Waking Early, Drowning Slowly - Blaugust the second

03 Aug, 2025

My daily routine looked like this which was modeled after Benjamin Franklin's "ideal day"¹:

5am: Wake up; Feed the cats; Make coffee.
5:30a: Write, research.
6:30a: Get ready for work.
7-11a: Work.
11a:L0nch!
12-4/5p:Work.
5:30p: Exercise.
6:30p:Dinner.
7:30p: Relax.
9p: Review the day.
10p: Zzzzz....

I liked getting up that early, I really did—so long as it was me waking me up and not the feline agents of chaos². In those starlit hours, I carved time for solitary rituals: reading, crafting, obsessing over minutiae. For a long stretch, it was handwriting, as if by scratching the letterforms into my bones I could rewrite my own cursed script. It did not work.

Ethics, too, held my attention—especially the stoic flavor peddled by Ben Franklin’s 13 Virtues³. But we’ll exorcise those ghosts later in the month for Blaugust, gods help us.

My belief at the time was simple: ritual breeds habit, habit breeds productivity, and productivity something something salvation. The grindstone was gospel. Keep the gears turning. Make. Ship. Repeat. Worth could be squeezed from output like blood from a stone.

Let’s be real, that’s pretty sad and a little toxic

Forging your self-worth in the crucible of productivity? That’s a fine way to build a soul-shaped paper shredder. Especially when the system dangling your carrots rewards production with conditional praise, paltry coin, and—most reliably—more work. Always more work. The grind doesn’t end; it shifts.

Scroll back up. Look at that schedule again. 90 minutes of “freedom,” wedged into the crumbling edge of the day like a loose tooth. Most nights, I used it to read or study—because I couldn’t not be productive, even at rest.

I’m an introvert with a talent for self-isolation and a history of betrayal by so-called friends during the tectonic shift of adolescence. Making friends? Speaking freely? That required a level of vulnerability I no longer trusted myself with. And so, weekdays vanished. Weekends were absorbed by the rituals of adulthood. I blinked and I had vanished—slipped through the cracks like an unpaid invoice.

But hey, at least I was making stuff, right?

I drove myself to panic attacks, depression, and burnout.

By 2017, I was juggling four applications, twelve direct reports, and sole ownership of the accessibility process for an entire company. The 5am alarm—once a time of sacred creation—had become a summons to the office so I could hammer out one more project before drowning in email. Efficient, yes. Enlightened? No no... Not so much⁴.

The panic attacks came like phantoms in the night. Gasping for air in my sleep, I thought it was allergies—maybe a new flavor of anaphylaxis. Something corporeal, explainable. But it wasn’t. It was my brain, waving a flare from inside the collapsing hull.

Three nights a week, for half a year, I drowned in invisible oceans.

I didn’t come to a magic realization though; circumstances saved me

There was no triumphant montage of healing. No catharsis-laced TED Talk moment. I didn’t even mention it to my therapist. Instead, salvation came sideways—a sabbatical in the Pacific Northwest, draped in fog and fir trees. A month of distance pulled me from the jaws of madness. The panic attacks evaporated. A team transfer transmuted bad stress into good stress. And that haunted writing project? I finished it, at long last, surrounded by moss and silence.

So I shifted—from doing all the things to doing fewer things, with intention.

What I gleaned from that descent: more work always begets more work. There is no prize at the end. Just another inbox. Another backlog. You must draw margins around your soul, lest the ink bleed out completely.

What you make is not who you are. But why you make—now that’s worth listening to.

The lies we tell ourselves: these events made me who I am

I like myself now. Most days, anyway. I don’t hitch my self-worth to my output anymore. The work I do⁵ still matters to me—deeply—but it doesn’t own me. It doesn’t gnaw at my ribs demanding tribute.

I’ve reshaped my days to leave space—room to breathe, to wander, to be. Not a cog. Not a machine. A human, dammit. A weird, joyful, stubborn little human.

• 30 Aug, 2025 FIELD REPORT: STARDEW VALLEY - Blaugust the twenty-ninth

  in which our author explores the audacity of slowness

• 29 Aug, 2025 Phosphors within a dying bulb - Blaugust the twenty-eighth point five

  in which our author offers and ember of poetry

• 28 Aug, 2025 Just a photo of me with my cat - Blaugust the Twenty-seventh

  in which our author posts a picture of him with his cat.

Footnotes

#blaugust #favorite #productivity