we're all mad here

Read time: 2.5 minutes

hey mad hatters,

writing a newsletter feels like following alice down many different rabbit holes — full of unexpected twists, turns, curiouser, & curiouser.

last week after sharing sahil bloom’s tweet about not letting friendships atrophy. i stumbled upon one of his more recent tweets about how we spend out time & i lost an entire wednesday.

the tweet led me to his newsletter which led me a presentation which led me to a data set that i majorly nerded out on.

our world in data took data from the american time use survey (2009-2019) to show WHO we spend our time with. many fascinating trends in this data that i’ll be diving into more.

i couldn’t wait to share one trend with y’all asap.

i know we all feel stretched for time & tend to think about the activities taking up the time, but it’s equally important to think about the people that take up our time.

the bar chart below show how many minutes we spend with different categories of people across our life time from ages 15-80.

my jaw was on the floor when i saw some of these trends quantified.

some trends are expected, others are more surprising.

spending more time with your partner than anyone else is not surprising.

but did you know we spend more time with our coworkers than our kids, parents, or friends? we spend 250% more time with our coworkers than friends (!!!)

last week i talked about how friends are the spice of life, but i am remiss now to not to expand this friend term to include partners, coworkers, kids, & parents.

people are the spice of life.

and as the cheshire cat said, we’re all mad here.

some are more actually mad or metaphorically mad than others.

and that has an undeniable impact on us.

mindset

this week remember that your people are your potential.

other people, consciously & subconsciously, shape our lives, beliefs, & mindsets.

while this is definitely true on social media, especially twitter

i think my remix version is even more true

as the saying goes, you’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

so we must pick our time tribe wisely.

we can’t control others, but we can control who is in our inner circle.

mission

your mission is to put out the garlic for the energy vampires.

it’s not always easy to walk away from a person due to certain circumstances, but you can setup boundaries.

you get to decide who you share your energy with & it’s not your responsibility to give your batteries to the people that were born without their batteries included.

the world will weigh you down, so you’re better off surrounded by people that lift & charge you up.

your life is too short to be anything but extraordinary.

musing

speaking of extraordinary, two big updates here.

1) i made my first meme ever last week that went semi-viral with almost 200K views & 5K likes.

2) i’m in the final 8 days of my 100 day challenge, can you believe it? bc i can’t. mixing it up in next week’s newsletter to mark this milestone.

moments for merrymaking

[insert cheshire cat grin here],

MacK