I’m a huge fan of The Art of Manliness website. I don’t always swing in and read it but I do get the weekly digests, and every now and then I’ll search the website for something that I’m curious about. The site is dedicated to reviving “manliness” in young men who seem to have lost how to engage in the next step of life after college. I mean, even after high school we kind of have a hard time figuring out our place. Some of this is due to the leisurely pace that our individual worlds seem to move, and some of it is to just having poor direction from those who came before us.

There was a time when people HAD to grow up because in some ways there wasn’t as much entertainment to be had, and because their survival required it. I think that the previous generation had so much so hard they wanted us to have everything we needed, leading to us having more of a “childhood” than most generations. I don’t think I even worried about having to get a job until I was sixteen, which is probably late in a lot of people’s eyes. Some kids don’t even have to do that.

This is totally not what I set out to write this morning but I guess it’s something that’s been on my mind. I think it comes to mind every now and then when I’m sitting on the couch playing a game or something when Sam is napping or asleep, rather than working on some major project that I should be getting done. In some ways, having the extra “play” time is really good for your brain, but too much of it can have a negative impact on the rest of your life. “No time enjoyed is time wasted,” is often what you’ll hear from people who spend a lot of time on the couch, and that might be true for you as an individual. I just imagine what I could have done in that would have impacted others.

I’m most likely going to write down all these introspective thoughts and then just do the same thing today. It comes in waves though, I suppose. Most of the time I’m doing some pretty impactful stuff. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself.

I suppose all we can do is wake up every day with the intend to do a little bit of something that impacts someone else in a positive way. If we do that, I suppose it doesn’t matter if we watch movies a bit or play some video games. The main thing is that we get up and accomplish something that makes a difference, even if that’s just repairing the fence that you’ve been putting off, or doing all the laundry that keeps piling up. Have to be responsible sometime, I guess!