"we have all hit a wall"

Susan Orlean is an American, much published, non-fiction writer. She tweeted a despairing twitter recently that was picked up and discussed in a NYT piece (April 4) by the American journalist, Sarah Lyall.

“Go0d morning to everyone," Orlean tweeted, “but especially to the sentence I just rewrote for the tenth time.” That caught Lyall’s attention.

“I feel like I’m i quicksand,” she explained when Lyall phoned her in California. She sounds like me, and possibly you: “I’m just so exhausted all the time.I’m doing so much less than I normally do—I’m not travelling, I’m not entertaining, I’m just sitting in front of my computer—but I am accomplishing way less. It’s like a whole new math. I have more time and fewer obligations, yet I’m getting so much less done.”

Lyall tries to define this mood: ”Call it a bout of existential work-related ennui provoked partly by the realization that sitting in the same chair in the same room staring at the same computer for 12 straight months (and counting) has left many of us feeling like burned-out husks, dimwitted approximations of our once-productive selves.

She goes on to cite statistics from surveys and to quote people who responded to a New York Times request to describe their work-related challenges. Although their circumstances were different their mood was very similar—like mine, and yours. As one respondent put it, “I find myself falling back into deep pajamaville.”

I’m giving you an outside report to defend myself. It’s not just me who feels this way; I know you do too. It’s no comfort to tell myself that it’s just (?) old age because if/when THIS is over and things return to NORMAL (whatever normal is, was or will be), I’ll still be OLD, not normal at all.

There’s still this wall.