The Primary Sacrifice Of Adulthood

It’s usually friendship, and there’s usually a lot of virtue-signaling around it all.

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: