Early Life

I think as a kid, I did a lot of stuff based purely on instinct and desire. And let’s be honest, I was a kid - it’s not like I was a fully formed person yet. But it’s hard not to look back on how I acted, what I did, how I spent my time - and not just admit that I probably wasn’t thinking about it very hard.

I went through school, sports, free time, boy scouts, everything largely by impulse. I liked some things and hated others. I read a lot of books and played a lot of video games, because these were the most exciting things for me. I didn’t really have a good sense of my behavior or impulse responses to things, so I never really noticed a lot of behaviors that I would later identify and realize are a core part of how I interact with the world.

I just acted based on what was expected from me in various situations - more or less effectively - as I slowly gained a bit of knowledge about the world around me, and about myself as an actor in it.

Depression

In my teenage years, I became deeply depressed, and considered suicide, a phase I’ve talked about previously on this blog. There were various triggers. I had my first strong, obsessive crush, and it happened to be on a girl who didn’t like me back. I was realizing that I was very unskilled at relating to other people, and struggled to make and maintain good friendships.

I was coming to recognize that I had been a very arrogant child. I had always, from a young age, been identified as gifted and intelligent, and I had often performed well in academics and on standardized tests with little to no serious effort or interest. At one point, in third grade, I was placed in a math club where I sometimes outperformed eighth graders, only further inflating my ego. This sense of intellectual superiority strongly flavored my interactions with other kids, and was part of what contributed to my inability to flourish socially.

In the process of recovery from my depression and my recently diagnosed anxiety issues, I committed myself to becoming BETTER - I became obsessed with the concept of self-improvement, and started exercising both to manage my anxiety and depression, and also because I felt proud about being in seriously good shape for the first time in my life.

In some ways, this only fed my innate sense of superiority, something which I struggled with for probably another 10-15 years, though at the time I was also beginning to recognize how toxic this was, and began pushing back against it.

Recovery

Around and after the worst phases of my depression, I became more obsessed with trying to get along better with my peers socially. My arrogance and semi-isolation was a contributing factor in my depression and anxiety issues, and I wanted to get better at establishing connections.

Around that time, I also developed some other deeply-held beliefs.

I wanted to get away from my parents and their style of living. I loved my parents, but found their lifestyle limited, often suffocating. I resolved that whatever I did with my life, I wouldn’t turn into them.

This led to some probably poorly-considered decisions. I made various leaps - moving around to other cities, taking a job offer in the middle east, then Chicago, then Seattle - most of which were difficult and caused me significant financial issues. I swung hard into libertarian ideology as an attempt to get away from my parents’ garden variety conservatism, before swinging back in the other direction. To a certain extent, I was experimenting with my personality in an attempt to find something that I liked better.

I also became obsessed with status. I had a deep-seated desire to be liked, or at the very least, respected, by as many people as possible. I often struggled when my desire to be respected didn’t line up with the reality - I was hardly anyone worth caring that much about, to be honest. This further contributed to my instinctive sense to get away - I took on risky moves and career decisions not just because I wanted to get away from my parents, but also because I hoped that in doing so I could get a leg up on my own career aspirations.

Stability and Work

Lots of things happened. I fell in love and got married. I got into a whole new career in video games for five years, then left it. I developed an online coaching business, and then grew it to a self-sustaining career.

During this time, I leaned hard into working. Working in a self-guided career like being an online content creator/fitness coach, there was not really a limit to how much I could work, unlike your typical day job where your work is at least somewhat reliant on the input of other coworkers. Even when I had a day job, I maintained this attitude, continuing to work on my coaching business as a side hustle when I had time and energy outside of work hours. This strong work ethic enabled me to make enough money to have stability and save for the future, something I deeply desired as a response to my earlier lifestyle where I took unnecessary risks and most of them failed to pay off.

I would say that from about 2016 until late 2023, this became my normal pattern. I worked as much as possible. Hobbies, video games, reading all took a back seat to focusing more and more on my work. I became obsessive, and while the effort paid off, it also meant that other areas of my life suffered.

I also allowed a lot of old friendships to essentially fade away. Living in a new country, focused on working 24/7, I missed high school and college reunions, I stopped talking to old friends. The world moved on. I developed some new friendships, but many of them held at arm’s length, people who didn’t require a lot of direct contact. I made many more friends online, the kinds of people for whom sporadic social media updates were sufficient to maintain a friendship, something halfway between real relationships and simple readers/consumers of my business content.

I had a belief that there was a kind of light at the end of the tunnel - if I worked hard enough, sooner or later I would get to the point where I didn’t have to work so hard anymore, and I could rely on the systems and processes, and the following I had built, so that I could work less intensely in the future.

For a while, that didn’t really happen. Relying partially on a serious day job in the games industry meant that, at least partially, I was still very dependent on the income this provided, and this meant being at the mercy of the demands of the job. But since I needed that income, and needed that job, I couldn’t fully break free. I kept trying to find ways to keep scaling my business enough that I could quit my day job, but it didn’t work out, not for a long time.

Going Forward

More recently, I’ve managed to gain some of that balance I’ve been looking for. I’ve been able to scale the business further, and am no longer dependent on working in the games industry. While I loved my time in that industry, I suspect that it will not be worthwhile for me to return to it, at least in the short term.

Focusing on financial and career stability and achieving it has been a project that has taken up most of a decade, and feels incredible to have reached. I struggle to calm down - I’ve spent more time doing this than I spent in the entirety of high school or college. I’m reaching an age at which I’m starting to hit the point where I’ve been an adult for just as long (if not longer) than I was a kid.

My brain is so wired to work, and work, and work - that I struggle to relax. I find myself watching television on a Saturday with my laptop in front of me, and I find myself starting on the next week’s work rather than starting up a video game. It feels sometimes like a struggle to tell myself to just work less, to just relax and enjoy the fact that I don’t HAVE to work as much as I used to.

I keep saying that I want to work less, and I keep writing about how I’m committing to doing less - and each time, I end up struggling to stop doing MORE. This time, I can only hope that this commitment will stick.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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