Welcome — However You Found Your Way Here
Playing Chicken with Myself
In my last article,Bound by Compulsion: The Hidden Cost of Rituals We Can’t Escape, I tried to untangle why I keep doing what I do — writing every day, stacking projects, refusing to stop even when stopping makes sense.
I thought it was compulsion. Maybe it is. But as I’ve sat with it, I think there’s another layer to it.
It feels like I’m playing chicken with myself.
I stay up too late. I sleep too little. I keep pushing the line forward, daring myself to see how much further I can go before something breaks. And the strange part? I’m not doing it because it’s efficient or even because I enjoy it all the time. I’m doing it because regret is nipping at my heels.
The Pressure of Time
I’ve mentioned this feeling, this pressure, in my other articles,
- Thoughts From the Trunk of My Car—Again
- Bound By Compulsion: When Anger Got the Best of Me at Work
- I’m Afraid of Wasting My Potential — So I Learn Everything I Can, While I Can.
- I’ll Tell You The Secret of What Motivates Me
- Have You Fully Met Yourself in the Silence?
I’m getting closer to thirty. I’m not married. I’m not cushioned by a comfortable job. I make about $50,000 a year across two jobs — warehouse work at $23/hour, smashing rooms at $16/hour. I’m building my emergency fund, tucking money into retirement, tackling debt one month at a time, and finding small ways to make my ideas tangible: like printing my first ever stickers, and waiting for my hoodie with The Stratagem’s Archive stitched across it to arrive.
Brick by brick, I’m building something of my own.
And yet, I still feel those unspoken expectations pressing down:
You’re running out of time. You’re falling behind. You’re worth less the older you get.
Society whispers it louder to women — that men age into “distinguished,” while women age out of relevance. Maybe it’s not true for everyone. But it feels real. And that’s enough to make me push harder, faster, almost recklessly. All because I can’t shake myself from believing these scripts as though written in stone.
Why I Don’t Stop
The irony isn’t lost on me: pushing like this could shorten the very time I’m afraid of wasting. But when I measure my choices, I still land here:
- I don’t want to die with a locked archive of things I never dared to try.
- So I dare myself.
- To print the stickers.
- To launch the blog.
- To write every day even when I’m exhausted.
- To see what else I can do before the door slams shut.
It’s not compulsion in the medical sense, maybe. It’s not just discipline or routine either. It’s something murkier. Something like survival. Something like what I’ve started to call the Archive Impulse — the stubborn need to leave something behind that proves I was here. That I was alive and made something that could survive me.
A Dangerous Engine
This impulse has given me things I’m proud of. The blog. The manifestos. The archive that keeps growing because I refuse to stop feeding it.
But it’s also a dangerous engine.
It eats my rest.
It blurs my days.
It makes me question whether I’m in control, or if the need to “do more” is driving me instead.
Still, it’s mine. It’s the fire that didn’t go out. And even if it burns me sometimes, I’d rather risk the flame than live in the quiet regret of never striking the match. Something that Burning the Candle at Both Ends… For What? Has tried to figure out too.
To Fellow Archivists
If you’re reading this and you’ve felt that pressure too — that dare to do more before time takes the chance away — know this: you’re not alone.
We might not all share the same rituals, or the same fears, but we share the weight. We share the stubbornness. We share the ache of wanting to leave something that proves we mattered.
Maybe you call it something else. I call it the Archive Impulse.
A Gentle Ask
If this article resonates, if you’ve felt the same ticking clock or the same weight pressing down, I invite you to do three things:
Like this post — it helps show this archive is worth finding. Share it with someone who might need to hear they’re not alone. Subscribe to join The Stratagem’s Archive — you’ll receive behind-the-scenes thoughts, experiments, and my newsletter Letters from the Void.
As a thank you, subscribers also get access to Two Manifestos + A Gift (For Fellow Archivists) — my early experiments, raw and imperfect, but alive.
Every click, every return, every silent read helps this space grow. It shifts this archive from being just mine to being ours.
Author’s Reflection
I know I can’t keep daring myself forever without cost. I don’t know how to stop yet, but I’m trying to learn how to rest without feeling like I’ve failed.
Maybe that’s the next dare.
Until then, the Archive Impulse keeps me moving forward. One brick at a time. One article at a time. One stubborn act of creation after another.
Thanks for reading.
— The Stratagem’s Archive
Leave a comment