I’m Tired. The Kind of Tired You Can’t Sleep Off: Or So It Seems

“I’m tired. The kind of tired you can’t sleep off.”

Tom Selleck’s character on Blue Bloods uttered that line in multiple episodes, always while standing in his palatial office with his back to the camera, staring out the windows at “his city.” Whenever I heard him say it, I immediately knew what he meant.

I ran into a neighbor last night on my evening stroll to the park, and we chatted for a minute about how hard life is right now for most everyone, especially in this country. She is British and living in the United States, and she mentioned what a difficult time she chose to move here.

It struck me as I walked away that we weren’t really talking about politics, economics, or global health.

We were talking about a universal shared feeling of being tired. The kind of tired you can’t sleep off.

I used to think that our grandparents—and great-grandparents, for some—had it rough with two world wars, the Great Depression, multiple global outbreaks of disease, and I think for most of my life that was true. Growing up, we had the Apollo program and then the Space Shuttle. We had the music of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and I’m sorry, but that music was SO much better than the last few decades. While we also had tough moments, I just didn’t think they compared to what previous generations went through.

Until now.

We were sort of cruising along, relatively speaking, and then the political climate became increasingly divisive. Then came COVID and all the unknowns and uncertainty that came with it.

Masks: good or bad?

Vaccines: good or bad?

People were dying from something no one understood, and we couldn’t see or talk to our loved ones as they passed. In most cases, we couldn’t bury them. Many went without funerals or memorial services, and some families had to say goodbye over Zoom.

Zoom.

To say goodbye to and mourn a loved one.

We then went through the isolation of so-called “work from home,” followed by the trauma, for many, of, “Oh, by the way, you have to come back to the office now.”

And then, when all of that dust settled...

...we got Term Two.

The sequel.

Without going into the details, or speaking to who’s right and who’s wrong, what my neighbor reminded me of—and why this is what is coming out of my brain today—is that we are now living in a time of global crisis.

Regardless of what side of the aisle you fall on, the reality is that our lawmakers have allowed all of what is going on to happen. Instead of finding ways to calm the waters and make life better for all Americans—and, frankly, all citizens of the globe—they apparently would prefer to keep fighting amongst themselves and blaming each other rather than making things better.

For me, and for millions of others, there wasn’t just the COVID part. According to my doctor, whom I have since fired, I never had COVID, but there is also this so-called “long COVID,” which that same doctor believed I had.

I’m sorry, but how can you have long COVID if you’ve never had COVID?

It doesn’t matter anymore.

I digress.

More importantly, I lost friends during that time without getting to say goodbye.

We all did.

I actually received two different texts from friends during that period which, as it turns out, were sent just before their deaths.

The first was my friend Chris who, not so ironically, was the one who managed all of the technology required to get an entire Wells Fargo call center working from home. A brief aside: Wells had told us for years that it wasn’t possible for managers to work from home because there was no way to make our connections “secure enough.”

Then COVID happened, and suddenly it is possible for managers and bankers alike to work from home.

That’s the “evil empire” for you.

My pet name for them.

Chris literally put his hands on every computer in the building, getting them ready to go home. Once everyone was out, he took a very well-deserved vacation.

Unfortunately, he was only about a day into his vacation when he got sick, and only about a week later he texted me:

“Man, this COVID thing is no joke.”

He died the next day.

He was forty-three.

I received a similar text from my buddy Jack, with whom I was working to write his biography.

He simply wrote:

“Hi Paul, are you still planning to finish writing about my life?”

He died shortly after sending that text.

I did not get to see either of those gentlemen before they passed, and there weren’t any formal services.

Of course, that still makes me sad to this day.

I have published the abridged version of Jack’s biography and hope to get back to the extended version someday, but as you can imagine, it has been a difficult project to work on without sitting there with the man himself telling me stories.

For me—and I’m guessing for millions of others—this feeling of being so tired that sleep doesn’t really help was a long time coming.

I have been very fortunate to have jobs that took me, quite literally, all over the world, and for most of my life I truly thought I was invincible.

Hop on a plane.

Go straight to the client site.

Work all day.

Go back to the hotel and change to go for a run.

Then out to dinner with the client, the team, or the partner.

Sleep never really seemed required.

Probably my favorite example was working with Frito-Lay Europe and spending much of that time in Bern, Switzerland.

The client partner on that project was from Spain.

He was very much Spanish.

He believed in slow, leisurely starts to the day.

He believed in siestas.

He also believed in very late dinners.

When he was in town, I would work until six or seven, go for my run or bike ride, get cleaned up, have some dinner, check my emails, and head to bed.

Then, without fail, my hotel phone would ring around 10:30.

This very Spanish voice would say:

“Hey, what are you doing? Let’s go grab some dinner.”

What am I doing?

Sleeping.

I would dutifully get up, get dressed, and go have “dinner.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that all of this was costing my body an amount I couldn’t cover.

For someone who, all my life, collected great nights of sleep like others collect cool stones or seashells from the beach, it has been a long time coming.

I can name those nights as fond memories.

One night at the Ritz in Atlanta, where I dove onto the cloud-like bed fully clothed and woke up the next morning.

The night before leaving my little rental house in Ohio, after packing everything, when I slept eight straight hours without moving.

The time in Berlin when I almost missed my flight because we had done four straight days of meetings in Italy and Germany, and I slept so hard that I woke up to a guy from the hotel shaking my foot because I hadn’t heard the alarm—or the phone when they called. They even turned the TV on remotely but I never heard it.

Or probably my favorite.

Flying direct from Zurich to San Francisco to present at a conference, attend a dinner, meet the keynote speaker, Brandi Chastain, “kiss hands and shake babies” afterward, and then get up the next morning and fly right back to Zurich.

I never slept on flights.

I usually spent most of that time deleting hundreds of emails or going through my mail, which I always carried with me.

The timing of the return flight had me arriving in Zurich in the early evening.

I remember walking into the apartment, walking straight to the bedroom, collapsing on the bed, and then waking up the next morning fully clothed just in time to shower, change, and head back to the client.

All of this is to say that I am exhausted.

All day long.

Every day.

As are millions of people around the world who have their own versions of these stories.

I also know how fortunate I have been.

I’ve worked in beautiful places, with great companies, and alongside some truly wonderful people.

It wasn’t until I turned sixty and the wheels came off that I finally realized something.

My mental, emotional, and physical fuel tanks weren’t infinite.

None of ours are.

Looking back, I don’t think Frank Reagan was talking about one long week or one difficult case. I think he was talking about carrying responsibility, grief, uncertainty, and loss for so long that exhaustion becomes something deeper than a lack of sleep.

The kind that settles into your bones.

I suspect a lot of us know exactly what he meant.

Maybe that’s why Frank Reagan’s line always resonated with me.

And of course, I never expected the last few years to unfold the way they have.

I believe the whole world is tired, and I think the remarkable thing about people is that we adapt. We always have. We find a way to keep moving. We show up. We keep going.

What we don’t always do is recover.

I think that over the last five years—or perhaps longer—we as a society haven’t had either the time or the emotional currency to recover.

We’ve been too busy surviving.

Somewhere along the way, we confused adapting with healing.

They aren’t the same thing.

I think we all need a really good nap.

But we also need some help.

We need someone—or, more accurately, someones—to restore a little sanity so we are not constantly anxious, stressed, and scared.

Living in fear is not good for anyone.

I also think we need a break from social media, twenty-four-hour news cycles, and the constant barrage of information. We were never designed to carry the worries of the entire world around in our pockets or absorb a new crisis every time we look at our phones.

Social media was a great idea in theory.

It has turned out to be a horrible idea in practice and, ironically, may be the least “social” thing that exists today.

The next time you are strolling down a street lined with cafés or restaurants, take a quick look around.

Notice how many couples are sitting together not talking to one another but staring at their phones.

Just saying.

Maybe the first step isn’t fixing the whole world.

Maybe it is simply recognizing that almost everyone is carrying more than they let on.

Maybe the person who cut you off in traffic, snapped at you in the grocery store, or seemed impatient at work isn’t necessarily a bad person.

Maybe they’re just tired.

The kind of tired you can’t sleep off.