One way to stop normalizing struggle

Do you ever pay attention to the words you use to describe your day?

Think about “pay attention” for example.

What are you actually saying? And what are you actually “paying” your attention to?

Your attention has extreme value to you and to the the things you pay it to.

It’s finite, but we speak about it like it’s infinite.

The metaphors we unconsciously speak into the world subtly shape everything about our reality.

We say things like:

“Putting out fires” when we’re just checking email and updating spreadsheets.

We talk about our days like we’re going to war, when most of us are just sitting behind a computer doing things of very little consequence.

The metaphors we speak shape our relationship to our behaviour, our thoughts, our emotions and our perspective about the world.

Until we make the unconscious conscious, we stay stuck in this linguistic trap that normalizes struggle day-to-day.

Think about ‘time’ as an example.

You’re wasting your time.

Is that worth your while?

You’re running out of time.

He’s living on borrowed time.

My fiancé just came in while I was writing this letter and said,

“I’m going to go kill some time”.

When she was referring to a beautiful gift of time she had to spare before an appointment.

In Western culture, time is treated like a valuable commodity, not a gift.

These ideas are relatively new to the human race, yet we worship them all day, every day.

In our society, money is a limited resource that we spend, invest and budget.

We believe time works the same way.

We attached time to money because we’ve structured our entire work culture around quantifiable units of output:

• hours billed

• quotas met

• deadlines hit

• budgets balanced.

No wonder we treat every moment we have like a transaction.

The metaphors we speak aren’t harmless.

As you’ve seen, they shape how we feel, experience work, relate to time and treat our attention.

Here are the consequences of 8 common metaphors keeping us stuck on the hamster wheel.

1. "Drowning in work"

→ Implies total overwhelm and helplessness. There's no oxygen, no breath, no space.

2. "Burning the candle at both ends"

→ Romanticizes self-destruction for the sake of productivity or ambition.

3. "Putting out fires"

→ Implies you're always reacting to chaos instead of creating from clarity. It normalizes urgency.

4. "No rest for the wicked"

→ Embeds guilt around rest, as though only the lazy or undeserving take breaks.

5. “Keeping your head above water”

→ Reinforces a sense of survival and just barely managing.

6. "Wearing many hats"

→ Sounds versatile, but often reinforces identity confusion and glorifies overextension.

7. "Running on empty"

→ Suggests you have nothing left, but must keep going anyway. It glorifies depletion.

8. "Killing time"

→ Treats time like a burden instead of a gift.

Awareness precedes clarity.

Make the unconscious conscious by noticing when you’re using this type of language and ask yourself why.

When we stop glamorizing our daily challenges with war metaphors we let go of the unconscious suffering influenced by our language.

And we don’t let the metaphors of the past dictate the life and work that we want to create for ourselves.

Much Love,

Cory Firth
Creator of One Minute Weekend

Let’s work together!