Man, I fucking love weekends. I love drinking my coffee more slowly or not having to rush into work where I feel like my brain doesn’t stop focusing on something for the entire day until my head hits the pillow that night. I love knowing that I have a day to do what I want to do, even sometimes those days are filled with doing shit that carried over from the week.

I still end up being worried about what I’m going to do that fits under the umbrella of nebulous productivity. It’s one of my biggest struggles. I find myself always, always needing to spend my time being productive; maybe that’s working on any number of things I can be do for my job, or writing a blog or newsletter, or going to the gym, or reading, or listening to podcasts. Whatever it is, I’ve developed this urgency to always be active and “becoming better.” I’m a learner at heart. I view everything in life, whether it’s something that fits under my previous educational experience or not, as learnable and therefore something we should allow ourselves the confidence to learn if we’d like to. It frustrates me that our obsessive work culture leads us to view our lives as resumés that we’re constantly preoccupied with improving. Why can’t a book I read on the history of surfing written by somebody who actually lived during the era being written about be something that is a part of my resumé? I’m being partially facetious; I’m not suggesting I should add “Read Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finegan” to my resumé. But I do believe that if it’s something that I would tell somebody about over a beer that it’s something relevant to my life.

I read Barbarian Days back in 2017 during what seemed like a turbulent time in my life but in retrospect was a relatively menial time. I was going through a breakup, worried about my sister, and also unsure of what the next step of my life looked like. It was a turbulent time, sort of, but far less turbulent than the following four years. It feels incorrect to say that I feel like I have a surfer’s heart; I grew up in the midwest after all. But I remember growing up and being captivated by the live streams of southern California at Hollister and desperately wanting to learn how to surf. It’s a funny, random memory but there’s something deeper, more interesting there. Whenever reading Barbarian Days, no matter where I was, it felt like the weekend.

We spend so much time being preoccupied with our established identities in the eyes of others compared to how we perceive ourselves that we limit the way live our lives. There’s too much focus on how others will judge us or if we’re good enough or if we’ll fail when we try to do the things that make us excited or bring us joy. We focus on curating our resumés instead of curating what we actually want to be and do with our lives.

I think that’s why I feel a certain nostalgia and peace when I think about the weekends. Weekends, the world just feels more open, it feels like it’s when I get the opportunity to pursue the future and the life that I want to live. I can go on a hike with Duncan or spend some time learning a new hobby or just relaxing and reading outside with a cup of coffee without time breathing down my neck. The weekend is the peace that I associate with a life that is lived exactly how I want to live. It’s this sense of possibility, of freedom, of pursuing life without feeling compelled to justify it by doing a risk-benefit analysis of how this will help me in future endeavors.

Even writing this blog in a stream-of-conscious way feels … bad. Not bad in the sense that I’m a bad person, but more that I’m a bad writer writing this for an audience who perhaps doesn’t give much of a shit. I’m not sure if any of this content resonates that much with people and maybe my assessments are misplaced and not that relatable.

Ah, it’s the weekend, who cares.