Viewing: Notes » Monday morning, 9am.
Monday morning, 9am.
(11 minute read.)
Whatever gets you through the night… or day.
So I have to be here for a while, until the cancer or decrepitude or emotional collapse meets a threshold at which it's deemed acceptable to slip out the side door and my kids are ok about it.
With this in mind, I'll 'let's be rational' organise my thought accordingly and write from an appropriate perspective… as if thinks were all-ok hunky dory.
Acutely aware of how the passage of time brings shifting realities, in accepting diminishing abilities and shrinking remaining life expectancy I recognise that at my age (70) I'm nearing obsolescence and heading toward what I smilingly refer to as 'the death zone'—the limit-of-life time at which it's reasonable for people to die of natural causes.
Anything before 73-or-so is probably early, and after 80 perhaps later than might be expected.
('Quick, bring me the brocolli and organic yoghurt…' I recall reading something about how 'a shift to a healthy diet even at age 70 can add up to ten years back onto a male's life expectancy'. Ha!)
I'm naturally-and-probably-unavoidably in that liminal zone between work and retirement… during which there's a psychological threshold where one's 'professional life' (ha! as if I ever had one of those) has faded, but 'a new post-work routine has not yet fully formed'.
In what Henry Miller might consider to be 'an opportunity for a profound and joyous liberation', I've become more accepting of retiring—and so with this and my physical and emotional health in mind, I've 'who wants to do business anyway?' adjusted my workload accordingly… paused or terminated some projects.
Some are things about which I've changed my mind—lost interest. Others, in the queue of 'if time and resources permit', are stuff I'd perhaps not get around to. A few have become 'now too lofty' almost certainly beyond my reduced and declining ability.
Also relevant is that my significant lack of confidence continues, about which I've written before…
I often think 'well that project is a stupid idea, and the name is shite—and even if it isn't a stupid idea, the name is still shite'.
When using AI to provide an objective analysis, to view a project as if it were somebody else's rather than mine, I might think 'that's a decent project, it's actually quite clever'…but then feel 'Who the hell am I to try and do something like that? Do I have the ability? And besides, there's others who're far better placed (smarter/established/more resources) than me, doing similar stuff.'
I frequently get random moments of 'OMG—what the hell have I done, in even thinking I could do this?'. And feel almost everything I do is a mistake, even when I look at it rationally and know that it's not. With it comes a feeling of 'none of it will work, and I'll never again earn any money'. Also present is no small amount of regret and guilt and shame.
More recently, I've started to feel 'this is sub-standard, it's not good enough' about my work, even when I know it's not.
Overall, where I previously had enthusiasm I now have apathy… I'm just not interested in most (almost all) of my projects. (And I recognise this is also a consequence/symptom of recurring burnout.)
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