, how long we stay at jobs that don't pay us enough or treat us well, we have a better understanding at a younger age that, regardless of what we need to do, it doesn't have to look and feel the way it has in previous decades. Whether or not this is a positive or negative trait in its totality is up for opinion, however, it has given us a way of perceiving life around us entirely differently. However, one -in my belief - inherently negative aspect of this, is that decline in interest to do things we simply don't want to do. When this outlook is given the context of a job, or further education, it seems significantly more beneficial, so long as the decision-making process is aided by well and thorough critical thinking skills. But when looked at through the lens of, say, sweeping, it takes on a new meaning. 

Young people have become so in tune with "boundaries" in an attempt to be in touch with ourselves, that it's circled back to keeping us out of touch with the world around us. My bountiful endeavors in writing about young dating culture are fantastic examples of this phenomenon, as we remove ourselves so thoroughly from how our actions impact others, and focus so heavily on how our actions make us as individuals feel, we completely shift the definition of what having a relationship with one another truly means. We've created talking stages, and situationships, low committal polyamorous three-way aromantic physical friendships, all in the name of protecting ourselves and our own feelings. The same phenomenon exists in jobs, with homework, and in-class attendance. Not to suggest that in many cases it isn't the right thing to do for the right person, but when our boundaries become needing to sleep through two classes and showing up 30 minutes late to work every other shift, we run the risk of blurring boundaries with a lack of responsibility. And likewise, these responsibilities melt into the mundane activities that remain somewhat unspoken of. 

I won't act as though I am the most responsible. My roster of job aquisition proves that I will be the first to quit if I am not enjoying myself, and I'm known to procrastinate more than enough, especially in regard to my school work. The defining difference between an issue, and a bad habit, is that no matter how many jobs I quit, nor how many assignments I've turned in late in my life, it has never gotten to a point where it is negatively impacting me, nor anyone around me. And this is where some of my original questions begin to arise. Racing to accomplish as much as I can in a day has left me feeling, for lack of a better vocabulary, nothing at all. I do what needs to be done, and I know I will complete everything required of me by the time I need to. But at this point, that is very close to all I do. Aside from my blog, and the allotted time I set aside to read (for class), every hour of my waking day is spent getting something done, regardless of how significant. What puzzles me is that, from an observational standpoint, it seems as though everyone else around me is doing the same thing. None of my friends are failing classes, or getting fired for showing up late, or spending all day blending their skin with the fiber of a mattress. So how is it that I feel as though the Reba McEntire of it all is going to be the death of me, and yet everyone else seems to have their daily schedules nailed down to a fine precise point?

My initial instinct is to assume that I am simply not as equipped to deal with as much stress as the average person. In that, my friends enjoy the hustle and bustle, moving continuously from one task to another. I, on the other hand, while enjoying having things to do - constantly - also like to adhere to a strict schedule, whereas they are willing to head to the studio with no end in sight for when they might call it a day. My second thought is that my standards for the life I lead are simply different. In no way am I implying one is wrong and one is right, simply that where those around me are okay with an admission of "Ah I forgot to get something done today", where I find myself with a handful of freshly torn-out hair when realizing I still have yet to empty the dishwasher. And it is this thought that I feel is the thing which I am missing. The go-with-the-flow gene, a trait passed down from the YOLO generation, skipped over my composition. The way I see it, every inch of the life around me is the money I am spending. The groceries in the fridge, the crumbs on the counter, the coffee in the French Press, and the walks I take downtown, are all the price I will be paying off for the entirety of my life. Though money means very little to me, the wasting of it means quite a good deal, and I am not willing to go with any kind of flow that results in sacrificing what I am quite literally putting myself in financial jeopardy for. Thus my day needs to be filled with maintenance. The upkeep of the life around me to assure that, from far observation, my money is being well spent. That I can come home to an apartment I feel good walking into, rather than one that crunches under foot, that I can graduate with grades that reflect the time I spent earning it, so that when I finally can exhale, every penny I spent is actually paid off - if not financially, then in the happiness I feel experiencing it.