Epic and Trending

Here's a question I have: who told you that your life has to be epic? 

It's a bit rhetorical because I know it stems from this social media world that we live in, where we're carefully curating our lives to be, well, beautiful. And exciting. And awesome. And full of all the things that we really don't feel like they're full of when we're sitting on our couches for the majority of our day, finishing off another bag of potato chips and letting our streaming services auto-play the next episode. 

I mean, let's just be honest here - that person who is always posting their runs (me! it's me!) isn't running all day; running is maybe an hour of my life on a good day. There are 23 hours I'm not doing anything else. That person who is out for a hike with their best friend...spends the bulk of their day not with their best friend. The one who is playing with their dog, their dog eventually has to take a rest. 

We are presenting our lives in moments, and they are swallowed in wholes, and we're all just trying to make our lives look epic. 

But...why? 

This morning, I was logging into my computer for the day and saw a new "trend" - presented with the idea of having a porch goose, which is becoming pretty popular again these days. It was all about having a porch goose, dressing it up in outfits, making a statement in your neighborhood...and of course, on social media, where you'll probably post your goose every time you change its outfit. 

They called this - are you ready for this? - "whimsy maxxing." 

Because we can't just call it "fun." 

Or "joy." Or regular "whimsy." It's got to be whimsy "maxxing." 

Because we live in a world where we don't do anything unless it's epic. Absolutely everything to the max. Oh, wait...the maxx. With an extra x. 

I just rolled my eyes. Can we seriously not just have fun any more? Good ol' plain fun?

Who told you your life has to be epic all the time?

There are a couple of outcomes to this. First, as has been well-documented, mental anguish is at an all-time high. Depression, anxiety...we're riddled with them. Mostly because our lives are not epic enough. At least, we don't think they are. Or because we're trying to find ways to make them more epic all the time. 

But second, we don't have normal experiences any more. We live in a world where nothing is regular. Nothing is just naturally human. Nothing is part of living. Everything is, by some measure or another, extraordinary...and if it's not - if it's really just a porch goose like half a dozen other families on our street have, too - then we desperately try to make it sound extraordinary to the point of exhausting ourselves with all the extraordinary things we are doing, which are not really extraordinary at all. 

Our trip to the grocery store - extraordinary. Look at me meal prepping (uhm...cooking), and getting a great deal (uhm...using coupons). Our drive to work - extraordinary. Cruising down the road, one hand out the window. Our job - maxxing out. Extreme paperwork ought to be the newest Olympic sport. 

And at the end of the day, we're tired...and we're craving to just do something quiet, something simple. Something "mundane." Something...human. 

We spend so much energy trying to make our lives epic that we neglect to live the epic of our lives and we look around and it feels more normal than we've tried to make it and we have the sudden realization that we've missed all of it. Every bit of it. By trying to make it more than it is and make it bigger than us and make it awesome to the maxx. 

...all when what we really want, deep down in our souls, is simply something good.