My journalling app threw a question at me that stopped me cold.
“What’s a moment from this week that felt meaningful to you?”
That was it. The bar was so low! One moment, just one, that meant something. It didn’t have to be a career milestone or a life-altering epiphany. Just something that meant something to me, something to remind me how glorious life can be.
Nothing came to me. I sat there with the cursor blinking, taunting me.
I scrolled my memory back through the days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Nothing. By the time I hit Thursday, I was panicking. By Friday I was reaching for anything….and finding nothing.
Seven days. Zero moments of meaning.
Ouch.
At first, I felt sad. Then I got pissed off. I had busted my ass that week. I’d been “on” every single second. How the hell does a week of 100% effort produce nothing worth remembering?
The autopsy of a busy week
I’d been in back-to-back meetings. Had to provide status updates on projects that were circling the drain. Rallied a team to pull things back together.
Consuming news I had no influence over.
Doing chores and running errands that kept the house functioning.
And then collapsing on the couch each night, dozing off in front of the television and my phone.
That was my week. But that’s certainly not the type of life I want to live. It’s the life I lived, busy running on a treadmill where someone else set the incline and the speed.
Busy is a shell game
Here’s the trap: your Job will fill every single minute you allow it to. That’s its nature. It doesn’t want you to have meaningful moments. It wants throughput.
When we get busy, we audit our calendars for efficiency. We optimize meeting blocks, batch tasks, and colour-code the chaos.
But almost nobody does what actually needs to be done, and that’s auditing their calendar for meaning.
We wear busyness as a badge of honour, as a signal that we’re indispensable.
We measure the week by how hard we worked, not by what we did that mattered.
And so the weeks pass. One after another. Each one full, and each one entirely forgettable.
This is how your dreams die
Your dreams don’t die in a big, dramatic tragedy.
They die through your neglect, like that houseplant you never remember to water. You kill them slowly, through the polite erosion of a thousand weeks that look exactly like the one I described.
The worst part is you won’t even notice it’s happening. Each individual week feels “reasonable”. You tell yourself you’ll catch up next week. But the next week is a carbon copy of the last.
Then one day you look back, so much older and more worn down. The version of yourself you meant to become never showed up.
The Job ate the time. The stress ate your energy. And your couch ate the rest.
This is how good people end up bitter in the end. Not because their lives were bad. Because they were too busy to live them.
The Monday Anchor
If you have a week like that, you need to fix it. It isn’t something you can ignore (at least not for long).
Here’s what I want you to try this week.
Before you open your inbox on Monday morning, before the first meeting invite, before the first dopamine hit of the news — write down one specific thing. Just one. One thing that, on Sunday, will allow you to say: “That was a meaningful moment.”
- Not a goal.
- Not a project deliverable.
- A moment.
A conversation you’ve been avoiding. An hour of the “Work” that is actually yours. A walk in the woods without a podcast. A draft of the thing you’re scared to start.
Just one.
Then protect it the way you’d protect a meeting with someone who could fire you. Because it is that important.
“Busy” is the most socially acceptable way to disappear from your own life.
Nobody will call you out on it. They might even promote you for it.
But the journalling app doesn’t lie. You won’t be able to answer that damn prompt. And trust me, you won’t be happy about that.
The bar is low. One single moment.
Find it this week, or admit that you’re just a ghost in a suit.
Quotation Worth Pondering
“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophe or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.”
— Ernest Dimnet
Journal Prompt
What can I let go of this week to make room for one meaningful moment?