Have you ever looked at your life and realized that while everything is functional on paper, you aren’t actually present for it?
Welcome to Reports from the Creative Closet! In this dispatch, I’m sharing one of the biggest reasons we feel so drained: we’ve built a system that treats human beings like machines, and then we do it to ourselves all over again when we get home.
If you are tired of living on autopilot, running on a hamster wheel, and scrolling your evening away because you have nothing left in the tank, this episode is your invitation to step off the track and choose aliveness instead.
In this episode, I discuss:
- The Hamster Wheel Trap: How selling our time for a paycheck can turn us into appliances on a hamster wheel and make us afraid to express agency.
- How “Shoulds” Contaminate Your Life: What a wild animal can teach us about breaking free from guilt and reclaiming how you actually live.
- The Efficiency Trap: Why fitting 20 pounds of tasks into a 1-pound bag is a great skill in moderation, but a disaster for your energy.
- Metal, Glass, and Real Life: Why screens are a simulacrum of connection and how to get back to real human presence.
- My Restorative Creativity Framework™: Why making messy, pointless things for the sheer joy of it is the fastest path back to feeling human.
- The Liam Neeson Warning: How to use the Daily Credit Report and Bingo Card as reminders of what you’ve done, without letting your inner critic turn them into productivity weapons.
Episode breakdown:
0:00 – Waking up feeling like a machine
3:26 – The hamster wheel and the carpet track
6:47 – How “shoulds” contaminate your life
9:18 – The efficiency trap: Fitting 20 pounds into a 1-pound bag
13:41 – Creativity as the fastest path back to feeling human
18:00 – The Credit Report, Bingo Cards, and the Liam Neeson rule
I’m Nancy Norbeck, your Messy Muse Mentor. I specialize in using creativity to reconnect people with themselves, so you can make room for things that interest and delight you and feel like you’re actually alive again.
Get Your Takeaways and Join the Community:
- Grab your free printable Daily Credit Report and Bingo Card here.
- Have a question for the Curiosity Clinic? Submit it here.
- Send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour: Join the Creativity Circle here.
- Catch up on earlier Reports from the Creative Closet here.
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Why You Feel Like a Machine (And How to Feel Alive Again) | Report from the Creative Closet #11
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. You didn’t lose your creative spark. You were taught to leave it behind. I’m creativity expert Nancy Norbeck, and I’m here to help you get it back. Let’s go. Welcome back to the decidedly unglamorous, but surprisingly functional Creative Closet. I’m curious to know if you, like so many others, have had the experience of waking up one day and noticing that while everything in your life seems to be functional, you don’t quite seem to be present for it. That sense that all day long, you think about what you would like to do when you get to the end of the day and your time is your own.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:51]:
And then you sit down to try to do that, and you just kinda can’t because there’s nothing left. And the only thing you have the energy to do is scroll. Or to put it a little bit more dramatically, that feeling that, you know, I would just like to have my life back. Thank you very much. And I wanna be really, really clear here that I’m not talking about folks who are unmotivated. I’m talking about being exhausted from being treated and treating ourselves like we are just machines. I think that what’s happening here is that in modern Western society and especially American society, and you hear me say that a lot, Western society and especially American society, because unfortunately, I think that American society has turned this into a particular art form. We have built this system where in order to earn the money that we need to live, we rent our time, which I really think is more like selling time, because let’s be real, we’re not we’re not getting the time back, to someone else.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:04]:
And in that time, we, in exchange for the paycheck, are doing a thing that we have agreed to do. With luck, that thing is something that we are cool with doing, that we’re good at, that we enjoy doing. But a lot of the time, for a lot of us, it’s just something that pays the bills, keeps us busy during the day, keeps us off the streets, as they say, pays the bills, and we collect the check and try to make the most of the time that’s left to us in the evenings, on the weekends, whatever time your particular schedule allows. And because our livelihood and in The US, our health care is tied to that situation. Many of us are afraid to express any kind of agency or disagreement in that work situation, even though, in theory, we have entered into it of our own free will. Because if we do, we might lose that paycheck that allows us to live. This is a feeling I know really, really well. I can’t tell you the number of days that I have spent feeling like I was on a hamster wheel, running and running and running and running and running and getting absolutely nowhere.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:26]:
In my case, I tended to notice this feeling for some reason, more often than not as I walked to the ladies’ room. I think it’s because I did that multiple times a day. I often felt like I was wearing a track in the carpet as I would walk to the ladies’ room, walk back for the how many of the times of the day. And it just was like every day was the same as every other day. Right? The famous expression, same shit, different day. I’m sure that that’s where it came from. And for you, it might not have been walking to the loo. It might have been, here’s another one of the same damn report that I’ve prepared 27 times today or 27 times this week.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:08]:
I mean, my dad, before he retired, had a paperclip chain that he would take one off of after he finished the report that he hated every month. Same idea. Right? And as I was walking to and from the ladies’ room, I often would find myself thinking, this is not living. I’m not exactly sure what living looks like by comparison because I’m told that this is normal, but I am really, really sure that it’s not this. And if you watched the second curiosity clinic episode, one of the things that happened to me when I started following Sam Neill’s Twitter account was that I realized I was watching someone who was really alive. And I wanna be really clear that being alive has nothing at all to do with how much money you have. Some of the most alive people I have ever seen or encountered have hardly any money. And it’s also nothing to do with happiness.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:12]:
It’s with experiencing the fullness of life and the full range of emotion. But I looked at that account and how how full that range was and how comfortable he was with being absolutely ridiculous and silly a lot of the time. And my reaction was, to borrow a famous line from when Harry met Sally, I’ll have what he’s having. Please. Thank you. And, you know, when when I say that money is not a determining factor, I also just wanna point out that if it were, I don’t think those tech billionaires would be so miserable. Right? And, you know, I I often when I notice wild animals, the birds in the trees, the deer out behind my house, the squirrels in the yard. I often notice that, you know, they don’t worry about paychecks.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:11]:
They don’t worry about health insurance. They do their thing. They don’t know where their next meal is coming from. Now admittedly, that can be the end of them, but they just do their thing. They don’t sweat it like we do. And so far, they have made it through every health issue, through every meal that they haven’t known about, and they’ve never sweated it. But human beings sweat it a lot. They sweat it a lot, and we worry a lot.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:47]:
And we mostly, more than anything else, we worry about what we should and shouldn’t do. And a couple of years ago, I read a book called The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by a guy named Boyd Varty. He’s unsurprisingly a lion tracker in South Africa. He runs a a nature preserve there. And in the middle of this book, which is very good, there was a line that nearly knocked me over. And he said, no wild animal has ever participated in a should. Right? Think about it. They haven’t, they do not get together and have a council of who should do what and why, and, and what, what the latest fashion is and who’s in and who’s out if they do and don’t wear it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:37]:
They, they don’t. The lion out in the wild is worried about making sure that his offspring survive and what he’s gonna eat next. And that’s more or less it. I mean, I’m not a naturalist, so somebody else is undoubtedly gonna come along and tell me that there’s a whole lot more to it than that. But those are the basics. Right? Not worried about any of the things that we worry about. Now, yes, we get good things out of things like, you know, coming together to accomplish things and culture. Obviously, the lion is not listening to Beethoven, and, obviously, I’m oversimplifying here to make a point.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:23]:
But shoulds end up getting us into productivity and efficiency and pressure and things that ultimately, in in moderation, would be okay for us. But when we overdo them, and we tend to overdo them, they tend to get us in trouble. Now when I worked in tech support, I had a colleague who told me that I was the most efficient person she had ever seen. And when she first said it, I thought she was out of her mind. Like, what the hell was she talking about? And then I realized she had a point. You know? I could have a row of computers set up and be working on five of them at the same time because they were all in different places, and I could check-in on all of them at different times and keep them all going. Things like that. I will map out my errands according to what the most efficient route is to get them all done so that it takes me the least amount of time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:18]:
That kind of thing. That’s what she meant. Is that a great skill? Absolutely. However, when I get done fitting 20 pounds into a single pound bag, I’m often totally exhausted. So it’s a great skill in moderation. It’s not a great skill all the time. And when we worship productivity and efficiency, we’re really, really good at wearing ourselves out. So, you know, we do this a little bit too much, and it starts to turn us into human machines instead of human beings.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:58]:
We tar start to forget that we are not the machine. We start to think that we have to be doing the thing all the time. We have to be turning out the thing all the time, the report, 27 times a week that we hate. Now, obviously, if your boss says you have to, you probably have to. But then we come home and we do it to ourselves again. We’ve forgotten how to do things like take breaks, sit down, and just listen to the Beethoven symphony, to watch a movie without picking up the phone and scrolling through the Internet movie database because, hey. I’ve seen that guy before. I recognize that woman’s voice.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:41]:
Who is that? I speak from experience here. And speaking of the phone, we come home, and what do we do? We sit down and we scroll through this thing because it feels relaxing. We think that we’re giving our brains a break. We think that we’re connecting with our friends on social media. Even though social media is a simulacrum of life and connection, it’s not the same as sitting down with a friend. It’s not the same as picking up a phone and calling a friend. It’s not the same at all. It’s not real connection.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:24]:
There is a world of difference between texting my nephew to see how he’s doing and picking up the phone and calling him. And there’s a world of difference between that and having a Zoom call with him. And there’s a world of difference between that and actually going for a visit and snuggling up on the couch and, for as long as he’s still willing to put up with it and thinks that it’s fun, having a tickle fight. Right? They’re all very, very different things. And we’ve become so accustomed to screen life that we start to think that it’s the same as reality, and it’s not. It’s not. It’s stripping away layers of humanity and replacing them with metal and glass. Now I’m not a Luddite.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:16]:
I just think that we’ve started to forget how to be human. And so what’s the way back? Because if you’re nodding your head, it’s all well and good for me to explain this, but what’s the way back? Right? It’s the thing. You are here to be alive like the lion in the wild, and I’m not suggesting that you sell everything and move there, not to be efficient. Right? I mean, I always come back to that great, thorough quote that I first heard in dead poet society about how I went to the woods because, among other things, I did not want to come to the end of my life and find out that I had not lived it. I’m afraid right now that a whole lot of us are gonna come to the end of life and find out that we spent it staring at a phone instead of actually living it. You’re here to be alive, not to be efficient because you’re not a machine. And because I’m me, if you’ve been paying attention to what I’m doing for any length of time, you’re not going to be at all surprised to hear me say that creativity is one of the ways that we come back to life. I believe that creativity is the fastest path back to yourself because your creativity is your life energy in motion.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:41]:
It is what makes the birds sing. It’s what makes the grass grow. I think that it’s all connected to that same force. I really do. When I talked to Matthew Jacobs earlier this year, he defined creativity as that thing that comes from within you that no one else can do. I think those two definitions go together beautifully because I think the creativity is what brings that thing from you. And, you know, I’ve been talking about my restorative creativity framework for a while, and I haven’t told you a whole lot about it yet because it’s kinda big. But the first part of it, the first area, there’s six six areas that I deal with in the framework is humanity.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:29]:
Because coming back to your humanity is coming back to your aliveness, coming back to yourself. All six pieces help you come back to yourself. And, you know, they all intertwine, but it’s useful to look at them separately. And they they’re not steps. They’re they’re not a process. They’re all pieces that go together. But when you wanna get back in touch with your humanity, you notice the should notice the should ask yourself, do I wanna participate in that should, is it necessary or is it just somebody trying to pressure me? You follow your curiosity even if it seems pointless. Sometimes the most pointless curiosities lead to the most amazing things.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:21]:
What if is one of the most fabulous questions in the world with apologies, but not really to my fourth grade teacher who used to kind of disparage us for asking what if questions. You make things badly and for fun just to have the pleasure of making them, just to have the experience of doing it and playing with them because it makes you feel more alive. And it’s just for the joy of it. You choose something that you want. You you choose the things that make you feel good. And you notice what makes me feel more alive, what makes me feel less alive. You move toward the things that make you feel more alive more often. It’s about play and choice and curiosity and self trust.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:12]:
Self trust is one of the biggest things that gets drilled out of us in the hierarchy of school and work and bosses and other people telling us what to do all of the time. We stop trusting ourselves because we don’t know what’s going to get us in trouble with all of these other people who have some kind of say over our lives. And yet, we only get the one life. You don’t wanna come to the end and find out that you haven’t lived it. When you do this, I wanna be really, really clear. There is no productivity payoff required. We are so used to the idea that there has to be some kind of success or prize or appreciation or something at the end of it. Sometimes doing the thing is its own reward even if it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it to.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:07]:
Sometimes you can learn more from something that’s a disaster than from something that’s a great success. And you learn a lot about yourself in the process of doing it. So I know it can be difficult, but shutting off that need to have that payoff is immensely helpful. I also have, if you like, a set of two downloads. One is the daily credit report, which I’ve talked about here before. It’s it’s a a printable handout that you can laminate for reuse or you can not and keep printing them, where you just write down all of the things that you’ve done on a given day. And the whole idea is to show yourself just how much you have accomplished. It can be tiny things.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:00]:
It can be big things. But the point is that we tend to forget what we’ve done and think that we have done nothing all day. Again, I am patient zero here. I do this to myself all the time. And then when I finally look at the list, I go, oh, Maybe I should stop beating up on myself now because I actually did a lot today. And the second one is an editable bingo card that can make it a lot more fun to get through things because you can play it like it’s a bingo card, and you don’t have to get through everything that’s on the bingo card. You can also use it as a a fun kind of reminder. You can use it in so many different ways.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:41]:
And if you’re interested in that, you can find the link for it either in your podcast app if you’re listening to this or below this video if you’re watching it. And, you know, have fun with them. And I wanna say, now that I’ve said that, more planners and productivity hacks can become more performance, and I wanna be very clear that those two things are not planners or productivity hacks. If you start using the credit report to track yourself and track your progress and to beat yourself up for not getting enough done, I will I will find Liam Neeson and get him to come after you as soon as I figure out where to find him and how to afford him. Right? That is a misuse of the credit report and the bingo card. Do not do that with them. That is not what they are for. They are reminders to you that you have done stuff.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:35]:
They are not to make yourself more productive and to beat yourself up with. Please don’t do that. There’s also no character transplant necessary here. You do not need a new version of yourself. There’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing to fix. You don’t need gold stars unless you really like them. But, again, they can start to feel like, you know, a productivity thing, so be careful with that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:02]:
Do something small and messy for the joy of it, and remember that your life is yours to participate in. Life is not a spectator sport, and I think we forget that a lot of the time. Don’t come to the end of your life and find out you haven’t lived it. And you will know that you have started to come back to life. And I just wanna remind you that, you know, my core belief with the framework and with the way that creativity brings you back to life is that you don’t need to become someone new. You just need to come back to life. You will know that you have started to succeed or maybe more than started to succeed when someone says, I’ll have what they’re having, and they’re talking about you. So if you like this crazy little corner of the Internet, I am absolutely thrilled that you are here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:03]:
I hope that you will subscribe either on your podcast app or on YouTube so that you’ll know when I’m bringing out more stuff. I’m thrilled that you’re here. I would love to have you submit a question for the Curiosity Clinic. I will put that link in the show notes and the the video description too. I’d also love to have you join me for the follow your curiosity creativity circle. That is where you come when you just wanna get some time to do the creative thing that you’ve been yearning to do, that thing you’ve been wanting to make or start, whether it’s writing or photography or music, whatever it is, as long as it doesn’t require other people as in, like, a choir or an orchestra, that we can’t provide. But if you’ve been wanting to start drawing or writing or anything that we can do online in an hour, come join us because that’s what we do for an hour every month. It’s a lovely group of people.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:03]:
We have a lot of fun and, you know, you’ll get something done and you’ll get to meet some cool folks, and we would love to have you for that. Thanks so much for joining me. My name’s Nancy. I’m your MessyMuse mentor, and I specialize in helping people come back to life through a creative practice. And I look forward to seeing you next time. If you’re tired of being productive and just want to feel alive again, come join us in the follow your curiosity creativity circle. It’s a free hour each month to stop overthinking, make something just because you want to, and reconnect with the part of you that remembers how good it feels to play. You can find it at the link in your podcast app.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:44]:
See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners. Thanks so much, and see you next week.