Life’s Overheads

How to spot them, how to shed them, and how to enjoy them

Life is full of overheads. As you get older you think about them more and more and how you can minimise them. After all, with a finite number of years ahead you want to make the most of the time available to you. We spend about twenty five years of our life in bed and another two performing our ablutions for a start, so a third of your life disappears in sleeping and staying clean. That’s before you’ve even made a cup of tea and decided how you are going to spend your day. But beware, the time you spend planning how you are going to use your time is also an overhead on your time. In fact I know people who spend so much time planning their lives that their lives are much shorter as a result. 

But the other big overheads in our lives are of course work and children. Doesn’t matter what you do by way of work. You may run a household, go to an office, drive a vehicle, build houses, write or do a combination of things. If you are a woman you will undoubtedly do a bigger share of the domestics; even where both people in a relationship are in full time employment, surveys consistently report that women do more of the housework than men and the childcare burden falls on them even more disproportionately.

I am currently reading a book called Black Ink by Eif Shafak in which she recounts her internal dialogue over a period of years before actually coming to the point of combining a relationship and motherhood with her career as a writer. In this she doesn’t just reflect on her own tensions but tells the story of many great women writers from Zelda Fitzgerald to George Sand, and the Bronte sisters to Simone de Beauvoir. They not only had to grapple with the normal overheads of existence such as sleeping and going to the bathroom; they also had to decide how to deal with the overheads of being a woman in a patriarchal society. Maya Angelou for example would routinely get up at four in the morning to write before the children woke up and she began her day in earnest. 

I remember many years ago doing a more than full time job in the NHS, having young children, undertaking a diploma course to further my career, and trying to write creatively for my own pleasure, all at the same time. I remember literally falling asleep over the keyboard late at night out of sheer exhaustion. My overheads were ridiculous. There was very little time left for me. My wife was in the same position, although noting the previous comments I suspect she also carried the additional overheads of being a woman in a man’s world. She was not a writer but also found her pleasure and yearning for knowledge in the written word; she has always been a massive reader, often with three or four books on the go at the same time, any one of which she could be found fast asleep over.

My wife and I also have a friend who is a big reader. She has always partly managed her time by reading as she walks which I find astonishing; I once observed her on the street, deftly weaving past people as she turned the pages of her latest novel whilst walking back to her car. She did confess that she had walked into the odd lamppost down the years. Nowadays of course the mobile phone has turned this into common practice. In fact the smartphone has completely changed the way we manage the overheads in our life. You can listen to a podcast, eat your lunch and plan your social life all at the same time if you are adept enough.

And what about your social life? Is that really a pleasure or can that be an overhead as well, something you feel you have to do rather than something you want to do? I remember ringing a friend once, racked with guilt, to cancel a planned night out because I had forgotten about a parent’s evening. “Oh thank god” she said. “I’m knackered and just want to turn on the telly and order in a takeaway”; then aghast at what she had just said she apologised and muttered the immortal words “this is about me, not you” which was funny as it wasn’t a date. We laughed about it but it is true. Sometimes no matter how much you love someone you just want to curl up on the settee and reach for the remote control.

And don’t get me started about family. That’s a minefield of guilt and longing. I love my very large family but there are so many of us that we entered into an unwritten agreement many years ago that we weren’t going to dump on each other over minor matters. No-one gets upset about missed birthdays or long intervals. When we do see each other it is just like old times. My family is so big that we could field several football teams and start our own league if we wanted to, so with that amount of baggage you have to be practical. If we had high expectations of each other we would have to give up work and turn our family into a corporation, which of course is what happens in some cases, and if you’ve watched even a single episode of Succession you know how badly that ends up.

So to circle around to where I started, overheads are a fact of life. I have reached an age where I have to take a lot of pills and stay on top of long term conditions. That’s a very annoying overhead. People with severe disabilities can take two hours to get up and get washed and dressed, and believe me just getting through the early morning routine is an act of heroism for them. Years ago I ran focus groups with carers. They were all exhausted but pitched up anyway and told their stories. I’ve never forgotten how much of their life was taken up with hospital appointments, helping with basic care, and finding time to keep the relationship going. 

So we all have our overheads and we all have to manage them. But in a classic business model overheads are offset by profit. If your overheads are less than your profit you are fine. If they are not, you are in trouble. Life, after all, is for living. You have to ask yourself what is the point of carrying all these overheads if it is not? We all know the workaholics who are so focused on their career that they run the risk of being a heart attack victim like the man in Abigail’s Party who falls to the floor and dies at the end of an evening made up of nothing but spite and bitterness. We all know the exhausted parents who stumble into the office for that 8.30am meeting having left their brain and their motivation at home with their packed lunch. We all know the teenager who has been studying for exams to the point of a nervous breakdown because of the expectations of teachers, parents and peers. These are examples of people whose personal overheads far exceed the quality of life profits they can expect to get either now or in the future.

As I write this, at twenty past midnight on a Sunday night / early Monday morning, I can say with absolute clarity that my older self, if given the time traveller’s ability to go back and talk to my younger self, would have a message about life’s overheads. First off, try and minimise them. Overheads are unavoidable but you can make choices. Secondly, don’t do guilt. If an old friend rings your doorbell just as you have started cleaning the kitchen, open a bottle of wine and forget everything else. The kitchen will still be there tomorrow but you may not see that friend for a long time. Thirdly, make your overheads fun. Dance whilst you do the kitchen and sing like you are enjoying your last day on earth. Fourthly, if you can, share them. All the research shows that if we live with other people and do stuff together it is easier and can even be more enjoyable. Fifthly combine your overheads. Make phone calls whilst scrubbing potatoes or whatever. But don’t do anything gross like taking your phone call into the gents. I hate to think how many mobiles have ended up in the urinal. And lastly remember that there are many people in the world who would love to have your overheads. Cleaning your house can be stressful but some people don’t even have a roof over their head. So put on your earphones and listen to the Eyecatching Words podcast whilst you scrub the loo.