Most nights, I dream about everything from the fantastic to the horrifying. Lately, though, I have dreams about the mundane. I recently changed my phone wallpaper from an AI-generated floral image—an odd relic of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign—to a photo of her and me while we waited at dinner. Yet I woke up the next morning and was startled to see the flowers again. It’s as if I’m unwilling to accept that I made the switch in the first place, or that anything has really changed at all.
I like to hate playing silly games like Dungeons & Dragons. Truthfully, all I care about is impressing my closest friends—everyone else fades into the background. The problem is I never seem to get enough praise. Each compliment becomes a small spike in my side, taunting me that it’s either pity or politeness. Their silence, on the other hand, is suffocating, like inhaling a lungful of regret for having tried so hard in the first place. I can feel anger smoldering beneath that regret, but I’m unsure if I’m angrier at them or at myself for wanting so much from people who never promised anything.
I place too many expectations on my friends. I’ve had to grieve the ways they failed to meet those impossible standards and then, with feigned indifference, quietly cut them from my life. It feels like an unfair exchange: if only they would show a hint of deeper understanding, I’d shower them with appreciation 10 times over. Sometimes I wonder if I’m bargaining with illusions of closeness I was never truly offered. I do the same with family—reaching out ten times for every one call I get back, if ever. Doesn’t anyone realize?
I’ve grown numb to most of my extended family anyway. Only the ones who genuinely show they care remain in focus. I once played my mother the song “Hi Ren,” hoping we might share a rare, honest conversation about my suffering. She said she couldn’t relate and then wove the entire exchange around herself. I fell silent. Later, I never even wished her a happy birthday. I regret that but not the distance it created. A half-mother is more painful than no mother at all. Now I have a newsletter I love, but I hate that I told her about it. She might read this. Unless I delete her from the mailing list in secret.
I lost my brother when I was sixteen and three-quarters. He died by suicide. I can’t pretend it didn’t plant the most destructive seed in my own mind, a quiet suggestion that removing oneself entirely might be the clearest exit. I’m left haunted by the idea that he unknowingly gave me something more dangerous than his memory—he gave me a blueprint. He doesn’t exist anymore, except in those dreams. But as the dreams drift from the fantastic toward the mundane, I lose him again and again. I lose the possibility of who I could have been. Prophet. Elon Musk. Freud. Now, Dad—safe, stable Dad.
Sometimes safety in circumstances is more dependable than safety in relationships. At least with my kids, my wife, and those few friends who truly reciprocate my concern, I know what to expect. Maybe I already have everything life can offer. There’s a bitter clarity in that. But it also surfaces a dark sadness I can’t quite shake: Am I any better for it?
Hasn’t someone wise once said that this is the time to give back, after receiving so much from the world? Perhaps I already gave more than I was capable of giving—like a quarter-full, slightly leaking mug rather than a brimming vessel. I’m left with less energy for those who show only half-hearted interest in me. I keep pushing them away, quietly justifying my choice by convincing myself they don’t really care.
Is it enough, being a plumber? Is it okay that I’ll likely remain unknown beyond a few generations only among my children, children’s children, and children’s children’s children? The thought depresses me, but it also rests on me like a blanket of forced contentment. I am in denial as I face the loss of my once ambitious self—halfheartedly telling myself that this is what contentment feels like. This is what contentment feels like.
It isn’t enough that I’m a good father or a loving husband. Nor is it enough that I care about a handful of friends who I believe reciprocate the feeling, at least in some measure. Yet this is what contentment feels like. This is what peace is supposed to feel like—or so I’m told. So why does it come so easily to everyone else, yet sits like a half-answered question in my mind?
Maybe that’s my acceptance: living in the tension between wanting more and settling for what is. Admitting that neither ambition nor apathy will define me entirely. This disjointed life, these repeated stumbles toward contentment, are all pieces of a puzzle I’m still arranging. If that’s the only truth I can hold onto, maybe it’s enough to be the father, the husband, the friend, the child, the writer of letters never sent, the plumber with plans no one might ever read.
This, after all, is what contentment feels like. This is what contentment feels like.