Don't submit! 💪🏻

Recuperating from the vagaries of life.

I reject suffering as a concept.

I mean, I recognize that immense amounts of suffering are happening all over the place at this exact moment, but if nothing horrifying is being done in your general vicinity, you can say no to misery.

Self-imposed suffering is beyond crazy. Like, you wouldn’t intentionally wear an outfit that was uncomfortable and ugly and unflattering and full of pins, right? Yet hardship seems to carry a lot of rizz, as the kids say.

Somehow we’ve come to believe that if you're not suffering, you are clearly not doing much of anything. Or at least anything worthwhile.

And I get it; you do have to expend effort to achieve your goals. But I don't believe that you have to SUFFER. I refuse to accept that the only path to success is embracing the grind. I'm not trying to be a world class athlete here, or the highest grossing pop diva, or a piratical CEO.

I'm all about the good life, and to me the good life involves a lot of ease. Taking the easy path carries a lot of stigma, but it's only bad if you're cutting corners that need to stay sharp.

I say if you're not suffering you're smart enough and evolved enough to know that you can enjoy life and still pay the bills. Misery will come to all of us in its time, we don't have to set a place for it at the table.

Also? Suffering is a tool of the patriarchy. We’re supposed to believe that all those billionaires put themselves on the rack to better our lives and are now being rewarded for it? Ha! Did JP Morgan suffer? Did John D. Rockefeller suffer? Do Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos appear to be suffering?

Nope. And yet the fiction persists.

I used to work at a place in which people (some people) regularly lost vacation days because they did not take enough time off. We were allowed to roll 120 hours from one year to another, so these bozos had more than three weeks of vaycay stored up and couldn't seem to figure out how to take a damn break!

I could think of approximately twelve thousand ways to spend those free hours, starting with turning off the alarm and pouring champagne into my breakfast OJ. Need ideas on how to burn through paid time off? I've got you. At age 60 I am better than ever at avoiding the pitfalls of modern drudgery.

But apparently these folks didn't have the imagination. Worse, they acted like the whole enterprise would fall apart if they got lost in the Florida Keys for a week or two.

Look, if your team can't cover your vacation, if you'd come back to so many messes and headaches that it isn’t worthwhile to leave work and enjoy your life, you are doing something wrong. This is not something to humble brag about. YOU ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT.

Unless you're, like, running a huge NGO that's smuggling food into Gaza, or working on the cure for ALS or something. But let's be real, most of us are selling something or making phone calls or tweaking spreadsheets or making our coworkers' lives miserable.

We're cogs. The machines won't miss us, and maybe no one would even miss the machines if they disappeared.

I know, nobody wants to think they're spending their lives at something both mundane AND unimportant. And likely your work is important, and hopefully it’s wildly enjoyable! It's just not the glue that's keeping the world from falling apart.

I mean, are you Betty White? I think not.

As soon as she died, Russia invaded Ukraine, monkey pox broke out around the globe, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Queen Elizabeth died. Now that's a life that was holding shit down. Mine? Not so much. Yours? Well, you decide.

(There was also that cryptocurrency collapse, but that seems more like hubristic bro economics that was destined to fail, so we won’t lay that at Betty’s blessed feet.)

Ok, ok, I’ll tone it down. It strikes me that this is possibly a harsh way to tell you it's time to take a break, but there you go. Take a break. If things fall apart then you need more hired help. 😁

OK, love you, bye!

Julia

p.s. Who came up with the concept of breakfast in bed as some sort of luxurious treat? There is nowhere I would less rather be while tucking into an omelet.

Recommendation!

Hubris alert! This is where I recommend ME. Namely, my new project, Newsletter Therapy.

If you’ve been with me for a while you know that I can’t stop writing newsletters. I even write them for other people now. It’s one of those things that I think is super fun; I even enjoy the challenging parts. But I realize this is not a universal attitude.

So I decided to try to make it easier for even the most unenthusiastic, heel-dragging, do-I-really-have-to entrepreneur, small business owner, or person who simply has things to say and would like to broadcast those things widely.

So if you’re up for hearing from me every Tuesday with supremely helpful advice I encourage you to sign yourself up!

Another recommendation!

On this lovely Hallmark holiday I can’t not recommend motherhood. It’s not for everybody, but if it’s your thing, there is really nothing better in this world.

A photo of me with my kids, aged about 5 and 2. We're sitting on a couch with them crammed into my lap and we all look very happy. — Could these people look any happier?

REM knows that life can be painful, and so does this email. Forward it to someone who could use a little break.