I’m back from two weeks away essentially without internet, and I need to talk about that. But first, I’ll do that thing that I ‘should’ do, which is announce that How To Create Cultures is now out and available everywhere in ebook – print release has stuck to the original date of the 17th, so that’ll be out in another week.
Print preorders should be floating around sometime in the next few days – I had a problem loading the final proofed file to the printers right before Christmas, and then I’ve been away and they’ve been on holidays. So I’ll fix that today, and hopefully print preorders will be up by the weekend – and as I noted, it comes out officially next week on the 17th.
In the meantime, ebook is out, hurrah! You can find it on all online stores here: books2read.com/how-to-create-cultures
So that’s that.
Back to the holidays.
So. I was away essentially without internet for basically two weeks, because my phone’s data was running super low, so I kept it turned off except for a quick email check every second day or so.
Guys. It was amazing.
It was amazing for a lot of reasons, not least because I spent the week with an incredible team of people (we were running an Australia-wide Camporee [video highlights], which is an outdoor ed type event for Pathfinders, which is a religious version of Scouts, and there were ~3000 kids aged 10-16 in attendance, with about 230 camp staff and then hundreds of club staff supervising the kids in their regional clubs [instagram pics]) and totally thrive on being part of an immersive team like that, with a clearly demarcated shared purpose, fantastic music every night to boost my soul, and so forth.
But on a more practical level, and what I’ve come home thinking about, is the accompanying lifestyle change.
Yes, someone else was doing the cooking for me and there was no housework involved because we lived in a tent, but it was more than that. Without even trying I was getting 12,000-20,000 steps a day. Every meal I was eating a plate full of vegetables and Amy-safe food. At night, I was sleeping like a rock on our super comfortable camp mattresses.
You guys. Even though I went to bed physically exhausted each night, I had more mental energy this week than I have had in literally more than a decade.
Being temporarily freed of the mental load of parenting helped, but it’s more than that.
For two weeks, I had a clear-cut sense of purpose; deadlines were physically strenuous, but attainable; I was making things physically with my hands, as well as having philosophical conversations; I was serving other people and tangibly improving their lives; I was healthy, inside and out.
I was not plagued by existential anxiety. I was not constantly distracted or fractured by the lure of the internet and notifications. I was not constantly in a rush, or hurrying, or moving at frenetic pace from one thing to another, or feeling like I either had to rush through a reply to someone or even reply immediately. If I didn’t get to a reply for a few days, the world wasn’t going to end – and it didn’t.
I’ve come home, and post-event depression has hit, as I expected it to. When you visit the mountaintop, however briefly, the lowlands seem ever so much lower when you return. And I long for the simplicity of purpose, the slower pace of life that I experienced.
And then I read this article today, and I cried. It’s about how burnout has become simply a way of life for Millennials, how we are the burnout generation who has been duped with the lies that if only we can work more, game the system harder, then we can be one of the few for whom the system works.
We know it’s a broken system, as the article points out. But we still believe, deep down, that if only we push hard enough, it will work *for us*.
Go read the article. It’s long, but it’s worth it. If you’re a Millennial, I expect it will resonate with you as much as it did with me. And if you’re not, then be prepared to come with an open mind, to understand a lot of why us Millennials are like we are.
It’s a great article, and it’s largely acknowledging that the system we have is faulty, that we’re killing ourselves and our joy (not happiness, but joy) with overwork, and how living with the constant looming spectre of burnout (as I did for most of 2018) decreases our productivity, our abilities, and diminishes our lives.
It hit hard, especially after spending two weeks living an alternative.
But now I’m left asking: What next? You can’t live on the mountaintop. It cost us about ten grand to run our activity (though we could have run for weeks more without too much additional cost, a lot of that was initial set-up), and someone has to pay the bills and bring the food in to feed everyone.
You can’t live on the mountaintop.
But it seems to me that increasingly, living in the valley isn’t a viable option either. It’s killing us all with stress and a frenetic, untenable pace of life, and I just don’t know. There has to be another solution.
All our lives, my husband and I have fought against joining the treadmill on the rat race. But this world does everything it can to force you there. I want out; I want off.
But I don’t know what to do next to get there.