In Your Life, What Are You Sacrificing?
I often feel as if I’ve spent the majority of my adulthood being confused and adrift, often lonely, and trying to get a few people here and there to understand where I am coming from. I think more people feel like this than we would readily admit. What most people do, I think, is consume themselves with tasks and busy all week — work, errands, “gotta get the kids to Little League,” etc. — so they don’t have to think about anything beyond their immediate to-dos. And while that’s a fine way to live life that probably prevents an onslaught of mental health challenges, it’s also basically a treadmill of superficiality and consumerism that should result in a vacation to the Amalfi Coast, but usually results in you being a primary caregiver for a second time as your kids get on the same treadmill as adults.
Anyway.
That’s a quick intro to this idea of “sacrifice.” I am not the biggest Simon Sinek fan, although I will tell a quick story. In mid-2014, I had just finished this graduate program at University of Minnesota, and I was 33 at the time and struggling to find a job out of that program. I randomly happened to write a blog post at the time and share it on LinkedIn that embedded a Simon Sinek video. Well, a lady in Texas saw that post and saw I had recently applied to a job there — and the CEO of the company was “obsessed” (her words) with Sinek, so I got an interview. That's part of how I got down to Texas about a decade ago. Weird, eh? I guess I owe Simon something, although I’m not sure what.
I watched this Sinek clip the other day, though:
This one is pretty good, although in typical “influencer” fashion (“thought leader”), Sinek is skating to a new puck. He went hard at work and purpose for a while, then he bashed Gen Z against the rocks for not being substantial, and now he’s onto friendships and relationships. That’s OK, because that’s an important topic, and they do a good job of discussing it above. I for one think America is in a friendship recession, or, as has been stated more eloquently: “Most Americans care more about West Elm furniture than their friends.”
In the video above, Sinek talks about “sacrifice” a few times. I want you to just quickly sit with that word and think about what it conjures up for you. I would guess most people would come to:
In general, the word “sacrifice” can (and often does) lead to a lot of virtue-signaling. It's very common among new parents, for example, and while we generally treat new moms like a bag of dog feces on fire and then give them a bullshit birthday gift on top of it, it can feel virtue-y to constantly talk about how much you’re sacrificing to have kids, when it was often the plan all along, and you probably did it at some level to keep up with your friends anyway.
Beyond defining the word “sacrifice,” though, I want to think or look at what gets sacrificed. I’ve made this point in other posts, but to most middle-aged, mid-career-arc, 1–2 kid people, the order of priorities is:
You can re-order that, but it’s nearly impossible to get “friendship” to the top. Almost everyone in that bucket will cancel a social plan for a work meeting, and/or “Kids are having a fit.” If you try to break this into more granular elements, I would say the order of commitment for many is:
So in general, friendship occupies the five spot. Neighbors usually beat friends because the immediacy is higher. Boss honestly is usually above kids, via the oft-stated justification of “I need to keep food on the table,” but no one says that out loud because it feels bad to put a bully in a suit above these kids that you created after one magical night with a little too much Reisling.
When we talk about “what” gets sacrificed, then, it’s typically friendship. That's a big point in the Sinek/Noah video above.
There are a lot of downstream effects of all this, most notably mental health and Big Pharma running away with our lives. It’s very hard to feel mentally stable without good social community. Believe me — I’ve been in 25 different social circles since I was 20, and it can get exhausting. I’ve recently started to think about it differently, I.e. “chapters,” but a lack of strong social support can doom you. In my case, it often drove me to bars alone.
What makes this part worse is that our approach to mental health is very two-faced. We talk of community, and the need for it, but it’s really not that important to many people. See the priority lists above.
I would reorder those lists as:
While (4) is necessary for (3) unless you have family money, (1) and (2) should be the top two, without question. (4) is usually (1), and many of our issues are downstream of that too. You can call it “workism” or “work as the new religion,” or just work as a place where a lot of people derive significant relevance, but work occupies too much time and attention in our lives, and we usually sacrifice other things for work. That’s the core problem. If Barry Bossman has an “urgent" need, you will punt your spouse, kids, and friends for Barry — because you are scared maybe Barry will initiate a PIP down the line, or because you think jumping and saying how high to Barry is the mark of a good adult. Either way, Barry wins and other stuff gets punted. And in the process, people become so consumed by pleasing Barry and exporting the spreadsheets properly that they don’t notice what other people are going through.
And then we wonder why people shoot up malls and schools, and we dismiss it simply as “guns” or “mental health?” Those are obviously factors, but people commit mass violence because they have nothing else. And yes, that's often the result of their own issues and/or their penchant to alienate others because of mental health struggles. But people sacrificing what should matter for what needs to matter simply for survival is the real culprit in a lot of our issues around violence.
In this video, in fact, a woman in Michigan claims there is no more American Dream — the new American Dream is simply survival.
At that level of thinking, work has to become a religion, because you’re so scared of losing even that small spigot. And when you sacrifice everything at the altar of Middle Manager Marty, you’re going to have other issues downstream of that.
Is this a call to prioritize friendships and de-prioritize work? Sure. It's not that easy, though, as different people prioritize vastly different things in different chapters of their life. Most of adulthood is about “similar life stage” in terms of the crafting of “friendships,” which are usually mid-to-high-level acquaintanceships that we pretend are deeper than they really are.
Just try your best to see others and sacrifice the dumb stuff for the good stuff. That’s all I can really ultimately come back to here.