Maybe I’m projecting, but I think a lot of us are burnt out. I think since a young age I always felt like I was behind, trying to catch up to my peers. I mean that’s what I thought I wanted, to be like them. To get into that prestigious university, get that cushy desk job, have a family and settle down in suburbia. I think as I went into my early 20s, I remember that’s all I wanted, to just be “normal”. I’d walk around the city and see people in their white button ups and imagine myself there someday.
They seemed stable. Content even. Obviously, things are not always what it’s made out to be, what it’s marketed to be… I’d also imagine myself insanely miserable in their shoes, vowing a long time ago that I could never work a “desk job”. But still I envied them? Maybe I should have studied a trade, or pursued that arts degree. Even after trying so many things, I can’t help but continually feel this immense pressure to have it figured out by now. I’ve picked up numerous hobbies, transferred across four different degrees, worked over twenty odd jobs and even now I second guess whether what I’m doing now with photography is really gonna work out.
I like to think all these experiences have at least taught me what I definitely don’t want to be doing with my life. Other times I wish I was ignorant to it all, wishing I never learnt the dread of waking up for things I don’t care about. The kind of dread you get 15 minutes before you’re about to clock in. That reluctant acceptance that your next 8 hours will be in pilot mode. Tomorrow too. Next week as well. Months and years… I wondered how much of my life I had already wasted being on pilot mode. I wish I knew sooner that it didn’t have to be this way. That if work was going to take up a large majority of my life anyway, then why wouldn’t I want it to be something I enjoyed?
© Hans 2026