“Lately, I’ve been plagued by a feeling I call “Don’t Wanna.” It’s not quite burnout, per se, but it’s related. Don’t Wanna isn’t a big-picture exhaustion; it’s the little voice inside you urging you to cancel or renege on an individual obligation as it approaches. “It’ll be fine once you get there,” you tell yourself, and it’s often true. But other times, you just…well…don’t wanna…and it’s important to honor that feeling on occasion. In many ways, seeing things through can be a useful impulse. It minimizes food waste and helps fulfill professional obligations. But completism is not a habit that results in optimal relaxation. Tenacity, applied uniformly across one’s life, is a curse rather than an asset. Don’t let anyone talk down to you about quitting in the middle of something, either. Finishing doesn’t make them superior. I’m sorry I wasted my time enjoying something else with my one sensational life, to paraphrase the poets Mary Oliver and Future.” Jordan Moss
- Who says I am supposed to ‘spend mine trudging through art that I don’t enjoy, simply for the sake of being able to say in a fully-informed way that it wasn’t my cup of tea?’
- How often do you ‘turn off a film at the halfway point if you aren’t into it’ or ditch a book or walk out of a show?
Two new questions on the nature of rest and relaxation to take with you today and discover the extent to which you are a slave to completism even in your rest time.
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