“Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.” – David Bowie
About 8 weeks ago, I celebrated my 1 year anniversary in my new role. A week after that, my manager resigned and I was tapped to take his place. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of changes and new responsibilities.
By all accounts, this is old hat for me, but the demands on my time have increased significantly, becoming greater and greater as I unravel years of mismanagement and willful neglect.
While I’m very happy in my new position, I am busier than ever, and even less inclined to do anything productive when I get home after 10-12+ hours of skull sweat…
Pressure requires a release valve, and lately, my pressures had been relieved by playing games rather than making them. What’s worse is, these games introduced a whole-new set of pressures and demands on my time – so much so that it felt like a second job, albeit one which I wasn’t being paid to do.
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While playing games can be fun and interesting, that part fades quickly. What keeps me interested is the social interaction; meeting and spending time with new “friends”. What I found was that for the people I was spending a great deal of time with, the opposite was true – they had no interest in camaraderie, just a person to occupy a seat at the table so they could carry on their game.
Maybe it’s the age gap speaking here, and relationships have given way to instant gratification – maybe I found myself surrounded by the “single serving friends” of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club…
So what did I do? I withdrew…
Credits: featured image, “Butterflies” by M.C. Escher
