Finding meaning and purpose in a world of hurry and hustle
Raising kids is hard work. And, dads, you have been stepping up more than ever. You are more involved and spend more time with your kids than in previous decades. And you are now as likely as moms to view parenting as central to your identity.
And while there’s been a lot of attention on how hard the pandemic has been for moms, dads have also been carrying a heavier load during the pandemic—and it hasn’t been easy on you either.
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Starting new things can be hard.
One reason it’s hard to start new things is that it’s hard to give up on the old things. We worry that if we give up on something—whether it’s a job or a relationship or a hobby or a business venture—then all the time, money, effort, and emotional energy we put into it will be wasted.
The desire to avoid waste can be helpful if it leads us to be mindful of how we invest our time, money, effort, and emotional energy. The problem is when we overgeneralize our desire to avoid waste by trying to recover costs that can’t be recovered. Economists refer to these as sunk costs—costs you’ve already incurred that you can’t get back.
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This Mother’s Day, there are a few Mother’s Day sentiments that I can really do without. I don’t really need to hear about “the joy of parenting” or how I should “cherish every moment” or how moms are “selfless superheroes.”
While these might sound like nice ways to honor moms on Mother’s Day, there’s actually a darker side to them: these same “positive” sentiments about moms can also be used to justify neglecting them, leaving them to fend for themselves in the messy maze known as parenting.
In business, this is known as passion exploitation. As researchers Jae Yun Kim and colleagues found, people are more likely to say that it’s okay to exploit someone at work if they’re passionate about their job, in part because people expected the work to be “its own reward” for passionate workers.
Sound familiar, moms?
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The past two years have been hard. The good news is that as Covid cases continue to fall and restrictions are lifted, a lot of things are going to get easier.
Here’s the not-so-good news: Our belief that things should be easier can make us feel worse if they’re not. As difficult as the pandemic has been, there has been one saving grace: We can at least understand why life is hard right now. When we feel sad, disappointed, anxious, lonely, or languishing we know what to blame. Life isn’t supposed to be easy in a pandemic.
But what happens when we no longer have the pandemic to blame for how we’re feeling? What if things improve, but we still feel like we’re languishing?
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