“How was your vacation? Wonderful, we were in Italy for 3 weeks”. Those short fun conversations are gone, since summer vacation was over around the beginning of or mid-September. The fun conversations were quickly followed by “It was wonderful but after one week I was back to being exhausted. And saying that, even in three weeks I could not restore my energy. Just too much to catch up with. It’s like punishing myself before and after a vacation”. This is what I have been hearing quite often from my clients.
And right before we noticed that temperatures were not too pleasant anymore and days got shorter day by day, the supermarket shelves were filled with fall, Halloween, and Christmas chocolates and decorations at the same time. Surprise. Choose whatever you want and whenever you want. No anticipation necessary. Go!
What are the effects of this modern drug we are self-prescribing to? What are the side-effects? Does it really satisfy all our needs to have access to everything at the same time?
We tend to accelerate the pace of time more and more. We shorten the year by throwing everything into the fall and call it “end of the year”. And it starts when? End of August? Beginning of September? This is crazy. Everybody complains about more pressure and stress but doesn’t say STOP to the craziness of our times. Is it FOMO at a very bizarre level? Or is it? (For those of you not familiar with the acronym, it’s: Fear Of Missing Out).
At the organizational level, we start projects with unrealistic deadlines (everyone knows that they won’t work) but this fuels some egos to push their boundaries. So everybody plays along. The quality of deliverables suffers, people suffer, but who cares, we delivered a lukewarm project, or didn’t. You can check it off the list, but before you do that, start the next one. No wrap-up, no appreciation, no thank you, just go, go, go!
I was supposed to meet a group I was working with last July. One of the participants wrote that everything was so hectic, so many appointments, and too many obligations, etc. Her suggestion was to shift our fun meeting to spring. You are kidding me? When does spring start? 6 months from now!
We all have a choice. We all can say yes or no to the circumstances around us. I made my choice. I am definitely not buying ginger bread before December. I am enjoying my fall decoration. It is pumpkin season for me, and plum cake season, and German onion cake season. I love seeing the leaves change their colors.
I am looking forward to new projects with my clients, I am emphasizing: fall projects. In November, I will be looking forward to Thanksgiving, and after that I will start thinking about the end of the year and buy a lot of ginger bread. I am refusing to artificially speeding up time and shorten my life. Who is with me? Who is the next one to say STOP?
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