Thinking Too Hard on January 1st

I climbed Mt. Everest this week.
My Mt. Everest, at least.

I spent all of Thursday not working.

No emails.
No writing.
No shooting.
No editing.
No side-eyed swipes through Instagram analytics.

I did wake up at my normal witching hour. That muscle memory still fired. But instead of the usual fervor to tackle business, I took the plastic wrap off a fresh bullet journal, brewed a pot of coffee, and tried to lay out the blueprint for a successful new year.

I didn’t reach enlightenment after a deep breath of frigid, thin air.
I didn’t even enjoy the view as I neared the summit.

But after about 4 hours of lung-burning mental cardio, something finally clicked.

EARN IT?

That’s sort of my MO.
The drum I’ve been marching to for as long as I can remember.

Any outcome must have an equal and corresponding behavior upstream.

A yummy meal earns its place after a hard workout and a week of eating on plan.
Online purchases require months of asceticism and convincing myself toothbrushes only need replacing once a year.
Sleep comes only after the tank is fully on empty, eyes closing mid-chapter of some chick-lit paperback I swore I was reading “for research.”

This is how I’ve learned to move through the world.

And, without really noticing, I started applying the same calculus to bigger questions.

like… What is my life’s meaning?

I treated it like a variable. As if a will to live could be solved with enough grit, enough discipline, and access to an abacus.

Run the numbers correctly.
Balance the ledger.
Earn the right to feel on track.

Do hard things.
People will admire you for doing those hard things.
Repeat till you die.

Sitting there, journal open, coffee drained, and hands cramping, the voice of an old therapist came to me - something he’d utter often and one that haunts me like a ghost…

“And how has that worked for you so far?”

Fuck.

EARN IT or DISCOVER IT?

Millennial men share a common ancestor.

Ross Geller.

The soft-handed, dweeby paleontologist from Friends, the sitcom that’s laugh track loudly raised me from ages zero to ten.

Ross was like a TV uncle. The man who made us laugh, sometimes think, sometimes question. Similar to my actual uncle, it was never entirely clear what he did for a living. Ross liked dinosaurs. Nerdy stuff. Ancient stuff. Big, extinct, unknowable things.
I liked dinosaurs too.

Not casually. But with admiration. In the way I think all kids do.

I had the books. The plastic T-Rex. The encyclopedic phase where you memorize names no adult can pronounce.

I felt awe.

Ross, in a strange way, was doing the thing adults tell us to do. He took a childhood fascination and followed it into adulthood. He discovered something and stayed with it.

And yet, no one respected him for it.

His enthusiasm was tolerated, not admired. His curiosity was framed as weakness. The laugh track often arrived right when he was most sincere.

And without realizing it, I think I learned something important from that.

Not consciously. Not explicitly.

But the message landed anyway.

Curiosity is fine.
Awe is fine.
Just don’t expect it to love you back.

The characters in Friends form a near-perfect teeter-totter of the vocational options we’re told exist in the real world.

Ross and Monica appear aligned with interests they were born with. Dinosaurs and cooking.

Chandler works with numbers. A job that he clearly fell into begrudgingly.

Phoebe heals people. Massage therapist, spiritual wanderer. You always get the sense she could fold up her table tomorrow, pivot to crystal balls, and it would all mean roughly the same thing to her.

Rachel floats. From career to career. Deeply passionate as a person, but never quite passionate about her job.

Joey dreams big. Shoots for the stars. Lands on the moon.

My childhood was culturally well-equipped to introduce me to the archetypes I’d later face in the modern job market.

But it didn’t equip me to make the decisions when those choices were available to me.

So instead of direction, we inherited something else.

A formula.

Hardship = growth

If hardship equals growth, then more hardship must equal more growth.
If that’s true, then maybe meaning is something you earn.

So I treated it that way.

Like a dig site.

Except I didn’t show up with a brush.

I showed up with a sledgehammer and a bottle of creatine, wondering why everything I uncovered kept breaking.

I’m chasing numbers, accolades, invisible reps.
Meanwhile, dinosaurs’ legacy will outlive us all.

As always, four-year-old me had a lot more figured out than I give him credit for.

Which brings me to the bottom of a pot of coffee, deep into this January 1st journal binge.

Meaning doesn’t seem to respond to effort in the brute-force way I’ve been trying to extract it.

I’ve been trying to earn it.

But what if meaning is more like a fossil?

Just like the bones uncovered from creatures that crept around millions of years ago, meaning has been there this entire time.
Waiting.
Not to be conquered,
but to be handled with reverence.

So what do you do at a dig site?

You don’t sprint in swinging.
You put on the nerdy glasses that make your eyes look four times bigger.
You grab a tiny molehair brush and one of those LED flashlights you always get as stocking stuffers.

And you excavate.

You slow down.
You pay attention.

Because if meaning isn’t earned, if it’s uncovered like a fossil, then it’s…

Fragile.
Timeless.
And easily destroyed.

We take these fossils and throw them haphazardly at LinkedIn job applications, algorithms, and family members who couldn’t catch a baseball, let alone a million-year-old heirloom, and we expect them not to drop?

Some things collapse the moment you try to extract them too quickly.
Some truths disappear the second you demand they perform.

So now I’m trying something unfamiliar.

Treating meaning the way I once treated dinosaurs.

With playfulness.
With patience.
With awe.

Not asking what it’s for.
Not asking what it produces.

Just asking if I can sit with it long enough to see what’s still there.

I don’t have a conclusion to offer you.
But I’ll give you the prompt I asked myself, the one that sent me up my version of Mt. Everest.

Maybe you’ll find forgotten childhood heroes.
Maybe you’ll stumble into sitcom nostalgia.
Or maybe you’ll find a little permission to finally put down the sledgehammer.

If you’re not producing:

Are you still valuable?
Are you still interesting?
Are you still you?

Dinosaurs weren’t productive.
They were just there.