Musings
Sipping Mojitos on the Beach
Is that the life you want?
The average attention span apparently has dropped to 5 seconds. Or may be it’s three seconds but who knows.
We’ve literally become no better than a goldfish. We have lost our ability to focus and do deep work.
Here’s the fun part. The part that should resonate. We take up side hustles to do our own work and the ability to keep our own time. We say that we want to escape the rat race. Yet, the irony of it all is that we’ve just left one to enter a different kind of rat race. One where we don’t even know if there’s cheese at the end of the race. We’re running toward something yet we don’t know what we’re running toward. Some elusive dream of success. Hope. Quite likely it’s the hope of attaining that success that keeps us going. Yet, we don’t know what we’ll find when we get there. We don’t even know where there is.
With a 9–5 you know where you’re headed. The corner office. Or at least that the cheese. But, with your own game, who knows?
In many respects, the rat race is far worse in the hustle game. You don’t know when to stop running and you measure yourself against millions of people on the internet. You don’t even know whether they are for real. You want to believe that they are so capable that they do everything on their own. They don’t steal ideas or prose. They don’t use AI to churn out articles. They don’t simply plagiarize other people’s work. You want to believe that it’s all real.
And you want to compete with that version of reality.
The version of reality that keeps you on an endless loop of never feeling satisfied. Never feeling like you’ve done enough because every time you look, there’s one more person out there with one more great idea doing, what it seems like, far more work than you. They look successful. They look like their living the great life and so you think to yourself that if only. If only I could work as hard, spend as many hours… then my life would look like that dream life of sipping mojitos on the beach while the money just pours in.
But that’s not really the life you want. Now do you? What would you realistically do with your life if you were just sipping mojitos on the beach?
