I sat down with Nathan last week over fast casual during my lunch break. We ate $15 bowls of beige - the kind of aggressively healthy corporate slop that makes you feel grown up. But for a blissful 55 minutes I wasn't writing documentation or pretending to care about synergy. I was transported somewhere else entirely.
Nathan's been my big brother throughout university. He's the person who answered every late-night crisis call and somehow made every quarter-life disaster sound solvable. He's also walked the exact path I'm on now - same major, same job, same team.
So when I told him that I had just gotten out of a "slump" I wasn't surprised when he said that he had too last year.
Here's what I've discovered about The Slump. It's not laziness, but it's not inactivity either. It's the slow fade of feeling fully alive in your own life. You're technically functioning but spiritually flatlined - going through the motions while some essential part of you falls asleep.
The Slump creeps in slowly. First you're hitting snooze more often, then you're daydreaming through meetings, and finally you've settled into what I call the Default State - that deceptively productive place where you're busy but not building toward anything.
I want to focus on the Default State because it's the best disguise for The Slump. For most people, this default state can be pretty productive - which is exactly what makes it so insidious. Take my friends, for example.
Haraj turned procrastination into performance art, spending months "considering his career options" and booking coffee chats to hear the same advice.
Ellie, on the other hand, remained the hardest worker in any room during her slump. But spiritually she ran on empty, coding without caring about what she was building.
And me? I typed "docs.new" religiously in my browser, creating documents that led nowhere. Every day I'd open a fresh Google Doc and write until my fingers hurt, yet I never published anything, and never finished any work. I'd flip through the same video edits and talk about work projects I'd never actually start.
Here's what I realized about high achievers and The Slump: our default states are the most sophisticated form of sleepwalking ever invented. We're still producing, still showing up, still checking boxes - but it feels like we're living someone else's life in slow motion. Every day blends into the next, and you start to wonder if this numbness is just what being an adult feels like.
So I wonder, when did we start accepting emotional flatline as the price of professional success? How many of us are walking around technically thriving but spiritually starving?
Having recently come out of the slump, I feel well diagnosed to offer an antidote. It's not about optimizing your productivity or joining a self-help club. It's about rediscovering what makes you feel electrically alive and setting those goals better.
Because here's what I’ve found: The Slump isn't actually about lacking direction. It's about losing touch with the things that light you up from the inside. Somewhere between college and career, we stopped asking “What makes me feel most like myself?” and started asking “What looks best on LinkedIn?”
The way out isn't through better planning - it's through better feeling. You have to remember what it's like to be genuinely excited about something again, even if that something seems impractical or doesn't fit neatly into your five-year plan.
Maybe the real tragedy isn't being goalless - it's the way we've been conditioned to mistake achievement for aliveness. I'd spent months thinking something would magically click in my writing, when what I really needed was to remember what it felt like to create something that mattered to me.
Turns out, the question isn't “Am I being productive?” It's “Am I being myself?”
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