Have you ever looked at your life and realized that while everything is “okay” on paper, you feel like you’re just playing a role?
In this week’s Report from the Creative Closet, I’m diving into the Performance Trap. We talk about why the modern world is obsessed with optimization and metrics—and how that obsession is actually stripping us of our humanity. From the “proceduralization” of our communities to the internalized pressure to be “endlessly capable,” we look at how to reclaim our spontaneity.
It’s an invitation to stop treating your life like a performance review and start returning to the creative capacity you were born with.
I’m Nancy Norbeck, and I’m your Messy Muse Mentor. I help people feel alive again through curiosity and play.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Dehumanizing Systems: Why HOAs and automated phone lines are designed to block human connection.
- The Self-Monitoring Trap: Why “metricking” your sleep and hobbies creates more exhaustion, not less.
- Trusting Your Instincts: How to stop letting external algorithms (and internal critics) drive your decisions.
- The Power of Play: Why we are starving for spaces where we don’t have to be “good enough” to belong.
Ready to send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour?We get together once a month for a relaxed, co-working-style session where you can work on whatever you want—without any pressure to do it “right.” We send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. Join the Creativity Circle.
Get in Touch
I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and experience with these ideas! Send me a note at fycuriosity.com, or contact me on Instagram, or Bluesky.
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Why Adulting Feels So Dehumanizing | Report from the Creative Closet #6
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. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Welcome to this week’s report from The Creative Closet. It is not exactly glamorous, but it works. Just a reminder that I’m speaking here from my personal experience as a creativity coach working with people over many years. I am not a therapist.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:33]:
So as a reminder, last time we talked about creativity as a capacity, not as an art form. So experimentation, flexibility, and just a basic part of being human. Also, the thing that lights you up from the inside. So the thing is a lot of modern life pushes us in the opposite direction. You may have noticed that a lot of people feel really, really pressured to appear functional and emotionally managed, productive, composed, and endlessly capable. Now I don’t mean to say that everybody is fake. What I’m saying here is that adulthood starts to feel like we’re constantly performing a role. So we’re always masking professionally, pretending to have it together, suppressing our emotion to maintain acceptability, constant self management.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:33]:
So, you know, the day that your pet dies, you are holding it together at work even though what you really wanna do is go off in a corner and cry your guts out. If you’re exhausted just hearing this, I I feel you. And I’m sure that there are people who are watching this going, well, yeah, that’s what adulting is. That’s what being professional is. But the fact is it’s exhausting, and it’s everywhere. We are all under this pressure to hold it together constantly, whether it’s at work with our kids or on social media. And the thing is, it doesn’t even have to be in a situation that is something that doesn’t involve only human beings. So as an example, I recently went to my homeowners association meeting.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:24]:
If you’ve ever been to a homeowners association meeting, I mean, I can only speak about my own, but, they tend to be an adventure. And this one was especially contentious, and that is despite the fact that the board introduced a new set of rules at the beginning of the meeting, which was that those of us who were not on the board were not allowed to speak at all during the meeting part of the agenda for the board. So if we had something to say about a decision that they were about to make, we were not allowed to say it. And then when it was our turn to speak, they went around the room person by person, and no crosstalk was allowed. So we were not permitted to add anything, to support anything, anything like that. And there were a couple of other rules. If it had to do with your particular unit, you weren’t allowed to bring that up in the meeting either. Issues with that too.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:22]:
But what that meant and I’m sure that they were trying to keep the meeting brief and to the point. I’m sure that that was the intent. But what it meant was that there was no opportunity for actual dialogue, for a a combination of ideas and synthesis of ideas and collective problem solving to happen. There was no opportunity for people to form a community and support each other in the moment or, in fact, for anyone to take the board’s side if they agreed and did not agree with the community member who was speaking. So it cut both ways. It was incredibly proceduralized, and it was phenomenally dehumanizing. It was really set up to strip us of our ability to contribute in a meaningful way. And, again, I think the intent was to keep things moving smoothly and to keep things from becoming contentious.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:22]:
Spoiler alert. It didn’t work. But even in a room full of just of humans with no mechanical means to try to get in the way and serve as, you know, an algorithm or that voice mail system at your doctor’s office that keeps you from getting a human, you know the one I mean, nothing like that, just a room full of human beings, it still blocked actual human responsiveness and connection. And this is what we’re dealing with in 2026. We have so many environments that prioritize management procedure and containment over nuance relational humanity, actual ability to respond and collaborate. And if you’re thinking this happens everywhere, you are correct. It happens everywhere. It happens in your office.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:14]:
It happens in the board meeting. It happens when you try to call your doctor and get a human. It happens in so many places. And and this is why so many interactions these days feel really, really cold. Like, you’re not actually supposed to be able to find that human in your doctor’s office or, you know, in the customer support team or whoever it is that you’re trying to get who could answer your question in ten seconds if you could just get them. And no. It’s not just you. And here we are in 2026 in this environment where so many things now feel so relentlessly evaluative.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:55]:
It’s so so relentlessly metric. And I know I made up that word, but you know exactly what I mean. Right? You’ve got performance reviews, algorithms, optimization everywhere. You can optimize your sleep. You can optimize the contents of your fridge. You can optimize every little bit of your, you know, vitamin routine. You can optimize your facial care. You can optimize bloody everything.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:19]:
Constant self monitoring. Right? I mean, I used to use an app to monitor my sleep, and all it did was make me sleep worse because every time I woke up in the middle of the night, I was wondering what it was recording. I’ve sleep so much better now since I stopped it. And just the other night while I was prepping one of these videos for YouTube, I have a tool that helps me, you know, make sure that I have the best possible title and description and thumbnail. Oh my god. The thumbnails. And the thumbnail thing was driving me crazy trying to get a good score on the thumbnail, and it it made me absolutely nuts until I realized this is not helping. This is me falling for the very thing that I’ve just been telling you about that I’ve been noticing for a while now.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:05]:
And I had to pull back and say, you know, most of the complaints that it’s giving me aren’t even accurate. And so I’m making myself crazy for this algorithm thing that’s not helping me, that’s not even accurate, that I’m not sure I can trust. And why am I doing this to myself? Well, I’m doing it because I’ve been trained to believe that that thing is smarter than I am and that you are, that your odds of watching this video are higher because of what that thing says than because of your own curiosity and interest. And I thought, woah. Woah. Hang on. That external scoring is overriding my instinct, your instinct, because once again, because it’s almost impossible to avoid it completely these days, The internalized evaluation has overridden sanity. So I set myself a rule.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:03]:
Can’t mess around with thumbnails for more than thirty minutes to keep my own sanity. Now again, to be clear, I am not anti tool. I am anti self monitoring to the point of madness. I am anti turning humanity into constant performance metrics. I am as fascinated by statistics and analytics as anybody else. I’ve had a podcast for eight years. I I find it really, really interesting where people are finding my podcast and and how often and all of that kind of stuff. But if I start to turn it into a reflection on me, that’s dangerous.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:40]:
Really dangerous. If you recognize what I’m talking about, again, if you know, you know. Right? Because here’s the thing. Constant pressure shrinks us. It leaves us with that feeling I was talking about a couple of videos before where it’s all about the rules. We’re cautious. We’re over managed. We’re self editing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:03]:
We are disconnected from our spontaneity and our own reactions. We are so scared to experiment, and our lives just become this tiny little box because it’s hard to play while we’re constantly performing, and it’s hard to feel alive when you are monitoring every single thing about yourself all the time. You notice little kids aren’t paying attention to any of that when they play, when they make stuff up out of absolutely nowhere, when they declare that that multicolored block of Legos is a cake, and they believe it. This is why you are exhausted and they are not, because they don’t care about that stuff. And we are busy with all this chatter in the back of our heads that says that we have to care about it when actually, I don’t think we do. Because here’s the thing. Human beings are not starving for optimization. We do not wake up in the morning and think, oh my god, please optimize me more.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:08]:
I mean, I certainly haven’t ever woken up in the morning and thought that, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and bet that you haven’t either. What we are starving for are spaces where we can stop having to worry about that stuff for a while, where we can stop performing and be ourselves, where we can be creative and play and have fun and let our imaginations run wild, tell stories, experiment. All of these things can soften the armor that builds up after years and decades of feeling like we have to perform for everybody all the time. This is what kids access naturally every single day because they haven’t built this stuff up over time because nobody has told them yet that they have to. Adults, however, we’ve got so much of it that we have to make a conscious effort to deprogram all of these voices in our heads that have trained us over the years to believe that we have to be and do all of these things all the time to be good enough just to let ourselves play freely again. And if you know what I’m talking about, you can feel it. I’ll bet you feel it right now because you’re just tired of performing all the time. So here’s the thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:42]:
I am sorry to say that just understanding all of these patterns does not instantly change them. And, you know, even once you start to change these patterns, it’s easy to default back into the old ones because they’re really ingrained. And we’re gonna talk more about that in the next video. So for now, if this feels like your kind of corner of the Internet, you are welcome here in the Creative Closet anytime. And the easiest way to make sure that you don’t miss anything is to subscribe so that you are automatically notified when there’s something new here for you. I also host the free Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle once a month. It is a very, very gentle laid back space for curiosity, experimentation, and creative exploration. We just get together.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:32]:
We all work on our own thing, and we come together to share what we’ve done and to get to know each other a little bit. It is super low pressure. We would love to have you. You’d be very, very welcome. The link is either in the show notes or below this video depending on where you’re listening. So I’d really, really like to thank you for spending some time with me here in the creative closet. I am your Messy Muse Mentor, and I help people reconnect with themselves through creativity, curiosity, and play. And I hope to see you next time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:05]:
If you’re tired of thinking about answering a creative call but never actually doing it, Come join me for an hour and start feeling like yourself again. The Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle is a safe, welcoming, and encouraging environment where we send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp, where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. You can find it at the link in your podcast app. 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.