I’m a little bit of a work fetishist. I’m into shit like routines and the Protestant work ethic and I avidly participated in hustle culture. But I regret to inform you that most of it is a lie.
So much of your professional life ends up getting wasted to slavish gestures to productivity porn. It’s just not how real life works. But it sure looks sexy when you lay it out like an Instagram reel.
But maybe it’s not always just for show. Maybe there is something you don’t understand about how things do or don’t work. So you accept some social norms to fit in with others and you find their advice on shit like sleep more and get high quality protein is sort of first principles.
You have the basics of being a responsible adult and learning from others while you do it. We have a grand shared culture and some of it is useful and some of it is superstition and sometimes it’s not clear which is which. But shared meaning is how humans organize. Maybe there is value to meetings.
Point my dear whacky zoomer autists is you need to be able to be a functioning member of civilization despite what Covid may have revealed. You have to accommodate other people’s lives even if you don’t like everything. Welcome to the herd.
And honestly you should have to learn to fit in a bit of life that overlaps with real humans. Even though we have total access to our most niche nerd fandoms online, we deal with normies in real life.
But I’ve also come to realize that performance is a game. And you can train yourself to go from zero to halfway decent if you just make an effort. But the real art of it all the tip and tricks and how-to guides comes down to just doing the work and figuring it out. The intangibles make you an expert. That’s the stuff you spend a life refining and it doesn’t ever take a break. It’s why all the super successful people are also kind of fuck ups.
Sometimes the weird is genuine as they have rethought a an assumption about the world and intend to make their vision known in the world. And that’s not done on bankers hours.
I work on Sunday when something happens and the momentum shifts and you know that adding your gravity to the matter could make a difference. And so you go the extra mile for someone else because it’s about us trusting each other to work with reality but also see each other as we are. And most of us are weird and it’s fine and you’ve got to work the way to makes your weird shine.
If you are good at your niche and you apply your knowledge and tell it straight then sometimes you do some magic and it moves your universe. So yeah sometimes you’ve got to keep weird hours to hold space for the possibility.