Living Outside the Linear
Everyday more people are out of work. One day you have an identity and job you enjoy, maybe enjoyed, used to enjoy, and then you don’t.
There’s a special torture we inflict on ourselves in how we Americans talk and think about time. We obsess over efficiency and productivity. We squeeze it, budget it, hack it, harvest it. Time is a currency that spends you, not the other way around. For years, I believed my hours were my own, and I gave them away to someone else in the right format, in exchange, whether it was billable hours and always on-call, then exchanging it to 9 am to 5 pm, weekends off, but receiving text messages outside of work hours, without extra compensation. The day I lost my job, the transaction ended. For a long time after, I kept looking for the clock, for a schedule, for a reason to run. There was odd freedom in being able to open my email without fear of what I would find there. There wasn’t a rabbit dropping from the sky, as in The Magicians, blurting bullshit that sent me into panic.
I won’t romanticize it. “Living outside the linear” is a phrase people love to throw around in yoga studios and corporate retreats. The freedom to organize your day around what matters to you is a luxury. It is a privilege. You either bought it, married it, or, like me, crashed into it headlong after an unceremonious exit. Some people lose their jobs and find themselves. Some people lose their jobs and lose their grip. I landed somewhere in the middle, holding a crap coffee mug with the name of my former employer, a loss of identity, a fuckload of knowledge, and with more hours than I knew what to do with, while I watched my husband leave the house and go off to work.
I want to be honest about that privilege. Most people don’t get to opt out of the clock. They’re bent double by the weight of someone else’s demands, bosses, clients, kids, parents, the rent, the algorithm. I had a window, a moment in my soul journey, when nobody expected anything from me except that I keep breathing and not self-exit. The question wasn’t, “How will I survive?” It was, “What the hell do I do now?”
My first instinct was an initial sigh of relief that the bad thing happened to me I knew they were planning long before they knew I knew. I owed them nothing more. I had the freedom to tell them to fuck themselves and what a [insert favorite British expletive] they were. Then, I immediately jumped into an exercise routine, running a 5k every day. The structure was gone, and with it, the excuses. I had nobody to blame but myself for whatever did or didn’t get done that day. I woke up with that old panic: you’re behind, you’re wasting time, you’re not moving fast enough. That’s how deep the script runs. My brain kept looking for a finish line that didn’t exist.
If you’re lucky, or unlucky, enough to lose the illusion of certainty, here’s what happens: the world doesn’t stop spinning, but you get dizzy. At first, you chase the old feeling, make lists, invent projects, say yes to things you don’t care about just to prove you’re still productive. But every “productive” hour just felt like rehearsal for an audience that had already left the theater. The performance was over. Nobody was coming back to clap.
Add ADHD to the mix, and it gets even more baroque. People think freedom from routine is heaven for someone whose mind runs in fifty directions. It’s not. The tyranny of choice is real. Every blank hour is a vacuum, and I am the queen of filling it with distractions: BlueSky posts, research, reading books by the dozen, baking anything, identifying everything wrong in my physical environment that needed to change so I could change what was happening to me. Guilt is the undercurrent humming beneath everything. The self-help people tell you to “just start.” If it were that easy, I would have done it years ago. The guilt had nothing to do with work. They were and are assholes. It had to do with needing to prove my worth and existence, my value as a human being, that only existed while I worked for them, and not before; there was me before, and a me now, and those two people were not the same.
Eventually, something had to give. And it did, not in some blinding flash of wisdom, but in a slow, uncomfortable grind. I noticed that every second I spent rehashing old humiliations was a second I’d never get back. No one was ever going to thank me for my anxiety. If time is a resource, why was I letting the damage they caused spend it for me?
I am the biggest hater of toxic positivity. But I thought about my life over the last seven years, and what I realized was that it was organized by harms experienced and not about joy. That rattled me. At 50 years old, seven years of hell and nothing to show for it was driving my thoughts and feelings. I needed to rethink and reframe where I was and what that meant.
I changed the question. Not, “What should I be doing right now?” But: “What do you want out of life?” “What do you want your life to look and feel like?” “How am I using what I have to not only help myself, but others?” That refocused me to answer “What am I doing with this second?” It forced me to consider if what I was doing at this moment, even this thought, aligned with where I want to go, who I want to be, what I say matters to me? Or am I just keeping the old machinery alive out of habit, out of fear, out of the hope that maybe if I just work hard enough, someone will tell me I did enough and extend me another transactional relationship?
Most of the time, nobody is watching. There is no reward for martyrdom. No bonus check for showing up at your own life exhausted and half-present. Most organizations, most bosses, hell, most institutions, are perfectly happy to replace you the second you can’t give them what they want, even when what they want is unlawful, illegal, unreasonable, impossible, etc. The myth is that you’ll get loyalty if you give enough. What you get is spent. I don’t want loyalty that sacrifices my integrity and disregards my knowledge and experience.
Once you realize your fungibility, there’s a savage relief in it. I stopped bleeding out for people who measured my value in their terms. I stopped killing myself to keep up. The decompression is not pretty. It’s not romantic. It feels like being wrung out, like a sponge under a brick suddenly released. What comes back isn’t some Instagrammable peace. It’s raw, sometimes ugly, always honest. You can feel the edges of your own needs again. Am I thirsty? Am I hungry? What do I need at this moment? You get curious: what if I didn’t organize my day around what someone else expects? What would that even look like?
For me, it looked like making different mistakes. I’d try to build new routines and fail. I’d say I’d write for three hours and end up fighting on BlueSky, staring at my laptop, cooking so that everything in the kitchen was everywhere. Some days the most radical thing I did was let myself enjoy it. Some days I sat in the mess of it and resented every single minute. That’s reality. Not the sanitized “choose joy” garbage. They should put a warning label on that, by the way.
Getting older has stripped away a lot of my patience for self-delusion. People are going to behave how they want. Whether they get away with it is the actual issue, not how you contort yourself trying to please them. Once you stop fighting to win over people who won’t be won, you decompress. In that emptiness, you find choices. Everything you do—everything—is a choice. Even not choosing is a choice, though most of us work hard to avoid owning that.
This lesson didn’t land in my life gently. It crashed through the door with the rest of the pandemic, the news, the everyday violence of American life, the fucking election. We live in a country built on the idea that you’re only worth what you can prove. That failure is fatal and that if you’re not busy, you’re already behind. What if we refuse that premise? What if we don’t organize our lives around the Administration’s terms, or our employer’s, or the fantasy of who we could be if only we tried harder?
Political reality right now is deliberately constructed to keep us overwhelmed and obedient. Fear is currency. It keeps you exhausted, off-balance, ashamed for not doing more. The more you run to keep up, the further you get from any actual power. What if instead we pick one or two things that matter? Not everything. Just one thing worth doing, worth holding, worth spending our seconds on. If we do that, we don’t just reclaim time; we reclaim agency. That’s resistance with stamina.
You’re not failing. You’re not behind. You’re not broken for not “keeping up.” You are where you are, and the only question is: What’s true, right now? Where are you really? I am not seeking what you want to project to those people in your life who have a modicum of power over you and that you are trying to please, not what you’re supposed to admit on a performance review, and not what Instagram wants to hear.
Who are you, what do you care about, and what are you building—today—in the life you actually have, not the one you fantasize about at 3 am, or while you are doing mundane tasks or sitting in a staff meeting?
If you have the privilege, even for a month, a week, an hour, to stop measuring yourself against someone else’s clock, use it. Not for grand gestures or social capital, but for the small, hard acts of agency that no one else can see. If that sounds like a luxury, that’s because it is. It’s one most of us will be punished for if we exercise it too visibly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking.
Living outside the linear doesn’t mean dropping out. It means refusing to be digested by a machine that was never built for your survival. It means risking being misunderstood, unproductive, inconvenient, or, my personal favorite, “difficult.” It means seeing that time is not just hours on a clock, but the sum of your actual choices. Who are you feeding? Who are you helping? What are you building for yourself, and how does that help others?
I don’t have a clean answer for how to live outside the linear. I am still trying to figure it out. Some days, I manage it for a few minutes and then get sucked right back into the negative thoughts of “What happens if…” or the guilt of feeling like I am not contributing enough to my family. Some days, the best I can do is not schedule the next form of self-punishment. But I know this: every second spent living by someone else’s expectations is a second you don’t get to spend building your own world. Maybe that’s not revolutionary. But it’s honest.
And yes, I’m happier when it’s quiet, not empty, not disengaged, not numb, but just quiet enough to hear myself think.
Feed Your Soul: Marinated Butter Beans with Lemon Zest and Herbs
Ingredients:
1 can butter beans (15 oz), drained and rinsed
2–3 tablespoons good olive oil
Zest of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chopped fresh herbs (parsley, dill, or tarragon, or any other herb; choose what you like.)
Sea salt, to taste
Freshly cracked black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon minced shallot (optional, if you like to keep things interesting)
Bread or crackers, for serving
Instructions:
Open the can of butter beans. Rinse well. Let them drain.
Tip the beans into a bowl. Add olive oil and lemon zest. Toss until coated.
Add chopped herbs, sea salt, black pepper, and shallot (if using). Stir to combine.
Let the beans marinate for at least 10 minutes, longer if you can stand it. The flavor deepens with time.
Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve cold or at room temperature, with bread or crackers.
Eat as-is, unapologetically, while the world spins.
I don’t have all the answers. Living outside the linear isn’t a prescription or a flex. It’s just a practice, one that gets interrupted, undermined, and, some days, forgotten. But in a world that is hellbent on measuring your worth in deadlines, urgency, and self-erasure, claiming even a scrap of your own time is a quiet rebellion.
If you’re lucky enough to get a taste of it, hold on. Don’t think of it in terms of what you lost, think of it in terms of how many choices you have. Think through all of those choices, and that will lead to more choices. Don’t swallow the story that you’re failing. The only thing you owe is to pay attention to your own life before it disappears into someone else’s agenda or ends, like everyone’s does.
The clock was never on your side, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose yourself keeping it. You are only here for a limited window of time, and as we grow older, it seems like the clock is ticking faster. Seasons and years are moving at an alarming rate, like our life jumps into hyperdrive. I can’t prevent the clock from advancing, but I can slow it down and create memories that aren’t centered around fear, anxiety and panic.
Does this resonate with you? If does, tell me more by leaving a comment.
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Dr. Tracy A. Pearson, J.D. is a legal, political and cultural analyst, writer, host, and and researcher, who appears weekly as a Contributor on the SiriusXM network, SiriusXM Progress Channel 127, on John Fugelsang’s Tell Me Everything.
She is an expert in implicit bias, investigations, corruption, abuse of power, and law, and she appears on various networks explaining complex issues in simple ways. You have seen her on NewsNation, Cheddar News, Fox5DC, NOWLIVE from Fox, KNX LA, Los Angeles’ longest operating talk radio station, and other ABC, NBC and CBS stations.
Dr. Pearson is currently writing a book based on the first study on implicit bias in workplace investigations and which is cited in the California Labor and Employment Law Review and Capital & Class (Sage Journals)
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