The intersection of overwhelmed and undervalued

Most of the time I travel with my phone tucked into my waist pack - out of sight but close at hand. I wish I could tell you that it is because I’m so bold as to launch myself into new environments with my best anthropologist foot forwards, but instead I’m actually afraid. Of dropping it, or having it swiped, or of seeming extra vulnerable, lost, and easy to swindle. I prefer to gird myself with my own version of RBF and pretending to look bored or hurried, I make my way confidently through places I’ve never been.

(This is how I nearly found myself in the men’s locker room last week at work.)

I suppose my preference could also be because of the vertigo? Focusing on the tiny world while making my way through the big world is tough, although I see others who manage their ways about Golden via peripheral vision alone, noses only a few inches from the screen hot on the trail of Pokemon or the oracle of Trip Advisor. This is true in LA and Breckenridge - the blend of those who meet my eyes and those who can’t be bothered. Those in a hurry to be in the next place, and those profoundly aware of precisely where they are.

Most everything I read in news and editorial land is reinforced by memes suggesting that we want more than we’re capable of having. That overwhelm is the norm - a veritable religion of debts - sleep, financial, caloric. Life in the crosshairs of my income and age brackets is afforded only the balancing act summed up by the adage that you can only have two: work, family, health, with the unhelpful soundtrack of pursuit. In an effort to conserve time, we multitask, optimize, and share hacks.

Most of my neighbors are 65 or better, and their mantra seems to be more about making meaning of their time in retirement than it is about slowing the clock and saving. Some of them are busier than I am, bouncing from volunteer commitment to grandparently service to faith group to book club, but the motivation is different.

There are strange threads at the intersection of the overwhelmed and the undervalued.

I fit neatly into neither box, and yet somehow find myself in both.

How ‘bout you?