Too Busy to Live

Open Instagram on an ordinary morning, and before you have finished your coffee, someone has already gone for a run, meditated, prepared a healthy breakfast, taken the children to school, learned a new language, answered all their emails, and somehow remembered to be grateful for it all.

Of course, we know that social media is selective. We know we are comparing our whole lives to carefully chosen fragments of someone else’s. And yet the feeling is surprisingly difficult to escape: I should be doing more.

When productivity is measured by exhaustion

A while ago, I noticed something strange about my own criteria: I only felt I had had a productive day if I was collapsing with exhaustion by the evening.

If I still had energy left, I could probably have done more. If I finished everything I had planned and wasn’t tired, it felt suspiciously easy, and so it didn’t quite count.

Only when I was utterly drained did I feel fully entitled to lie down and stop demanding anything more of myself. Sometimes it took getting sick before I could accept that I needed to stop.

Almost imperceptibly, the goal shifted. Completing the task became secondary to reaching a state in which I would finally allow myself to rest.

Why does rest have to be earned?

When permission to stop comes only at the point of complete exhaustion, this may be about more than time management.

Productivity can become a way of proving our worth: as long as I am doing something, coping and being useful, I am doing life correctly.

Rest then begins to feel less like a natural part of living and more like a reward that has to be earned. Even when there is time to rest, it can be difficult to relax fully. Somewhere in the background, the question continues: Have I done enough yet?

Many of us spend the first half of our lives this way. We can always push a little harder, hold on a little longer, sleep later. Finish one more project, take on one more task, squeeze something else in between work, children, exercise, and the rest of life.

At first, this can feel deeply satisfying: I can do this. I’m managing. I’m making things happen.

What changes in midlife

Then, somewhere around midlife, new questions begin to interrupt this familiar pattern:

Yes, I can. But why do I keep living this way? And what is it costing me?

One of the things that changes as we get older is that the cost of our own productivity becomes harder to ignore.

Once, being able to push a little further seemed reason enough to do it. Now, just because I can do something doesn’t automatically mean that I should.

We start questioning ourselves:

Do I even want this?

Does it really matter, or am I trying to prove myself again?

Why does rest have to be earned?

And why should having no energy left be the only sufficiently convincing reason to stop?

It is easy to interpret this shift as becoming less disciplined or less ambitious. Yet perhaps what is changing is our willingness to accept exhaustion as the normal price of getting things done.

FOMO and the fear of missing a life

And here comes another midlife paradox, courtesy of our old friends FOMO and FOBO.

Around the time we begin to understand more clearly what we actually want, we also become more aware that our time is finite. We can no longer seriously believe that there will somehow be another whole lifetime for everything that matters to us. And familiar FOMO – the fear of missing out begins to sound different. It becomes less about missing a party and more about missing out on a life we long to live. What if I never visit the places I wanted to see, learn something I have always wanted to learn, or find the courage to make a change?

So, instead of making more room in our lives, we may quietly fill them up further, just with different things.

Alongside this is FOBO: the fear of better options. What if choosing one thing means missing out on something better? This hardly helps us slow down, either. Realizing that our time is limited can make us even more frantic about fitting in everything that matters.

Redefining productivity

So the question for me at midlife is less about how to become less productive, and more about what I want productivity to mean now.

Getting as much done as possible? Choosing what truly matters? Being present for my life while trying to get the most out of it? Learning to recognize my limits before my body forces me to?

Perhaps the hardest part is accepting that a good life is shaped both by what we choose and by all the things we have to let go of, because no single life can hold everything.