Everyone Is Tired of Performing

Day 186 – May 28, 2026

I have a theory. Everyone is exhausted. Not physically. Spiritually. Performance exhaustion. Because life increasingly feels like being trapped in a never ending audition for people who aren’t even casting anything. We’re curating. Posting. Branding. Optimizing. Networking. Positioning. Manifesting. Leveraging.

At some point I would simply like to exist.

What happened to that? When did being a person become a full time marketing campaign? I don’t want a personal brand every second of my life. Sometimes I want to buy yogurt. Sometimes I want to sit on my couch. Sometimes I want to spend three hours researching something completely unnecessary because curiosity grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me into the woods.

That’s called being alive.

And I think people are hungry for that again. Realness. Not perfection. Not expertise. Not another person pretending they wake up every morning full of purpose and hydration. Nobody believes that anymore.

The most interesting people I know are gloriously unfinished. They’re still figuring things out. Still changing. Still occasionally making terrible decisions with tremendous confidence. That’s relatable. That’s human.

That’s why I think authenticity became such a buzzword. People aren’t looking for perfect. They’re looking for evidence that somebody else is actually living. And maybe that’s why I’ve become increasingly suspicious of anything that feels too polished. Too rehearsed. Too optimized.

Life has texture. Life has weirdness. Life has moments where you walk into a room and immediately forget why. Life has Roger barking at absolutely nothing and then looking at me like I’m the one who missed something important.

That’s reality.

And reality is usually much more interesting than performance. Maybe that’s why I keep writing. Not because I have answers. Because I like watching real life happen. The awkward parts. The beautiful parts. The ridiculous parts. The moments nobody would put in a highlight reel but somehow end up meaning everything.

Those are my favorite.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, increasingly convinced that being a person is already interesting enough without turning it into a production.