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"It's Time To Get Back To Work"

I watched the entire first season of Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+.

Factoid: No matter what you’ve achieved in YOUR life, somebody has always been there to try and take it away.

For me, first was my parents. No matter how much “energy” I showed them, they always brought me down to their dull, boring level. I left before I was out of my teenage years.

Then, in my military active duty life (20 years) there was more of the same crap. Because of my work ethic, and it being recognized by my supervisor, I was promoted with the very first STEP promotion in the Military Airlift Command (MAC). My peers weren’t overjoyed. The day it happened, my wife (of 8 years), and my two kids were moving out of my on-base house unit. Then, DURING the ceremony, as the 4-star general was pinning on the new stripes, everyone’s pager went off. President Reagan had been shot, and there was a scramble.

There was a lot of paper plates and cake on the floor.

20 years later,

the dream house I built for my family was taken away by my employer, who just happened to be my sister-in-law. It’s a bit of a long story I’ll share in its own post.

50 years later, in Episode 9 of Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm provides the “sauce” that everyone who has ever been in a situation like this should hear.

I’ll share both the audio clip and the text.

This is what happens.

You work your ass off to build the life you think you want.

And then one day, someone takes it away from you.

And that's when you learn that there's a world of difference between working hard and fighting for your life.

You've never had to fight before.

You don't even know if you know how, but then you do it to your own great surprise, you win, and it should feel sweet, it should feel like redemption and validation and victory all at once.

But something's changed.

You can see your old life in front of you, there for the taking.

And it would be so easy to jump right back onto that hamster wheel and start running again.

But when you're done licking your wounds and being angry at the world and trying to save everyone you love, you will have to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you can really go back to being who you were .

Because the hard truth is, once you've seen the chaos behind the curtain, you can never really watch the show the same way again.

But right now, right now.

It's time to get back to work.