Working for the Weekend

Today’s Topics

• The Life You Don’t Realize You’re Living 🤓

• Underemployed 😠

  7 Mins Read Time

The Life You Don’t Realize You’re Living 🤓
By Jo

A lot of people don’t realize they’re in survival mode until they’re finally out of it.

When you’re in it, it doesn’t feel dramatic. It doesn’t feel like a crisis every day. It just feels like life. Busy. Tight. Heavy. Constant.

Survival mode is the state of doing whatever you can to stay afloat long enough to see tomorrow. It’s not about thriving. It’s not about fulfillment. It’s about maintaining.

Keeping the lights on.
Keeping rent paid.
Keeping gas in the tank.
Keeping food in the fridge.

That’s it.

And no—survival mode doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing anything illegal or immoral. It doesn’t mean you’re manipulating systems or taking from others. Sometimes it simply means you are stretched so thin that there is no space left for you.

If rent is too high where you live and your income barely covers it, you adjust. You nickel and dime everything. You cut corners. You sacrifice sleep. You sacrifice hobbies. You sacrifice relationships. You live in a way that you know isn’t sustainable, but you convince yourself it’s temporary.

You tell yourself, Once I get through this…
Once I pay this off…
Once I catch up…
Once I save enough…

But that “once” keeps moving.

The Hidden Cost of Constant Pressure

The most dangerous part of survival mode isn’t the grind. It’s the normalization of it.

When you’ve lived in that state long enough, stress feels standard. Exhaustion feels productive. Being overwhelmed feels like responsibility.

And when you finally get to a place of comfort—when the bills are manageable, when the income stabilizes, when the pressure lifts—you don’t know how to turn it off.

Because survival mode trained you to stay alert.

You don’t relax easily.
You don’t spend freely.
You don’t trust stability.

You’ve conditioned yourself to expect the next emergency.

I know people who worked themselves down to the bone—years of sacrificing their bodies, their time, their youth—just to reach a level of comfort. But when they got there, they couldn’t enjoy it. They didn’t know how to sit still. They didn’t know how to exist without grinding toward something.

Because survival had become their identity.

What Gets Lost Along the Way

The problem with survival mode is that it often demands trade-offs you don’t fully calculate at the time.

Missed family events.
Missed friendships.
Missed milestones.
Missed moments that don’t come back.

You tell yourself it’s necessary. And sometimes, it is. Sometimes you are the one who has to take the brunt of it. Sometimes you’re the one in your family line who absorbs the pressure so the next generation doesn’t have to start from zero.

That’s a real role. A heavy one.

You become the foundation.
The stabilizer.
The one who builds something out of nothing.

And there’s honor in that.

But there’s also a quiet question attached to it:

At what cost?

Are you laying bricks for others while forgetting to build a life you can actually live in?

The Generational Weight

For many people, survival mode isn’t just personal—it’s generational.

You’re not just trying to get ahead for yourself. You’re trying to change the starting point for everyone who comes after you. You hope that the sacrifices you’re making today will give someone else a head start tomorrow.

That’s not wishful thinking. That’s legacy thinking.

But legacy doesn’t only mean assets and property. It also means modeling balance. Modeling connection. Modeling presence.

If all the next generation sees is burnout, hyper-vigilance, and emotional distance, what did survival truly solve?

Knowing When to Shift

Survival mode is necessary sometimes. It sharpens you. It forces discipline. It teaches resilience. It shows you what you’re capable of under pressure.

But it’s not meant to be permanent.

Thriving requires something different:

Space

Rest

Connection

Emotional availability

And the hardest transition isn’t getting out of survival mode.

It’s believing you’re allowed to.

Because when you’ve spent years fighting to stay afloat, peace can feel unfamiliar. Stillness can feel unsafe. Comfort can feel temporary.

But survival was never supposed to be your entire story.

It was a chapter.

The real question is—once you’ve survived, can you learn how to live?

Underemployed 😠

By Marcus

Saying this current job market is tough is an understatement. Many people have found themselves either looking for work for months, some for years, and others have had to accept a different fate:

Becoming underemployed.

Underemployed is that status of having a job, but the job doesn’t utilize your skills, experience, availability, or pay you what you’re used to.

Underemployment can feel like purgatory, but it’s important to keep in mind it’s a temporary status.

The Dirty Work

A little over six years ago, I resigned from a job that wasn’t a good fit. This was the best-case scenario for many reasons. I did the math, had some savings to last several months while I looked for a new job.

About a month into my search, with no real traction, stories about a coronavirus started circulating the news….

We all know where that goes. The world quickly started to panic, uncertainty set in, things began to shut down, people got laid off, and new jobs became scarce. This threw every financial calculation off, and my window for finding a new job became much smaller.

So, I had to quickly come to terms with the fact that if I didn’t want to run out of money, I’d need to take any job I could get.

And that’s what I did. I applied and accepted a job working at a resort in the housekeeping department. I was responsible for cleaning floors, collecting trash, deliveries, vehicle maintenance, inventory and whatever random grunt work they could give me.

It didn’t pay well, but it kept me from drowning in debt. It was the true equivalent of keeping your head above water.

I hated that job. I was miserable every single day and frustrated, but I showed up, produced, took initiative, and never called off. There were additional layoffs in my department and others while I was there. Fear of being laid off hung over my co-workers constantly. This was the norm during that time, as COVID had a brutal impact on so many businesses.

Once the world began to open up again, I started applying for new jobs. It took a while—multiple interviews—but I finally landed a role that matched my skills, experience, and salary needs. I’ve held that job for almost five years now.

The Job Is The Bridge

Not every situation has an elegant solution or a quick fix.

For someone who has never experienced underemployment, it can be tough for them to grasp how difficult it really is. They may tell you to be grateful, but the frustration and stress can hover over you like a dark cloud.

I worked that resort job for a little over a year, and it was a true test of endurance and character.

If you’re underemployed or in between work for longer than you anticipated—just know your value is not diminished.

Yes, it’s unfortunate. Life has presented you with another set of circumstances, another challenge on your path.

Just know your situation is not permanent.

Please remember that and keep fighting to survive.