The Joy of Underperforming
The idea of life having “seasons” has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval.
For many of us—the vitamin-D-deprived, the sugar-addled, perhaps the suddenly jobless or those dreading family gatherings—’tis the season not so much to be jolly, but just to be “in a season.” The phrase has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval, or of explaining that you’ll be doing things a little differently for a while.
Diddy is in “a season of total independence” because he has “come too far to ask somebody that isn’t where I’m from about cultural and artistic things.” The expression can fend off societal pressures (“I’m in a season of really wanting to … enjoy this phase of our relationship,” the singer Becky G said in March after getting engaged) or tacitly ask for space (after the actor Lupita Nyong’o’s breakup in October, she found herself “in a season of heartbreak.”)
You might have noticed this phrasing if you are a Christian, or run in Christian-adjacent circles, where it seems especially prominent. Many believers tend to say that they are, for example, “going through a hard season” or are in a “season of singleness”—a reference to the Ecclesiastes verse “To every thing there is a season.” (“I’m in a season where the kids need the best of me, not the rest of me,” explained Elisabeth Hasselbeck when she left Fox News in 2015.)
This concept of “seasons” has now spread far beyond Christianity, to mainstream mental health and self-help. Invoking it has become a signal that you’re too overwhelmed to meet some expectation or another: “I’m in a season of not reading as much,” the artist Caroline Kent told The New York Times when asked, mid-pandemic, about her current book list.
Although it may seem cheesy or evasive on its face, the expression is a healthy way to interpret the times when doing it all or pleasing everyone simply isn’t possible. In fact, thinking of life in terms of seasons might just be the best way to stay sane during times of change.
Often in life, we are firing on all cylinders, notching promotions, getting the holiday cards sent out before December 20. But each of us, invariably, goes through a slower season too. In her best-selling book Wintering, Katherine May explains that though we tend to wish that life would be an “endless, unvarying high season,” there will often come “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
She points out that, for most people, wintering is inevitable. For May, winter arrived at her 40th birthday, when both she and her husband fell ill and her son began refusing to attend school. But even if you never experience a serious illness or setback, your parents will die; your job will change; your plans will go awry, and something will have to give. Winter is coming, whether you want it to or not.
Even in a challenging time, though, the idea of “seasons” is hopeful, suggesting that there can be periods of your life when you emphasize different things—family, work, hobbies, friendship—and one or two of the other areas can shrink for a while. The birth of a baby is an obvious one, but many things can prompt a shift in seasons—a graduation, a breakup, a new job, moving to a new city.
This might mean that your life sometimes seems unbalanced, because you are out of necessity paying more attention to some realms than others. A layoff might make a career woman turn into, for a time, a stay-at-home mom. A demanding new job might make that same woman a less involved parent for a few months. But looking across the entirety of your life, the peaks and valleys of work, family, and self-care can even out to a balance. People tend to misinterpret balance as “needing to do everything,” says Brad Stulberg, an executive coach whose latest book is Master of Change. “I need to be the perfect partner, the perfect parent, the perfect employee, the perfect friend; I need to have orchids and follow Game of Thrones and have a fantasy football team and on and on … I think a much more realistic and attainable version is to have your priorities and your emphases ebb and flow with your life.”
Stulberg himself admits that, right now, his main work emphasis is promoting his book. That means he’s not starting new writing projects at the moment—and that’s okay. “I think it’s actually really empowering to realize,” he told me, “that you don’t have to give everything your all.”
This isn’t a new concept, of course, just one that seems to have gained traction recently among the burned-out keyboard class. Thousands of years ago, the Buddha taught that impermanence is one of the “marks of existence,” and that understanding this is one of the secrets to enlightenment. I once had a meditation teacher who liked to remind her students that “This too shall pass” is both relieving and somber: Nothing bad lasts forever, but neither does anything good.
No one is quite sure why “seasons” took off among Christians, only that it has. During the pandemic, Amber Reynolds, a history professor at Wheaton College, noticed a rise in email greetings that said something like,“I hope this finds you well in this season,” a nod to the difficult, temporary period we were all living through. Reynolds says this usage is meant to express, “this is a challenging time, but it’s an expectation that it will be temporary. God will put you through the winter of life, but there will be hope in the future.” Of course, you could just say you’re in a “phase of life,” or, taking a cue from Taylor Swift, an “era,” but these imply time horizons that are either too short or too long. “A season” feels more apt—a few months, give or take. The transitoriness is built into the word, and that makes it edifying.
The phrase has now trickled out of religious circles and into secular mental-health spaces. Charlene Lenkart, a therapist in Alpine, Utah, sometimes uses the “seasons” analogy with her anxious clients. “Earth requires both periods of growth and periods of rest,” she told me. “If there was just growth constantly, then it would become destructive.” There will be times in your life when everything blooms, and times when it withers and fades.
This metaphor can be helpful if you, like me, struggle to endure an actual season of the year. I have seasonal affective disorder, which means that the winter draws me into depression, anxiety, and exhaustion. When the freezing rains of February lash the East Coast, it feels, to me, like winter will last forever.
It also sometimes feels that way to Daryl Van Tongeren, a psychology professor who grew up in California but now teaches in Michigan, at Hope College. “There are times in which winter honestly feels like it’s never going to end,” he told me. But eventually, tulips will push through the frost. Every single year, without fail, “we always manage to get out of winter,” he said. Winter, to us, is an interminable season, but it’s also only a season.
I’m probably not the only person who appreciates this notion but also, secretly, resists it. Most of us cling to the idea that everything good will only get better, and that there’s no excuse to ever drop any balls. As Marilynne Robinson put it, “the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency.”
“I think it’s a little existentially threatening to think that everything lasts a season,” Van Tongeren said, “because then we might extrapolate that out to realize our life is just kind of a series of seasons that will also end.”
Eliminating or stepping back from things may feel unnatural because the human is not a minimalist animal. When faced with a problem, people are much less likely to remove elements than to add them, according to research by Leidy Klotz, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract. People have a natural desire to exhibit competence, he says, and it’s harder to display your smarts by not doing things. In one experiment, he and his co-authors presented study participants with a packed itinerary for a day trip to Washington, D.C. Over 14 hours, the itinerary had the participants visiting six different buildings, three different memorials, a museum, a shop, and a bistro. Then, they gave the participants the option to add or subtract activities. Only about a quarter opted to remove some. Even when asked to improve an article—a.k.a. edit it—his study participants added words to it.
To overcome this tendency, Klotz recommends focusing on what you gain by subtracting—on what your life will look like when you have one less meeting to attend or one less kitchen tool to find space for. He suggests temporarily removing a standing commitment from your schedule, just to see if anything breaks. “We’re just going to try it, and if something bad happens, we just add the thing back in,” he explained in an interview. You can stop subtracting once you start missing what’s been cut.
The key, however, is to not let a season of pulling back on certain commitments mean that you never focus on those areas of your life again. Prioritizing work for a few months might be necessary, but prioritizing work for a lifetime could be pathological. And you should probably sneak in some time with your kids even while you’re sprinting through a work tunnel. Stulberg recommends viewing your identity as a house, one in which you might spend most of your time within just one or two rooms for a while. But you don’t want to let the other rooms go so unused for so long that they fall into disrepair. Even parenting, which seems like something you can’t overdo, eventually ends. When your kids move out, you’ll want other elements of your identity—hobbies, friends—to dwell in.
Or, take the analogy of a three-ring circus—put to me by Laura Vanderkam, an author who specializes in work-life balance. You might have one main event, but the other rings of your life still have something going on. “If you’ve got one ring where there’s a giant sphere where people are riding eight motorbikes around in the center of it,” Vanderkam told me, maybe, in one of the others, “there’s a clown juggling”—something simpler, but still extant. This can be useful advice for when you feel like the clown who’s juggling.
Sometimes this can mean changing your focus with the time of year—literally the season. Vanderkam, who has interviewed several accountants for her books, said they tend to go to the dentist and see all their friends in December, before clients start seeking their help in January. “Then they would kind of check out again until April,” she said. They settle in for their own personal winter: tax season.