I used to kid around with people — in those moments when I suddenly lost track of what I was going to share or input to some important decision — that ”my train of thought left the station but left me behind, standing on the platform.”
Such moments make me feel rather senile and incapable of holding a thought.
I've often wondered whether I just have singularly poor short term memory, or whether it's "that ADHD-ish thing" that's playing tricks with my mind, or maybe I simply have more stuff to keep track on at any given moment then I am capable of.
Researchers — you know, the kind that study how the brain works and what we are capable of doing — often have come to the conclusion that the average human being is able to track about seven things simultaneously. If you want to think of that in an everyday usage sense, if we have anything more than seven tabs open in our browser things start to go sideways.
In that context, I also have to admit that I'm often thinking about an awful lot of different things all at the same time. Or at least I am trying to.
It's not that I'm not capable of focusing on something, it's that I'm not capable of shutting out the other noise in the background.
Again, the browser tab analogy kind of works pretty well here, you just have to imagine that you are looking at what's in the open tab (simple enough) but your mind is still processing everything that's going on in the other tabs as well. In other words, I'm not entirely present with what I'm working on right now.
I've been told it's a matter of practice, and that you can train yourself to be more present. Nice as that sounds, it ignores the fundamentals of tangible life, as it is actually unfolding.
The combination of what I do — which includes trading and doing business with people all over the world — with the fact that I'm dead broke most of the time, sets me up with a situation where I have to keep track of deadlines that happen all throughout the day at different times.
So my typical "on deck" scenario might look something like this, at any given moment:
- Thing A has to be done before people go to bed in Europe.
- Thing B has to be done before 5:00 PM East Coast time.
- Transfer C has to be executed before 5:00 PM central time.
- Action D has to be executed while people are awake in Japan.
- Incoming bill E has to be funded by a deposit to the bank account before the bank closes at 5:00 PM local time.
- Meanwhile, I'm trying to stay abreast of incoming inquiries across six different e-mail accounts.
- All of the above happening stuff has to be put into a bookkeeping system in real time a rare piece of software that's actually able to separate what's going on into six different buckets, each with their associated income and expenses.
The irony is that this is all the trouble I go to, in service of avoiding having to go to work for some soulless company doing a mind draining job that I don't even feel supportive of... just so I can have a regular paycheck that may — or may not — be sufficient to cover the eternal flow of escalating expenses.
Which invariably makes me sit and reflect on the fact that staying true to your own authenticity is often a costly proposition. Like all things in life following your own sense of true north comes at a cost. You get to feel good about staying true, but you lose virtually all the benefits of conformity… and yes, there are benefits although critics tend to focus exclusively on the drawbacks.
"Going independent" was an easy choice for me; even taking an immediate 70% pay cut (in 1997) was an easy choice. I was done with "grind culture." Permanently.
I don't regret the choice.
But sometimes I do wish I had a little more stability. At least enough that my train of thought doesn't leave the station without me, all the time!
Thanks for coming by, and have a great weekend!
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Created at 2025.08.08 22:27 PST
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