Waking up lately is getting harder and harder.
And it’s not that I am sleeping any worse than before…in fact sometimes I am sleeping better, but I am just so, so, so very tired.
As any parent of two elementary-age children will tell you, parenting is NEVER-ENDING exhaustion.
From the neediness to the attention-craving whining, crying, shouting, and laughing.
It all compounds.
Yet somehow, most of us parents managed to fool ourselves into thinking that it would be easy.
But raising kids to be the best versions of themselves is hard. It is anything but easy!
Humans, man – we are so so very easy to fool!
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
— Richard Feynman
Parenting is hard.
Life is hard.
But then again, we are all making choices that run ourselves ragged.
- We choose to plan a trip that is complex and time-consuming to plan.
- We choose to put our kids in 10 different activities, thus leaving little to no downtime in our schedules.
- We choose to say YES to things even when we absolutely don’t want to do it.
- We choose to learn two different languages back-to-back for fun even though our brains can’t take it anymore.
- We choose to stay tapped into our favorite social media personalities 24/7 as if we’ll miss something important — and yet on most days, nothing important happens.
We are constantly making choices to do more, be more, take on more — and as a society, it’s clearly not working for us.
I am pretty sure nobody thinks it is working for us anymore.
That is why our politics have gotten so contentious.
EVERYONE is unhappy.
No one is truly crafting the life they want, even those of us fortunate enough to have retired early with that sole goal in mind.
Every one of us has managed to fool ourselves into thinking we can do it all, be it all, have it all!
What Are You Lying To Yourself About?
I suspect that part of being a man is that you will as a matter of course fall asleep in your own life. It will happen.
– Boyd Varty, The Lion Trackers Guide to Life
I think we are all guilty of lying to ourselves about something.
While I have made it my own goal to craft the best life that I can, I still manage to fool myself a majority the time.
Be it the continued management of my affiliate website, or trying to learn a new language.
These are worthwhile pursuits that I doggedly pursue even when I know them to be more of a burden than a pleasure.
I kill the time by working up spreadsheets upon spreadsheets upon spreadsheets.
But I can’t help but feel that much of what I do is a big fat avoidance of facing real emotions, of growing into the next better version of myself.
I think we all fall asleep at various times in our life.
We all build prisons in our minds that keep us from growing.
We avoid making the big hard decisions that we know deep down we need to make.
And sometimes we simply take on too much at once and need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking we can competently handle everything.
So that is where I am at.
I feel like I’ve fooled myself into avoiding too many of my real emotions for too long.
Fooled myself into keeping an affiliate website that I didn’t enjoy working on.
Fooled myself into thinking that parenting wasn’t going to be exhausting in every way.
Fooled myself into thinking that early retirement itself would be some end all, be all.
Maybe there is nothing I can do about it.
Maybe the whole point is to become aware enough to SEE what you couldn’t “see” before.
But it does beg these questions for all of us…
Where are you fooling yourself?
What are you unhappy with that you are hiding from yourself?
And what are you going to do about it?