Everyone I know is at absolute maximum busy-ness, and either I am the worst one at managing time, or I am lazy. Also, this kind of thinking got me caught in a t!r!a!p...>*

We can't keep up with EH ver ee thing...

Too busy for life.

At many points in life, when I haven't been doing good, I have lost my composure. Some of those times have been when I was so overloaded with work and tasks and projects I had freely and semi-freely taken on that I felt I was going to ʙʙʙᙖᑌЯˢsₛₜ!

I worked in a profession in which I could choose to
go all out ✅✅
maintain the norm ✅
do very little at all ✓

It’s not because I’m special, nor do I want to make you think that; it's just that I had long wanted to be excellent at this work and so I worked really really hard. That was a choice. It was also apparent that the more I existed as a contributing member of communities tied to this profession, the more successful – though that word sure has proven to be subjective in my lived experience – perhaps I should just say more well received? I don’t know – but it became apparent that the more I was present as a contributing member of other worlds connected to that main professional world, the better things were for me in that work I esteemed so highly. That was also a choice, to be involved like that. And I chose to have a bunch of kids and I chose to do some homesteading. All of that was a lot and all of it was driven by choice. No one made me do any of those things.

And I chose to be engaged in a side business with my partner – a business I never wanted to be in and that I did not enjoy. I chose to express these things along the way but I also chose to not follow up – to not press pressing matters, to not insist, for my own sanity, on resolution – and I repeatedly almost Bↄↄↄ u r s -!-.

And I chose to use alcohol as my thing to make rough places plain. Eventually, though, I was the Pokémon and not the other way around. It chose me. There were opportunities for triage I didn't choose to take. For a while, alcohol worked. Until it didn't. For a while my super-extension of effort worked, until it didn't.

[^>+~]

Choice and my composure became bungled more subtly than the skeins of hard-wine skins. There were times when I ᶻᵉʳᵒ% reasonably expected others to help me. Some of those times included the expectation that people who volunteered to work with me, say, on a project or a fundraiser, would follow through and do their part. I have been told that, even in such instances, one should not have expectations. I oscillate between seeing a wisdom in that and in thinking that it is a stupid thing to have to hear.** Like, you reallyˀ don't expect to get your money's worth in your various transactions in life? (It is popular and easy to critique transactionalism, and it is good to have a skepticism of it, though, ought we not seek to keep that skepticism healthy rather than succumb to it?) How many ways might you say, Et tu? And yet –

(Yet!
I look around me and I can see the utility of resigning myself to the fact that my assumptive plans – or what I think ought to be – has nothing, really, to do with what anyone freely chooses to do. So,
So!
I do not have a resolution for that mixed assessment and I hope that you don't expect one. I am much too busy in this voluntary blog and its coming tributaries to dawdle there. Much too busy.)

– some of those times were when my clients were content with meager outcomes but my supervisors were not. It is not true that we are never accountable for others' behaviors. Sometimes we are. I had layers of bosses saying, "Get them to somewhere between 900 and 1,000", let's say, and the clients, for whom achievement was predicated on their own choosing to engage saying, "I'm str8. 500-550 is fine. I don't want to do more. But mayyybe..." I believed I could build a bridge to everywhere – intrigued, titillated, doped up by mayyybe – connecting the principle party to the expectations of the agent party. From the outside, I was assumed to be the master of possible success, when in reality, I was The Intermediary of Oz. I was 100% expected to magically bestow gifts, ᶻᵉʳᵒ% able to, and I 100% expected my clients to "help me" by catalyzing their sinews. I was being ᶻᵉʳᵒ% reasonable, which is between ᶻᵉʳᵒ and 100% wise.

I could feel everyone clicking their heels, itching to get

home.

It's where we go to eat poop*** shower and watch things.

Are you old enough to have experienced the rush of Netflix convenience in the form of mailing DVDs back and forth? That was revolutionary then; it is hilarious now, and only because we can now eat poop from our phones in any place on earth, pretty much. But we especially love it at home, and it has made us hella busy.

When I've felt overwhelmed, I've embarrassed myself (nearly always only on the inside – keeping it in, recognizing it as unreasonable and so not wanting to say it aloud, but still believing in it enough to dwell on it,) saying things like, ohm!ygodtheyarenotthatb!usyareyoukidding!metheyspenddozensofh!oursa!weekjuststaringatthings!

Hey can you take care of this thing so that you can be successful?
Sorry man I'm really busy.
In 2,147,208 different ways.

It would irk the living daylight out of me and I would feel a dark effect. (The danger in any form of, Lookit me – I work so hard, kept my mouth silent about it, but not my heart and mind. [Have you noticed, though, that that lookit-me spirit is alive and well in the world we watch? If you're the client and I say, Praise be Pachomios, to you, I am a gross, attempted perception-controller – a self-worshipper who proselytizes – The Narcissus of Oz – but if I make sparkly videos that say it, where I rage or weep, where I have a trim body smack my face with hammers and show you my boobs – if I find the right background music – if I time its release just right, it may go so well that I'll get paid for it because you'll eat my poop.]) In real life, we know better. I knew better.
I have no claim to anyone else's time or energy.
I had better not pretend an oppression when I choose to give my time to them.

An artless Lookit me that is cast upon us is poop we do not want to eat, understandably. But a Siren's Lookit me is the shit we spread on ersatz sablés.

It's impossible to keep up.

It is impossible to keep up with everything. We have to make decisions. There are trade-offs. Incentives might motivate us in those choices, but our struggle is more than natural (or, if incentives are mutilated and perverted through manipulation, our struggle is less than natural).

I am not really into watching movies and shows, but I enjoy doing so from time to time. However, I know that I could fall into it oh-so-easily because it does feel pretty good.
At first.
Becoming the Pokémon doesn't happen overnight. Only the first cigarette of the day is all that pleasurable; the cigarettes of the day thereafter mostly just keep you from the discomfort of not smoking. Vapes are Doritos and Netflix, however, but that's developed below...

If I have chosen to choose a show, I look for one very important thing besides just whether I think I will enjoy it. The number of seasons matters to me. Rarely have I ever started a show that has more than three seasons. A show can command our time – a furnishing gifted to us that we never really wanted and that, we, being committed to the use intended by the generous gift-giver who was thinking of but didn't know our wants and needs, now commands the arrangement of the entire room. Haven't you ever stuck with a show for dozens of hours past when you enjoyed it most? Haven't you ever continued to eat even after your greatest enjoyment has peaked?

A wiseacre would say, "Yeah but you're free to choose; quit your crying." True. Though haven't you noticed? I mean,

let's start with fentanyl. It isn't only the high likelihood of death that angers us about sneaky dealers lacing or replacing other drugs with it. Death is the nail in the coffin, for sure, but only after an unjust trail of incentivized decisions from the agent that convolute and twist the incentives of the principal so as to turn them into a Pokémon. After an intentional art takes hold of what is natural and inflames it beyond nature; cancer "fixing" the body to death. When an addict dies from super-overdoing it, we are rightly saddened (though you can generally hear a tsk tsk tsk that's how it goes in the commentary and commemoration). Even more so with a college kid who gets obliterated, and especially if they are hazed into vanishing from among us. If their frat-siblings-to-be intentionally-accidentally pressure them into death, those dealers of peer pressure are held accountable. And in the death of a drug user – addict or no – who dies because they were under the impression that they were doing only one drug and were secretly being fed that and another – we are, rightly, angered. But because no business person ever, anywhere, has had as their actual aim the killing of their clientele, we know that lacing unto death is accidental. It is an accident**** through ignorance or carelessness, both motivated by greed. The aim of introducing and supplying the fentanyl is to get you hooked more strongly so that the exact opposite of losing clientele occurs.

It isn't just the death and destruction that makes us mad about fentanyl; it's also, and perhaps especially, the trickery.

It's 5 second before the next episode starts playing while you are still weighing how much you care about tomorrow. CEOs help make that decision for you, sure, but so does their team below them, and the teams below the teams. Right on down to the grotesque warrior who wants to (subtly, and not so subtly) raise your kids for you. They all adore equality, but not more than they lust after the money for which they expand the gap between your agency and theirs. They engage you on bended knee with their hands concealed. They appear below you, asking. The head, the shoulders, the hands, then you. Earth. You aren't below them; you're beneath them.

But neither are they inventing your hunger; they are only manipulating it. I shouldn't say "only" because it is a big, wicked deal. I only mean that their devilry dances on a dancefloor to which you have chosen to open the doors. We were born with the party in our heads.

You know it's happening but you do it anyway, on both the cutting and consuming ends.
It's natural. You just so happen to want it.
It's unnatural, consenting to Sirens. The product contains drug powers you can hardly (I said hardly, not ᶻᵉʳᵒ%!) resist. The song is irresistible.

We are all being knowingly manipulated into being too busy to live, or, {they} are knowingly manipulating those who want it, who are asking for it, begging, spreading for it. Put it in my head and heart.

loot boxes,
whale hunting,
fomo – oh my!

Take me on a sneaky joy ride that will kill me slowly, Progressive Professor, interests whispering, who mouths a fight against injustice and complains about the rich while whoring out your precise knowledge of the human animal, parlay, publish, deal. Cool ranch

home

wrecker

for hire.

The gaze of assumptions about religious folk – that fiery eye on a tower, assuming that all of them put on a pious skin to go to church and live like hell the rest of the week — it never turns to examine itself, does it? It never notices that it weeps only for what is popular, always blinking like the face of a dune, beholding and adoring irreconcilable purposes, always (and only) in touch with the mood – while really, always, only, ever a pupil of god-money.

Bow down before the one you serve.
– Trent

It used to bug the shit out of me, back when I knew too much about my client's lives, that everybody all of the time said they were soooooo busy. I may have incidentally gained a lot of knowledge about how other households managed, but that's not something you can just reference in your coaching of people – your principles. It would infringe on their agency. It would be like asking someone how much they make but way worse. The fact of living in a very small community gives those residents increased access, knowledge-wise, to other people's households – even if all the better to misunderstand you with, my dear. It would be wolfish to say to your too-busy client, "Surely you can get to 750, if only you spent less time on your phone!", and I sure don't want anyone talking to me with such presumption, even if rather well informed, but it sure sucks to know better and “hafta” pretend like you don’t.

I became increasingly bitter, "having" to sacrifice more of my time to drag a client to an end they didn't want and to which they did not give their time. It was either that or lose the job. I was, in fact, subscribed to a service with endless dreaming – in a game I didn't want to play – engaged in a deal to move another person to somewhere they didn't desire to be. Which all sound condemning, and yet, didn't I say that I was also a parent? Doesn't social order require some people moving or preventing the movement of others? A notion of perfect freedom is pretend-land. There is not anywhere ordered when there are no ordering agents.

Eventually I realized that to be busy means that your time is accounted for. It makes no difference whether the things filling my time are essential or not, or whether you would agree with my selections, or whether my filled time is helping me to get somewhere good. The fact is, if I have activities or states planned for the hours of the day, I am busy. Beyond that, it isn't your business, goes my feeling.

Everyone is so super busy. But how many hours a week am I staring at a screen, laying there, allegedly recuperating, finding release or cover? Is that what I find there? Is that what really happens? When I escape away into fantasy, am I really regenerating hope and energy and optimism and vision and motivation? It hardly seems that I am relaxing when I rest so hard it robs me of sleep. I finish a season like I finish a bottle.

When I consume a dozen hours of motivational or motivational-seeming content, it doesn't even leave me motivated. If it did, I wouldn't have to consume so much so often. It doesn't sound like I am improving; it sounds like I am hooked. It doesn't sound like moving content moves me; moving content makes me stuck.

I know the struggle from elsewhere. We talk about it in meetings. Addiction makes one unable to gauge, measure, or control the Goldilocks conditions of enough>, there on the couch, there in bed, gazing, scrolling, stuck so super busy.

*If you haven't already, I really think that you should go back up there and click that arrow and go diving. Except I'm not sure that this is the right approach to get you to do this. It totally depends on what kind of person you are –
Do you hop down to footnotes, read them (or in the case of GS, follow the reading from them) and then return to where you left off? Do you finish the page first and then go back and gather up the footnoted connections – Sankofa!> – ? Or do you get annoyed – here I am, dangit!, being obtrusive because I do this one, too (as I do both things I just described) – and say, "MOTHERBROTHER. Just put it all in the paragraphs above and quit making me jump around!!"
**Brother, how do we really proceed without expectations? You don't expect your neighbor to stay out of your garage? What do you do when you find them in there at night, rummaging through your car? Do you say to them, "My bad! As you were."? You don't expect the insurance company whom you pay a million dollars a week for something almost no one ever has to utilize to step up and fulfill their one and only function when something on some rare occasion actually does go awry? You say, "O! Well I guess that I was just donating to your boat and your fourth home, Mr. Pirandello."?
***Yes, I do, in fact, know the, how do you sayˀ, comma, Eat Grandma.
****I do realize that, if a foreign power is lacing "our" drugs in order to enfeeble us and kill us on purpose, then that part up there might not hold pills. Of course governments conduct operations on each other; I just don't know whether the China-fentanyl theory is weird conspiracy or astute discovery. Even still, let's say it was some foreign operation, I would guess that it is still mostly accident when it leads to death. The drugging of another people in an opium war is not unheard of, right, Mrs. & Mrs. Streaming Moguls?