SOLVE THE PROBLEM, SAVE YOUR MONEY
Let’s pretend you live in a nice suburb of a bustling metropolis. You’re in your 30s and every morning you spot the glimmer of emergent grey hairs in the bathroom light. You look tired. Your three kids are 12, 10 and 7, so of course, you are. Your house is messy, but not gross. You live in it, after all.
Your mornings are action packed from the moment your feet hit the ground. You barely get the kids on the bus before jumping in your newish SUV and speeding off to work, already preoccupied with your overdue tasks. You’re stressing about how you’ll get it all done, especially since you can’t stay late today.
You didn’t get to the grocery store yesterday and now it’s an emergency situation. Kids 1 and 3 have projects they need help with, and number 2 has soccer practice. Your spouse will take her to that so you can focus on…everything else. Oh, and the laundry…the never-ending laundry.
Now you’re home. It’s 11pm and the house is quiet. You should go to bed, and you know it, but it’s the first moment you’ve had to yourself since 6am and you’re using it to mindlessly scroll through social media. You just don’t want to have to think for a while.
Your feed is rife with people showing off their stupidly serene morning routines and you’re immediately incredulous. In spite of yourself, you notice the order of their surroundings, the technology, and conveniences they have. Some part of your reptilian brain connects those luxuries to the influencer’s apparent peace and polish, as the post was designed to do.
Perhaps you could get life under control with their meal planning tools, their meal subscription service, or their in-home gym equipment. Now, the influencer on display encourages you to click the link in their bio for all those life altering goodies. So, you do. You wake up the next morning and start again, waiting for the delivery that’s going to change your life.
The stuff is delivered. It sits in the box for a week before you can get to it. Over the weekend, you set it all up and commit to using the stuff. You inform your family that things are going to change around here, you know, because of the stuff.
You do meal prep consistently for about 2 weeks. After that, your zeal fades. It turns out there is a level of organization that is ultimately burdensome. Your designer meal prep system now sits unused in the cupboard. Months later, you give it away to your neighbor. Someone should use it after all and maybe they’re more disciplined than you. You feel a little stupid for throwing your money away.
We recommend not feeling stupid. You were the victim of a particularly clever form of lifestyle creep, the kind that doesn’t promote competitive luxury, but stress solutions for everyone. It’s great marketing because you really do have a problem to solve. Providing 3 meals (and about 10,000 snacks) a day for a family of five is no joke.
Bottom line: you need things to ease up because you’ve been running on fumes for years and everything is suffering from your exhaustion. You’re willing to try any solution, even a marketing campaign thinly veiled as self-care. But this is not the way.
A good friend of ours said we should try to solve problems with our brains, not our checkbooks. Great advice, assuming you actually understand what your real problem is; many don’t. You need time, space, and dialogue to start looking for it. No overburdened parent wants to hear this, but you’ve got to make some room on that calendar to talk openly, else all future solutions be insufficient or misguided, like the old band-aid on a gaping wound analogy.
Next week we’ll show you the conversational format we recommend for getting the ball rolling. You’re going to be uncomfortable with the amount of honesty required, but then again so will any other participants. It’s time to get real.