I spent the best part of this morning feeling lost.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing anything – it’s that I, no matter how many “things” I do, never quite feel like I’ve done enough. I’m lucky, though – I have a job, a business, I keep people paid, we get paid, everyone’s good. Our work makes clients happy, and new business is still rolling in. But I still feel like I’m not doing enough, because I feel like I’ve sat in front of this computer and typed and hit send in the same way every day (minus weekends) for months, because I have.
The nature of what I do, and what you likely do reading this, is inherently digital, and thus the difference between one day and another is usually dictated by what happens on the computer, or on Zoom, or beyond. As even those lucky of us to have a separate home office to go to have found, the lack of change, the feeling of being in the same place, doing the same thing, every day, is grating and brutal.
The issue isn’t so much work-life balance (which many of us struggle with, obviously), it’s the separation of one piece of time from another. Even the most sedentary of us has some degree of change that they faced every day – “having” to go to work, or go out to eat, or take the bus, these were all things that broke up our day into comparable chunks. And when life sucked, we’d feel exactly like we do today – like we’re stuck in a rut, repeating the same few lines of a story.
I should add that we do have it easier than those who have to travel into meat space, going to physical jobs, in real places, where the coronavirus also might be hanging out. The other side – which does not discount the safety and significant stability that this offers – is that many of us are simply moving from one screen to another screen to bed. I’m not making that vacuous, boring argument about how you need to get away from the computer – I’m just saying that our physical movement of our bodies through different spaces is what gives our brains and opportunity to sense and experience time.
We are lucky. We are privileged to be able to do work on the computer. Digital marketing and PR professionals are still, somehow, in demand. We aren’t totally isolated from layoffs, but our jobs do not require physical space nor physical materials to complete them. We are digital. I am grateful for what I have, but understand the repetitions that come with it.
We are lucky. We are privileged to be able to do work on the computer. Digital marketing and PR professionals are still, somehow, in demand. We aren’t totally isolated from layoffs, but our jobs do not require physical space nor physical materials to complete them. We are digital. I am grateful for what I have, but understand the repetitions that come with it. subscribe back