In honor of Friday, let’s talk about what I call weekday zombies. Weekday zombies walk around in a trance, dragging their feet with their eyes rolled in the backs of their heads Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and then on Friday, they come alive again.
These are people who live for the weekend. They turn off and become zombies during the week, most often because they dislike their jobs or have no sense of fulfillment in their careers. On Friday, they wake up excited to live life to the fullest, only to die again late Sunday night or Monday morning.
If you aren’t someone who lives for the weekend, you certainly know people who do. It’s a very common issue. People spend more time at work than anywhere else and most never even try to build a career that grants them the lifestyle they want. So they end up hating Mondays, dreading Tuesdays, barely getting through Wednesdays, tolerating Thursdays, and elated once Friday rolls around.
If you live for the weekend, you might need to read what I’m about to write...
You’re only actually enjoying your life 105 days out of the year. That leaves 260 days out of the year that you’re miserable. To put it another way, you’re only enjoying less than a third of your life. Think about that. If you were to go through your entire life only enjoying weekends and you lived to be 90 years old, you would only enjoy around 26 years of your life. Is that okay with you?
I hope your answer was ‘no’, because it really shouldn’t be okay with anyone. Our complex, meaningful, beautiful lives were not created just to work and go through the motions. That’s why it’s so important to get to know yourself well enough to figure out what your gifts are and to share them with the world.
Your gift may not be to get on stage and sing, or to play piano, or to act in movies — it may be to teach special needs children, or to be a nurse at a cancer research hospital, or to be a real estate agent. Whatever it is, you should be spending your life doing that, so that you wake up every day excited that you get to spend your day doing what you’re gifted at doing.
We all know it’s not easy to face down the things that we’re unhappy with and to be courageous enough to change them, but when the alternative is spending over 2/3rds of life unhappy, it’s the only logical option available.
So I hope that, if you currently live for the weekends, you’ll take some time to figure out what your gifts are and how you can share them with the world so that you can live for every single day of your life — 365 days a year — and not just the weekends. You can live life alive and not as a weekday zombie.