Back when I had a proper job from 2013-2018, I remember the dilemma I had every weekend\u2013 or \u2018quadrilemma\u2019, to be precise. Do I\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes I would feel so torn between all the options that I\u2019d get 0 out of 4 meters filled. I found it difficult to relax when I felt like I had so many other things competing for my attention. I lived a long way away from my old friends, and I struggled to make any good friends in my neighborhood, so socializing would require planning and travel which I never felt like I had the energy to do, and never felt like I was able to \u2018justify\u2019. Sometimes I\u2019d make some progress on work, but actually most of the time I think I decided to work on my own writing\u2013 which largely paid off. Although when I do a big picture overview of the past decade, I wish I had socialized more, and I wish I had\u2026 just treated myself better, gone out more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I imagine those things will remain true for me as I look out at the decade ahead. And now I have a child, so my actions don\u2019t just affect me and my wife\u2013 they also inform my son\u2019s baseline assumptions about what life is like. In my case, my parents ran their own family business, with very little boundary or separation between work and life\u2013 the fastest way I can convey this is that my dad would be free to come home for lunch and take a nap afterwards, but he also had an extension of the home office phone in their bedroom. In an odd enough way, I suppose my parents in the 90s lived in a psychological reality that\u2019s not too dissimilar from how current-day people live with work emails and messages sending push messages to their smartphones. Everyone is \u2018always on’ now, for the most part. There have been attempts to push back against it, which I commend, but that\u2019s the baseline assumption I\u2019m familiar with (especially in Singapore, which is famously terrible at work\/life balance.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I left my job mid-2018, and have been self-employed ever since, which means I have been self-employed for longer than I was ever employed. The bad news is I\u2019m not a great boss of myself. I did manage other people in my last job and received some positive feedback for it, but I was never quite able to treat myself with the same respect that I treated others. I\u2019d like to think that I\u2019ve gotten better at it over the years, but to what extent? The real proof is in the outcome, and for the most part I\u2019m slightly underwhelmed with my outcomes. I wrote and published 2 ebooks and maybe a couple of decent essays, and I\u2019ve done marketing consulting for a couple of dozen clients. If I search my heart for the truth, I feel like with better management I could have done twice as much, at a minimum. And again, I find myself thinking, as a dad, it feels more important than ever that I do a good job of managing myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Has my \u2018quadrilemma\u2019 changed? Well, the demarcation between \u201cmy job\u201d and \u201cmy own thing\u201d has become much blurrier. I think I understand the importance of rest better now. Actually, to give myself some grace, I think I was making decent improvement on every front until<\/em> I became a parent, at which point the disruptions to my routines and the chronic sleep deprivation smashed my entire operation with a sledgehammer, forcing me to rebuild everything from scraps. It actually does feel like one of those video games where the player loses all their gear and levels and is forced to grind all over again. But the good news in both counts is that there\u2019s always something more fundamental that isn\u2019t lost. I notice that even on my hardest days these past couple of years, I\u2019ve never really become as despondent or depressed as I was in my teenage years, or in my mid-20s. I really do have a handle on that stuff. That\u2019s something I can be proud of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, \u201cI remain psychologically functional\u201d feels like a very low bar, and I\u2019d like to be a little more ambitious than that. I\u2019ve been sloppy with my correspondence, missed an appointment recently, and generally feel like I\u2019m out of sync with my work, my material, my processes. All of those things just feel like they are in disarray. What is to be done? This substack is called Frame Studies, so let\u2019s experiment with some frames.<\/p>\n\n\n\n