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Putting Down the Wrench


There was a season of my life when I became fully convinced I could fix myself.

Not heal.

Not grow.

Fix.

Like I was a toaster emitting smoke and the warranty had just expired.

If you opened my podcast app, it looked like a wellness apocalypse.

Tim Ferriss was teaching me to “batch” my life like a spreadsheet.

Andrew Huberman had me convinced the sun was personally disappointed in me for waking up too late.

Mel Robbins was lovingly yelling at me to count backward from five.

David Goggins was screaming at me to STAY HARD while I was just trying to fold the laundry.

Rich Roll was making me question my relationship with cheese.

Brené Brown was reminding me that vulnerability is courage while I was trying to figure out where Sadie hid my phone without having an emotional collapse.

Jay Shetty was telling me to live like a monk when I couldn’t even live like a man who remembers trash day.

Joe Rogan had me wondering whether I needed an ice bath, an elk steak, or three hours in a sensory-deprivation tank.

And Sam Harris wanted me to observe my thoughts without becoming attached to them.

Unfortunately, I was very attached to my thoughts.

Especially the ones telling me I was doing everything wrong.

At one point, before breakfast, I was taking advice from a monk, a Navy SEAL, a vegan endurance athlete, a neuroscientist, a philosopher, a UFC commentator, and several people who apparently wake up at 4:00 a.m. voluntarily.

No wonder I was tired.

And the books?

Stacks of them.

Every title seemed to scream:

YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

Followed immediately by:

GOOD NEWS. FOR $27.99, WE CAN FIX YOU.

So I kept trying.

Optimizing.

Upgrading.

Tinkering with myself like a nervous mechanic who couldn’t figure out why the check-engine light kept coming back on.

I had morning routines for my morning routines.

Apparently being a human being was no longer enough.

I needed to become Human 2.0.

And here’s the strange part... the harder I worked at becoming a better version of myself, the less I seemed to like the version standing in front of me.

Eventually, self-improvement started sounding an awful lot like self-rejection wearing expensive sneakers.

Then came this new season of my life.

A quieter one.

Not necessarily one I would’ve chosen.

Life has a funny way of clearing your calendar without checking with you first.

Things slowed down.

Eventually, so did I.

One morning, instead of trying to optimize myself before sunrise, I picked up Wayne Dyer again.

Wayne never seemed interested in yelling at anybody.

No ice baths.

No macros.

No waking up at 4:17 because apparently 4:18 is when losers wake up.

He always seemed more like your favorite uncle who disappeared to Maui in 1978, found enlightenment, and came home wearing linen pants.

And I came across a thought that stopped me:

You don’t need a new life.
You need new eyes.

Oh.

OH.

I had spent years trying to change my life when maybe the invitation was to actually see it.

The coffee getting cold beside me.

The dogs waiting at the door.

Sadie laughing somewhere in the house.

Morning light coming through the window.

People I love still close enough to hug.

Another day arriving without asking me to earn it first.

None of it was optimized.

None of it was impressive.

But it was my life.

And suddenly I realized:

I wasn’t broken.

I was blurry.

I had been staring so hard at everything I needed to become that I had stopped seeing everything I already was.

I didn’t need another morning routine.

I needed to notice the morning.

I didn’t need another book telling me how to become a better human.

I needed to stop treating the human I already was like a renovation project.

You can spend your whole life becoming better and never notice that somewhere along the way, you started believing you weren’t good enough to begin with.

So I’m trying something different now.

I’m putting down the wrench.

I’m stepping away from the imaginary repair shop.

And I’m learning to look around.

Because maybe I was never a broken appliance waiting to be repaired.

Maybe I was just a man standing in his own kitchen, surrounded by a beautiful, messy, ordinary life…

too busy trying to fix himself

to see it.

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