This morning, when I was sitting in bed drinking my bulletproof coffee, I felt an unpleasant urge to move.

There was an ominous pressure to start something, to work on something.

To fucking DO something!

As if I’m personally stopping the entire universe from universing, and now I’ve got to get back in the game before everything explodes.

So it feels something like:

You’re wasting your time, and your life, you irresponsible, lazy idiot!

Now work!

Call!

Write!

Hustle!

Make a mark!

Do something with your life!

All really compelling, and uncomfortable.

And somewhat motivating.

Sort of.

And then it struck me:

How many times have I been here before?

And how many of these times do I still remember?

The answer to the first question would be something like, let’s say, tens of thousands.

And the answer to the second is probably zero.

Or five, if I try REALLY hard.

You can do the math.

I did, and it’s pretty liberating.

We, precious human beings looking for good Wi-Fi, are created to feel importance and pressure and relevance and anxiety where it really isn’t.

It works very well.

It’s designed perfectly.

The slightly sickening, dealbreaking pressure I felt just now, was filled with personal judgments and smelly ideas about responsibility and having to be somewhere else (a ‘better’ place or position, of course), and all of that is obviously part of our amazing driving force.

Time and time again it feels like you’re seriously slacking, while everybody else is probably saving and changing the world (and their bank account, in an upward direction), so you have to get off your ass, right now!

It always feels like the world is ending, like you’re personally steering towards a disaster, and when those feelings are gone, the same day or the next, fresh ones will be created.

Effortlessly.

To me, this was very liberating and helpful to realize, and it opened up new ways to deal with it.

Or not.

I’m just having another coffee, smiling stupidly, realizing that I interrupted the habitual, guilt-ridden madness of Fucking Do Something Now!

This is not an excuse to not do something ‘productive’.

Why would you even need one?

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(Photo by @lenin33, for Unsplash)