How much grinding is too much grinding?

After work, you rush home to get your gym gear on. You’ve settled on a two days on-one day off-three days on-two days off lifting schedule, with your days set at chest and shoulders, legs and abs, back and arms. You learned the virtue of rest days during quarantine. You also learned that a weighted vest maximizes your time spent walking after the gym, which is anywhere between four-and-a-half to ten miles per day.

Dinner is your one meal per day, and is usually some combination of steak, eggs, pork, and chicken. You feel guilty indulging in Quest cookies before bed, which have become the bane of your weekday existence but also what you most look forward to- the gift and the curse; the sacred and the profane. You spend a lot of time thinking about processed, low-sugar protein cookies. This is your life.

Don’t message me for fitness advice, because now you know everything I know. That’s the only way I know to do it. I only know the hard way, every time. I’ve been fat- women treat you like a leering retard and people at work talk down to you. I’d rather drop dead from my awful schedule than deal with another second of that ever again.

You actually tell people you go to bed at 8 o’clock, she enquired. Earnestly. She thought this made me look crazy– that I don’t spend my free time watching streaming TV shows that remind me of the inherent badass nature of white suburban women; drinking wine; enjoying my time in a kind of free-floating, unscheduled manner. Unproductive. Repulsive. Enjoy your time off the work farm, plebs- I’ll be here grinding myself to death.

I have nothing in common with people who don’t understand the urgency of getting to bed early; sleeping away my two hours at the gym, ten miles walking with twenty-pounds on my back, the 3,000 calories of meat- sleep substituting for meditation; dreaming productively; waking up with total mental clarity and peak creative mindset. Racing to work to write in a fucking notebook- the most important thing you do; what must be guarded before all else. Avoiding morning greetings and polite chit-chat from well-meaning co-workers; vicious mind-erasers and creative vampires, all of them. Everything in service of writing in the fucking notebook because writing in the notebook is all you fucking have.

[Excerpt from SET IT AND FORGET IT]

Lesson: How much grinding is too much grinding? How much sacrifice is worth the 1% level up? Self-improvment is as addictive as anything else- and I don't have a good answer... it's hard to not think of time strictly as productivity and value, and it's hard to pass up writing or working out for something not as immediately rewarding as seeing friends.

Obviously there must be balance found between using time productively and not letting all other aspects of your life wither- but anyone have a clue as to how?

K I LL T O P AR T Y