3 a.m. Metrics

Wow. Waking up in the middle of the night is my new normal, and for the most part, I’ve accepted it. It’s when I’m most creative.

But it’s also the hour when the mind can stutter, when it locks onto a single thought, worries it from a thousand angles, and gets abso-fucking-lutely nowhere.

Some nights I ruminate.

Other nights, like tonight, I just float. From one version of my life to the next. Forward. Backward. Restart. Compare. Repeat.

It’s hard to be productive when you’re caught in that loop, measuring yourself against others, against your own expectations, against the expectations of family and friends. I know it’s not fair. That doesn’t change where I’m at tonight, stuck cycling through the least meaningful scorecards imaginable: job, money, love.

You know. The shit we’re told matters.

But those things don’t define a life. At best, they describe a sliver of it. None of them are how I measure my own success, and none of them are how I introduce myself to the world. They’re just the metrics society shoves in front of us and asks, “Well? Did you win?”

Are you responsible?
Are you rich?
Does someone love you?

What a load of bullshit. The real questions are quieter … and harder.

Do you put yourself first?
Did you leave any childhood dreams rotting on the side of the road?
Are you honest with yourself?
Are you kind when it actually matters?

Those questions get to the heart of real success. They’re the ones that show up at three in the morning when there’s no audience and no applause. They’re the ones that decide whether you’ll have regrets when the lights go out.

I know this because I’ve been there. I’ve been on my deathbed three times.

I had regrets the first time. The second time too. Same with the third.

That will not happen a-fucking-gain.

So why am I here tonight, stuck chewing on things that don’t matter? Why did we collectively decide that love and relationships are the ultimate proof of a life well lived? Why is someone married in their fifties automatically viewed as more successful than someone who’s single?

Why is a person who shows up every day to a job they hate, having traded curiosity, fire, and unfinished dreams for the appearance of responsibility, why are they seen as more virtuous than someone who wakes up in the middle of the night needing to feed a childhood calling… even when they’re still doing the work, still paying the rent, still carrying their weight?

The math is broken.

And at the same time, somehow, absurdly, everyone is in a fucking hurry.

Racing down the road like time itself is a predator, rage in their eyes if anyone else dares to exist on the same stretch of asphalt. No patience. No margin. No awareness. Just speed, entitlement, and the unshakable belief that their urgency matters more than anyone else’s life.

Which makes these late-night realizations even stranger.

We saddle ourselves and each other with bullshit expectations that don’t actually define a good life… and then we’re in a blind rush to meet them. Hustling toward standards we didn’t choose, to impress people we don’t even like, for reasons that won’t matter in the end.

What the actual fuck are we doing?

This train of thought didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d closed my tablet, trying to sleep, and my mind drifted to something small and practical. I’ve been looking at lights for my motorcycle. One setup caught my attention: fog lights, one yellow, one white.

And just like that, I was back in northwestern Minnesota. Fog so thick it swallowed the road. Young. Newly licensed. Driving way too fast for the visibility I had. Dumb. Lucky. Alive.

Then my brain did what it does now. It replayed the scene … but on a motorcycle.

Same fog. Same limited line of sight. And some asshole comes barreling through it, in a hurry to go nowhere, pissed at the world, driving like nothing else exists … and hits me.

And suddenly, everything lined up.

We’ve built a society obsessed with shallow measures of success, stripped out reflection, patience, and personal responsibility, and then we act surprised when the roads are filled with anger. When people treat other humans as obstacles instead of lives. When everyone’s moving fast and thinking slow.

The madness isn’t abstract. It’s kinetic. It’s lethal.

Society is bullshit, plain and simple. Collectively, we’ve gone soft, outsourcing responsibility, purpose, and self-worth to systems and labels instead of owning them ourselves.

The world is upside down. We reward compliance over courage, security over truth, appearance over substance, and then wonder why everything feels brittle and dangerous.

Maybe that’s why some of us keep waking up in the dark. Not because we’re broken, but because some part of us still knows the math doesn’t add up.